At this point in spring, a clear day sets an arch of expectation above the islands, an invitation to voyage to some even brighter reach of ocean just over the horizon. With beans to sow, I am not sailing anywhere, but a corner of my mind keeps slipping away, to spend time out there with the great whales.
I imagine, for example, the meditative and mighty pulse of the two-ton heart in a blue whale, a mammal as big to me as I am to a mouse. Or the deep reverberation of the fin whale's song, loud as an amplified rock band and propagating hundreds of miles through the sea. Compared with the long, slow rhythms of these animals, our lives are as agitated as those of pygmy shrews.
I have been reading a book - one of those passionate works by scientist-poets that takes you over for days. Roger Payne is the US field biologist who discovered the songs of the humpback, and in Among Whales (Scribner, 1995) he weaves decades of research with a mounting rage against whaling ("What we do with whales . . . takes the measure of our souls"). Even 10 years ago in Ireland, there was something irremediably remote about the lives - and deaths - of the great baleen whales. Their existence seemed to be played out at such a vast remove: Patagonia, Newfoundland, Antarctica, Baja California - that's where you went for the giants. The occasional monster cadaver drifting to our shores in winter seemed left over from somewhere the far side of storms. Even the failed history of whaling in Irish waters seemed to consign the big whales irrevocably to the past.
Against this, there are the current records from outposts such as Cape Clear Island in west Cork: a sparse but steady procession of solitary whales - among them, humpbacks breaching clear of the water in an awesome display. Ten years ago, the newly formed Irish Whale and Dolphin Group, an alliance of zoologists and dedicated amateurs, set out to redeem, as it were, the island's claim on whales, and to show that there was much more to cetacea than one famously friendly dolphin or even a whole smiling tribe in the Shannon estuary. If whalewatching is the world's fastest-growing tourist industry, then Ireland's corner of the continental shelf ought to offer a prime arena for it.
The group has shown us just how rich our coastal waters are, from eight kinds of dolphin to the summer inshore foraging of minke and killer whales. Their quest for the giants prompted a brave but disappointing series of deep-sea forays out of the Shannon in 1998 (a wicked summer on the sea), in which an acoustic brush with a sperm whale was the only real discovery.
But a major study for the UK's Joint Nature Conservation Committee, funded by oil and gas exploration companies, recently explored the population of big baleen whales around Ireland and Britain by monitoring their songs for a year, with arrays of bottom-mounted hydrophones. The project was led by Britain's Chris Clark, who has been able to track humpback whales acoustically at distances of 1,000 miles.
Humpbacks, as it happens, with their long, complex, ever-changing songs, were the least numerous of the whales the study plotted in these waters - they were migrant passers-through, mostly north to south in late winter. The commonest sounds were the deep-throated moans of the fin whales - the lowest sounds yet attributed to any animal. There were 300 to 500 of them, widely spread and vocal in every month of the year, but commonest in late autumn.
The real revelation in the battery of song came in the bursts of deep, pure tone, some as long as half a minute, generated by some 30 to 50 blue whales: an organ chorus strongest off the west of Ireland in November and December. The research team has been reluctant to disclose their actual locations, but the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group, led by Dr Simon Berrow, is now actively looking for sponsorship to go in search of Ireland's blue whales in 2002.
The presence of our fin whales, however (a big one in the northern hemisphere may measure 24 metres in length against the 26 metres of the blue), is much more than a moan in a hydrophone. Padraig Whooley, the IWDG secretary, based in Co Cork, has had remarkable telescope views of groups of fin and sei whales from a windy perch on the cliffs of the Old Head of Kinsale.
This winter, he reports, large whales were blowing for "days on end" in the bays between Toe Head and Galley Head in West Cork, and people at Ballycotton saw whales fitting the fin's size and blowpattern (different in every whale species) feeding on herring on three consecutive days after Christmas around marker buoys 500 metres off the cliffs. This inshore movement in winter could be dramatic new evidence of resurgence in fin whale numbers: the species was, after all, the mainstay of the Norwegian whaling stations at Inishkea and Blacksod in north Co Mayo in the early 1900s. Almost 600 were captured and killed (and 124 blues harpooned off Ireland over the first quarter of the century).
The songs of the blue and fin whales, ringing across oceans, have convinced Payne of a long-range communication, serving, among other purposes, to bring widely-scattered whales together to mate. No breeding grounds have been found for either species, while those for many other big whales have long unfolded to the searches of commercial whalers. The fins, in particular, have the habit of collecting unpredictably at seemingly random locations - 200 spouting at once, for example, near the Shetland Islands.
The mounting knowledge about "our" whales - including, now, some of the rarest on the planet - gives an extra edge to the responsibility for conservation that came with Ireland's somewhat quixotic declaration, a decade ago, of a whale sanctuary in our waters. Should we not now extend this shelter to the full 200 miles of the European Economic Zone?
Meanwhile, every report of a cetacean, large or small, is grist to the database of the IWDG Sighting Scheme, which posts new sightings on its website: www.ucc.ie/sightingscheme Its postal address is IWDG, Merchants Quay, Kilrush, Co Clare (065-905 2326 or 086854 5450).
Michael Viney can be contacted at viney@anu.ie