a tiny cottage on it, and it became a great hideaway from Dublin urban life. Nearby, at Woodstown, there is a long cockleshell-strewn beach, a place that is deeply engrained in my family mythology, and which, somehow, has avoided the kind of developments that have spoiled other popular seaside places. Also close by is the fishing village of Dunmore East, where we could enjoy swimming, coastal exploration and mackerel fishing in summertime. At the time we built our cottage, there was only one house, a 200-year-old farmhouse, nearby. Since then, the surrounding area has seen the erection of nine homes, but there are still plenty of fields, fox coverts and woods close by.
Observations of ‘ordinary’ nature from our Dublin and Waterford homes, through a typical year, are offered here in the hope that they will inspire curiosity about that fascinating wild world that lives quietly in parallel with our twenty-first century digital, mechanised world, and provide a sure source of tranquillity to sooth our sometimes frenetic lifestyles.
January
The country is more of a wilderness, more of a wild solitude,
in the winter than in the summer. The wild comes out. The
urban, the cultivated, is hidden …
– John Burroughs
Waterhen
WINTER SEEMS TO GET LONGER AND DARKER the older one gets, and I celebrate and delight in any signs I come across of its approaching end and the longed-for beginning of spring. In the pre-dawn darkness it is a joy, hearing from the warmth of my bed, our early birds beginning to test their vocal cords, tentatively, as if self-consciously rehearsing for the full-scale dawn chorus they will take part in before many weeks have passed. The blackbird quietly tries out, without much success initially, a series of phrases. He keeps trying, however, with long pauses between each attempt, which leave me wondering if he has flown away. But then he starts up, attempting once again to get it right. Towards the end of January his song improves appreciably and the early morning rehearsals get less tentative. Outside my window, the blackbird is joined by the wren and the robin, whose enthusiasm needs no rehearsal. Pliny the Elder wrote that there is not a musical instrument devised by the cunning and art of man that can afford more music than the robin can produce.
Although each of our days, after 21 December, is a few minutes longer than the previous, the dark nights seem to drag on relentlessly and unchanged, for quite a while. January is a strange, slow sort of month, gripping autumn with one hand and spring with the other, standing motionless in frigid neutrality. The month is named after the Roman Janus, a human king who became a god, but deification caused him to develop two faces, one looking back to the old year, the other looking forward. The Anglo-Saxon name for January was Wulfmonath, the month when starving wolves were driven to descend, desperate and ferocious, on human settlements. Only plants like the crocus and the snowdrop brave January’s temperatures, the crocus giving us colour that is astonishingly vivid against the surrounding greys, and the snowdrop, which gleams bright and new, offering hope that spring is near.
I have never forgotten the words Shakespeare used to describe the winter season in As You Like It:
Blow, blow, thou winter wind!
Thou are not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude.
And in Love’s Labour’s Lost:
When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick, the shepherd, blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail …
When the days dawn bright and clear, however, January has many gifts to bring. It is a good month for tackling the hills for a walk, and if it has been frosty, usually boggy terrain is firm and lightly crunchy underfoot. We are fortunate to live near the Dublin Mountains, and we have a choice of hills on which to stretch our legs. Nearby, Ticknock is a particularly inspiring place after a light fall of snow. The outlook down to the dark, dirty-looking city makes one so grateful to be high up in a glistening landscape, and the myriad sparkles in the soft dry snow would brighten any spirits. Teresa likes it when the snow is fresh and a couple of inches thick; she says it’s like walking on a duvet. A particular bonus of these conditions is the impossibility, if you watch out for them, of missing the prints left by passing fauna, prints that are not readily visible in normal conditions.
fox
red deer
While most bird species can be relatively easily spotted, even at a distance, because they can make an escape by taking to the air, many of our small corps of mammals, owing to aeons of human predation, tend to be secretive and nocturnal. Often their presence in a particular area can be discerned only by the tracks they leave, or indications of their feeding or grooming, or from as prosaic a matter as their droppings. Some animals, like humans, move from place to place in a fixed routine, and often this means that their frequently used routes can be identified. An extreme example of this is perhaps cattle moving every day from the field where they have been grazing to where they are milked; they walk in single file and wear down the grass to a narrow, bare earth path. It is rarely this extreme in the case of wild animals because they are much lighter on their feet, but it is often possible to see clearly the habitual route a badger takes through long grass, and the tunnel in vegetation the animal makes through a hedge or under a barbed wire fence.
Being able to identify what animal left what prints makes it easy to get an idea of the variety of species that frequent the countryside when you are not there. John Burroughs wrote, ‘The snow is a great tell-tale, and blabs as effectively as it obliterates. I go into the woods, and know all that has happened. I cross the fields, and if only a mouse has visited his neighbour, the fact is chronicled.’ The best time to read prints in the snow is when it is fresh and the cover is no thicker than an inch or so; in these conditions the prints are well defined without any distortion or blurring. It is also important to try to get out before other walkers and their dogs complicate the situation!
Even if the snowfall occurred only a few hours before, it can be surprising to see how much traffic there has been. Once you learn what the footprints of foxes, hares, rabbits and deer look like, the remaining question that one has to work out is the sequence of passage – which animal came first? On heathery Ticknock, well away from the telecommunications masts, there are often numerous tracks of birds in the snow, particularly those of the red grouse; by carefully observing what you find, you may be able to discern the shape of the smaller female’s foot from the longer, larger male’s.
Hellfire Hill is nearby and is another great place for us to take a walk. Recently, walking in a light covering of snow on the west side of the hill, where less people stray, I was surprised to see how many deer had been active there. The snow showers had been about dawn, three hours before I got there, but the forestry road was full of deer prints, and there were places where you could see that they had dug in the snow to get at grass. There were also lots of rabbit prints, and a fox had been about.
