HEART BEAT:It's in our nature to be bats about wildlife
' FORTUNATUS ET ille deos qui novit agrestis"; the man is fortunate, who knows the Gods of the countryside, wrote Virgil 2,000 years ago.
It is extraordinarily quiet here now. The morning rain has passed away, the cloud cover is breaking and the sun is shining on Coomasaharn up behind Glenbeigh. This is rare enough; sometimes I think Coomasaharn with its deep mysterious lake must be among the wettest places in Ireland.
There is silence, apart from a gentle breeze ruffling the meadow grass and no sign of life save a solitary rabbit meandering along the hedgerow.
Up to yesterday my weather station showed a steady barometric pressure and the icon of a sun on its display. In the past few hours however the pressure has fallen sharply and the sun has been displaced by a picture of dark clouds and rain, a combination that has “get the sandbags ready” connotations. It still looks lovely but the warning has been noted.
Reverting to the Gods of the countryside, yesterday I was called by the HA to look at something in our meadow. I laid aside whatever low-level domestic drudgery I had been assigned and hurried to the window. There, maybe 30 yards away, was a red deer stag. This was a first sighting in this secluded spot. There are red deer in Killarney and some around Glencar but these locations are 20 miles away. How did he come to be here? As we watched he slowly made his way across the field and nimbly jumped the low sea wall onto the rocky beach. He looked around warily and then entered the ebbing tidal water of Caragh Creek and swam the half-mile stretch of water to the far side where we lost sight of him among the foliage on the far shore. Where he came from and where he went I don’t know but I thank him for brightening our lives.
Anthony Raftery, blind Mayo poet, wrote of his birthplace, Killeaden near Kiltimagh:
Tá an eilit’s an fiadh’s gach sort gaem ann
An madadh rua leimnigh, an broc’s an mial buidhe”
“Animals of all sorts are to be found there, hinds and deer
The preying fox, the badgers and the hare”
Our visitor added to our list here in Treanatragh. We also have rabbits, stoats, badgers and the occasional escaped mink. We have had visiting wild goats much beloved of the HA for their indiscriminate appetite in the flower beds. The old Irish proverb “bíonn gach duine go lách go dtéann bó ina gharraí” or “everybody is good natured until a cow gets into his garden”, applies here. You’d swear I ate the flowers myself.
Over the past weeks we have been entertained by the activities of a husk of hares. I looked up that collective noun. For some years we have had a large older hare in residence. This year we have five or six. Sometimes they appear to have things other than feeding on their minds. The other evening there were five sitting in a circle around a stone pillar near the stile. The gathering looked peaceful and civilised but somebody must have said something for the meeting broke up in disorder and mayhem ensued. The fighting, boxing and kicking involved four of the group. The others remained quietly nibbling grass.
I had read that such scenes were mating displays and that the males were fighting for the attention of the docile females. Who ever heard of a docile female? More recently I read the squabbles are due to the “docile” lady telling the importunate gentlemen to take a hike, as she has the equivalent of a hare headache and would they go and bother someone else. These are mountain hares, widely distributed around Ireland and with us for at least 30,000 years. The initial event of our hare watching season came watching our local kestrel;
“High there, how he hung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing" – (Gerard Manley Hopkins – The Windhover)
This particular swing led him to ill advisedly attack a large hare which had little trouble telling its assailant to seek dinner elsewhere. The bird moved away and hovered over the adjacent marsh and shore; bad news for our field mice, frogs and Natterjack toads. We share the property also with a colony of bats and we have the ubiquitous hedgehogs. I’m not allowed mention rats. It’s a humbling privilege to share this spot. Virgil had it right.