Chaffinch

The song of the chaffinch is more discursive. My provisional phonetic translation is as follows: No, really, this is how we freely spend our time puzzling things. The phrase can be repeated as often as the weather allows. I heard it yesterday morning in a small copse of hazel near my house. The morning was very mild and you could sense the birds' impatience to be getting on with the business of spring.

Mink-Shrink-This-Vision

My title is a phonetic translation of the song of the reed bunting into English. A pause should be observed between each word, the intonation rising to the third word and then falling on the fourth.

Landscape with Crows

Late January is an elemental, primal time in the countryside. The hedges have been stripped of haws so the redwings and fieldfares have to hunt along the ground, in the poached earth for whatever stirs there. As the flocks lift they are scattered by the wind as thin swirlings of ticker-tape until they turn down to the ground again. 

   My neighbour scattered manure from the trailer of his quad yesterday and today the rooks and jackdaws had it quartered and were waddling about importantly in the brown, crumbled mess. Two hooded crows patrolled the hedge behind them and forced them to fly off a few times before the hoodies got tired of this pointless bullying and withdrew; then the rooks and jackdaws came back to their quarry.

   On the road, an early lamb foetus had been reduced to its front half by magpies. They squabble over such carrion with hoodies. When a sheep dies in a field - if it is left there for a time - the pecking order is as follows: ravens, hoodies, magpies by day; at night the foxes have the pickings to themselves. If the sheep has died on a slope, the carcass gets dragged by the foxes and is moved several metres each time, leaving a white smear of fleece after it as it rots.

   Contradicting all this, the daffodils are emerging already: just a spike here and there the size of a little finger, its tip yellowed by the hard frost. Somehow these plants manage to grow in these cold, hailstone hit days. 

   The days are not far off when a burst of sun and mildness will tempt a skylark into the air, and the little grebes will be doing their speedboat chases on the calm surface of a lake.

Totem birds

Mark Roper has a piece in PIR 96 and in the current issue of New Hibernia Review about the kingfisher. The essay is about his mother reporting on a sighting of a kingfisher in an unlikely spot, being disbelieved, and then having this sighting confirmed years later after her death. Roper's fascination with the halcyon bird gives it almost totemic force. This is a quality that certain animals acquire for people who habitually potter about in nature, looking at things, noticing them. The response, I suspect, is not confined to modern druids and witches of the natural world but is also a reality for more secular observers. One animal or bird acquires a meaning above others and then takes on a function as a bearer of portents and a signal of fortune. In my case it is the merlin, a little falcon that lives in the desolate bogs of Mayo and Connemara and also ranges along the coast in winter. 

   Some years ago I was under stress in my teaching routine and went for a walk one afternoon from the house in an effort to unwind. Just a few paces from the house I was passing a gateway and heard the usual commotion of pipits and wagtails to signal that a raptor was in the area. I looked up and watched a merlin approach at eye level along the road. I had just walked into his line of flight.  The bird came to within a couple of feet of my head and swept aside at the last instant, but I fancied that part of its spirit was carried forward in its momentum and got flung into me even if the bird had managed to avoid me. While my wife and I often thought we saw a merlin on our winter drives in the wilder parts of the county, this was the first time I had seen one at our house. My surprise at the sighting was transcended by the jolt I got, the bird almost colliding with me. Nature watchers usually have to stalk their object to get satisfaction; it is rare to have the object come straight at you. 

   As a result of that episode I was entirely cured of the stress of confinement in classrooms and offices for the rest of that term.