The Jack Snipe

While the jack snipe has an uncertain status in Irish lexicography: scientifically its existence is quite clear. Ireland's resident snipe is gallinago gallinago; the jack snipe, lymnoctryptes minimus[smallest of the marsh dwellers], is a much scarcer winter visitor breeding in Scandinavia and NE Europe. Jack snipe are distinguished from snipe in that they are flushed at the last moment, rise reluctantly, and usually silently, before coming to ground again within about fifty metres.
The term jack snipe has been wrongly attached to the male of the snipe, gallinago gallinago. This is presumably because 'jack' is used properly to describe the male merlin, so the term has been adopted for the male snipe. It is the male snipe that makes the famous bleating sound with its tail feathers over its nesting territory, usually at night. This is the origin of the Irish name gabhairin (little goat) reo (of the frost)for the drumming male snipe, a term celebrated, and beautifully explored by Seamus Heaney in his poem 'The Backward Look' (Wintering Out).
In his famous dictionary, the Rev Dineen wrongly translates gabhairin reodha as jack snipe, presumably for the reason I suggest. He also gives the word naoscach for snipe, which has now been adopted as the standard term. Curiously, he also has naoscan (long accent on the second 'a') as meaning 'the larger kind of snipe' gallinago major. This may be a reference to gallinago media, the great snipe, a bird of such obscurity and rarity in Ireland that it is unlikely ever to have found a place in the vernacular. A more likely signified here is woodcock, a bird with superficial resemblance to a snipe. The Irish for woodcock is creabhar, and it is correctly listed as such by Dineen.
I have flushed the occasional jack snipe from boggy ground in winter, and always felt gratified to have the word to add to my record of a lonely place. Sportsmen in the past described meeting 'four or five a day in good snipe ground'. The all-Ireland record for this species is held by Carrigower Bog in Wicklow, where 21 were counted a few years ago. Half a century ago in Mayo, Robert Ruttledge knew a spot where he often rose eight 'from a small area of marsh (about 100 x 50 yards)' and even had ten on a few occasions.
Clive Hutchinson's 1989 estimate of between 20 and 30 thousand jack snipe wintering in Ireland has a curious abstractness about it, given the jack snipe's preference for the solitude of lonely, unfrequented places.

Happy Birthday Ma'am!

April woodcut from Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar (1579)

Gurteen Lough

Gurteen Lough is a six-acre lake among the drumlins about half a mile from the house. There is no direct road or track: the angler has the choice of a twenty-minute tramp across the drumlin from this side, or a longer, less steep walk from the far side down through two spacious fields. Approaching from the southern side, you descend the slope of a hill such as in Kavanagh's 'Shancoduff':

My black hills have never seen the sun rising,
Eternally they look north towards Armagh.

(The sunless slope here has not been improved by fertiliser and rotavation, so it is botanically the most interesting, with lovely displays of orchids and sundew.)
I fish this lake in spring between March and May, or until the growth of lilies and other water plants makes fishing impossible. Early in the year, the fish are hungry for flies and are not too fussy: this makes for good sport. The trout run to about a pound here, and there is the occasional sea-trout among them, a silvery version of the browns, which has negotiated a narrow, weedy trench to reach this lake from the sea. Their occurrence here, in fresh water in spring is an enigma, as sea trout are supposed to leave lakes and rivers in February after spawning. There is the further satisfaction of having sea trout in an area where the species has declined dramatically in recent decades: the State's Marine Institute has a research station a few miles up the coast, at Newport, where they can count salmon and sea trout in their high-tech fish pass; the smaller species has almost reached extinction at Newport, making Gurteen's population all the more precious.
I went to the lake yesterday afternoon for about the third time this year and had my first encounter with trout: four fish between four and ten ounces, all returned. They were feeding in a few little sheltered corners close to the reeds and were easy quarry. Flies were in the air, and the lake water was not cold to the touch. A check in my diary confirmed what everyone is saying about a cold spring: last year (2005), the first showing of feeding trout on Gurteen was on St Patrick's Day, a full month earlier than this year.
(PS: Spring salmon are abundant this year in Carrowmore.)

Did you like the peanuts?

GW works in social services on Tyneside. He recently visited a sheltered housing project where some of the residents keep a feeding station for birds. One of the residents, an elderly Ukranian with learning difficulties, has a habit of scribbling messages and notes on pieces of paper and fixing them to surfaces all over the house. He has extended this to the bird table, which is festooned with scraps of paper. One of them lists the different seed types that are available locally and invites the birds to make their choice. Another is set out like a customer satisfaction survey, where the creatures are invited to assess the quality of the food provided. There are also slogans such as 'Be kind to one another', etc.

The Cuckoos of Aran

The cuckoo had not yet arrived on Inishmore Aran earlier this week during our three-day visit. The woman of the house (bean a'ti) told us that each village on the big island had its own cuckoo, from Bun Gabhla in the west to Iarairne in the east. This would give a total of fourteen calling cuckoos, far too many for the size of the island according to my expert friend CH. I notice from my brother Liam's Atlas of Breeding Birds of the Burren and the Aran Islands that cuckoos were recorded from eleven survey squares on Inishmore, but many of these records were presumably duplicated, the cuckoo being a very mobile bird during the breeding season. CH considers 2-3 breeding pairs to be a more likely total, an estimate it would be intriguing to put to the test.
Our hostess also told us that the Irish word for cuckoo (an chuach) is feminine in Cill Einne and Iarairne at the eastern end, while the people in the western villages of Bun Gabhla and Eoghanacht use the masculine pronoun. Apparently, there was some dispute about this on the island last year; when they investigated the discrepancy it was found to be a consistent east-west division.
(PS: GC heard the cuckoo on Aran this year for the first time on 19th April.)

Beckett in the West

I notice from the list of events for the Beckett centenary that scarcely any events are listed for outside the capital city, one exception being the celebration of his friendship with McGreevy in Tarbert, Co. Kerry.
Last week, as part of the Arts and Heritage Week 'at mill', we screened the whole Beckett on Film project (19 plays) over two days. People were encouraged to drop in and out as they pleased. On the first day, we had clashes with a fire safety demonstration, a workshop on dyslexia, and an academic staff meeting. Our fan of the day was a visually-impaired student who sat through Godot, Not I, Krapp's Last Tape and several shorts. I found myself describing several actions to him on screen: he had been intrigued by Godot and wanted to know as much as possible about what was going on. Like most of the others who dropped in, he had never seen (correction: witnessed) a Beckett play before.
During the eleven hours of screening there was a trickle of curious, bemused or delighted visitors to our forty-seat lecture theatre. This small contribution to the Beckett festival is something we are proud of: overall numbers weren't big, but then, Beckett himself didn't often do 'big', and so the occasion seemed fitting. We might, however, have been able to pull in a few more with some targetted advertising. As most of my colleagues are from disciplines other than the humanities, I felt that I could have steered them with a list of recommendations:

Beckett for nurses: Footfalls
for lawyers: Rough for Theatre II
for bloggers: Krapp
for dentists: Not I
for managers: Endgame
etc.

The next challenge should be to translate Beckett into Irish and perform his plays in that language. Did I hear of Godot as Gaeilge?