Merlins of the Wicklow Mountains

This is the title of Anthony Mc Elheron's short book on the merlins in his part of Wicklow. Mc Elheron works as a Conservation Ranger for the NPWS and has devoted many hours and days to observing the birds, in summer and winter. The main section of the book is an expanded field journal of one breeding season spent observing a pair at Duff Hill, in the northern end of the range. Tragically, that year's brood was lost just days before fledging, for unknown reasons.
The short text invites us along with the ranger as he sits out his early morning vigil in May and June, watching mating and hunting behaviour from a secure perch not far from the nest site. These tiny falcons quarter pipits, wrens, wheatears and other small birds in their uplands territories, and were even observed killing a snipe on one occasion. They also take moths, especially emperor and northern eggar; these are a vital source of calcium for the female during egg formation.

At the start of his chronology in chapter two he writes:

The morning of 29 March was bitterly cold, with banks of white cloud broken at infrequent intervals by a constant north-easterly breeze. First light revealed a carpet of frost gripping every aspect of the dark and bleak moor. The first rays of sun from the east seemed to take an eternity to arrive but, when they came, exploded through the huge gap between Scarr and Knocknacloghoge. Spreading a thin veil of milky yellow, they raced like lightning along the carpet of dormant heather, through the great swath of Juncus reeds adjoining the new plantation and finally enveloping the larch, which fronted the vast forest of Sitka spruce.

Wicklow's merlins are, from this account, in good shape. A coloured map of the Wicklow mountains shows 26 sites, of which 15 or 16 are occupied in an average year. In a bad year, no pairs may breed at all, while in an optimum season, 21 sites had fledged young.
In autumn, female and juvenile merlins leave the breeding ranges for the lowlands and coast, leaving the males to occupy the home territories. At this time, the males are harder to find, but Mc Elheron's persistence paid off and he was able to show that siskins replaced pipits as the mainstay of the birds' diet.
There is a small amount of comparative data here with counties Kildare and Sligo, but no mention is made of the merlin's range in Mayo and Galway, where the species is widespread. In the parts of Mayo that I am familiar with, merlins turn up regularly in winter along the coast and around freshwater lakes. In summer, an appearance by this little falcon regularly breaks the monotony of a tramp across the bleak bogs of Erris and the Erriff Valley. At the same time, they are scarce in the drumlin country where I have lived for twelve years and where I can count only two sightings: one, of a merlin plucking a pipit off a wire opposite my house, and another memorable encounter when a hunting merlin almost collided with me and seemed to recharge my stressed-out frame. This simply suggests that merlins are quite particular in their habits and do not roam much outside the typical habitats, unlike their larger cousin the peregrine.
The forthcoming Atlas of Breeding Birds may give some passionate observer the chance to see how the merlin is doing in south Connemara's lake country, a traditional stronghold. I hope that my own searches in the parts of Erris that I love will produce a few results, to figure as red dots one day on the Atlas's merlin map. This too can be part of one's 'stain left on the silence'.

My copy of the Trilogy

My copy of the Trilogy has all but fallen apart. I can't claim that this is from over-use. No. There are other paperbacks from the same era that still stay together, and these have been re-read more often than Beckett's three. The state of my copy of the Trilogy relates, in the first instance, to the poor quality of the glue used in the binding. The glue has dried out completely and lost any suppleness it had, so it tends to split when you try to open the pages flat. Tends to? It cracks and splits, as simple as that. The pages have cracked into little sections of maybe fifteen to thirty sheets; the whole bundle sits as a wad bursting out from between the card covers.
This isn't the only deficiency of the book, assuming detachable sections to be a deficiency. The text is also corrupt. I check now and find He' instead of He's, too instead of to. And others that I forgot to mark. Another reason to read the book again, mark all the typos I find. The mistakes suggest a typist in a hurry, with no-one to check against the original text. They come in the later pages of the Unnamable, which have fewest readers; perhaps the typist knew that and felt that no-one would notice. But the original text? That would be Calder's I suppose, but his editions had errors too, so the trail would not end there. Might have to check at Reading, or ask Percy Puthwuth.
I have ordered another copy of the Trilogy for my son. I haven't checked if the new edition will correct the mistakes in mine, or anything about the status of the text. If he is interested in these things - there's no guarantee that he will even read the book - he will have to investigate them for himself; I don't believe I will have the time to consult his copy before I post it off to him. No. There will be nothing to distract me from the book I possess, for all its shortcomings.
It occurs to me to say that I am attached to the book because it has a history. There is some merit in that. Its purchase dates from a grey zone in my own life where I too avoided a lot of daylight and enjoyed reading into the small hours. If I tilt the cover against light at a certain angle I can see scratches and scuffs that possibly relate to movements of the book on the floor of various bedsits in Dublin where I lived as a student. Amazing how we prize souvenirs from those days, as if our own bodies weren't souvenir enough! Why not say, this is the body that slept in that grotty room in Grosvenor Square; I've kept it as a memento.
The book, though, doesn't hold all the times I've read bits of the Trilogy. There was the separate Penguin edition of Malone Dies, with the skull on the cover. I had read that before I bought the Trilogy. Did I then settle down and read all three books in sequence? I don't think so. I probably read Molloy, then decided I'd skip Malone and went straight to the Unnamable. I don't think I finished the third part.
Then there was a time in London, at my sister-in-law's party. I had the book with me then. Summer it was. I thought I'd have a go at the whole thing again, so I read Molloy, then Malone, then most of the Unnamable, and eventually gave up maybe fifty pages from the end. Still something missing.
I don't know if the spine had started cracking at that stage, maybe nine or ten years ago. At a guess I'd say it had split in one or two places; but it had not yet come apart as consistently as it has now. At that time, I'd say, its disintegration was in its early stages; it was, you might say, inhibited, hesitant about falling apart, and it had yet to flaunt itself as the ruin it is now. It? Why do I say it, as if the book had ideas about this? It was me who decided to open it up and make it fall apart. Recognise that, and we'll deal with it when the time comes. The latest phase of disintegration has to do with my determination to make it fall apart by prising open the pages and relishing the crisp snap of the breaking glue. If that gesture seems excessive I should say that it has been part of my effort to get at the pages, lay them flat and read carefully. There is that. The book's ruin reflects my effort to get at Beckett. Yes. That sounds good. And I can even claim to have read Malone Dies again, in the separate Penguin edition with the skull, before my latest struggle with the entire trilogy. Not in the older copy, in another I had from my father.