The west is at its ferniest, mistiest, most luminous, a raindrop pendant from every fuchsia bud and escallonia bell: a summer, surely, to sort out the family loyalties to "our little place in Connacht".
Among the thrills of arrival at one's holiday house (hum of dehumidifier, wellies lined up in the porch) may now be a dawning awareness of other presences somewhere overhead: a miaowing, perhaps, as of cats, or whiff of something musky. A flash of a dark form down the ivy confirms that "wildlife" is indeed in residence - not cats but cait crainn.
"A rank wood is their province," wrote Arthur Stringer, hunting pine martens around Lough Neagh in the 1700s, "for they breed in the tops of hollow trees and continually lie in such places in the day time." Today's Ireland presents new denning options for Martes martes, thus assisting the revival of the island's most versatile carnivore.
The benevolent removal of pine marten families from the undisturbed attics of holiday homes is now a regular occupation for Dúchas conservation rangers in the woodier parts of the west. Two summers running, the south Mayo ranger, Sue Callaghan, has been called to houses in the Cornamona-Tourmakeady area bordering Lough Mask.
Last year, Callaghan caught the marten mother in a cage baited with cat-food and then sat in the attic listening for the kits. She eventually found two of them snuggled up in the fibreglass insulation, little balls of sable-soft, greyish fur with their eyes still closed. She kept the family together for a few days in a holding pen and released them somewhere safe.
Last week she was at a different house in Cornamona, where the kits were six to eight weeks old and venturing out alone. Again, she caught the mother in a spring-door cage, but this time left her surrounded by cages baited for her young with a two-course meal of sardines and raspberry jam.
For all the marten's reputation as a fierce little predator, handling them is easy. They look, of course, enchanting, with chocolate fur, creamy bib and big, fluffy tail, and even adults are quite docile in a cage, gazing at their captors through wide brown eyes. In a long-term Dúchas study of martens in Co Clare, none of them bit anyone while in captivity, and martens that use rural outbuildings can become used to seeing people and quite tame.
At the time of the Clare study and captive breeding programme, from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, pine martens were probably at their lowest ebb. They had been drastically reduced early on by deforestation and trapping for fur, then persecuted by gamekeepers and finally, in the crucial modern threat, poisoned by strychnine-loaded carrion put out by sheep farmers to kill foxes. Among its final strongholds were hazel-woods enfolded in the Burren's limestone wilderness.
In the last two decades, however, with strychnine banned, strict Wildlife Act protection in place, and changing public attitudes, the pine marten has been increasing again, using corridors of forestry to found new territories and populations.
From "hide-outs" in the Slieve Bloom mountains and in wooded estates in the Boyne Valley and Co Waterford, it has spread to Wicklow, Kildare, Laois, Carlow, Dublin, Fermanagh, Tyrone, Antrim and Down.
The mid-west and Connacht, however, remain the chief arena for the pine marten's recovery (with an outpost at Killarney National park). It is 15 years since its reappearance was proved in my own corner of Mayo. The stuffed marten that crouches over a snipe in a corner of a pub in Louisburgh may look a little fiercer than ever it did in life, but an animal that massacres a farmer's ducks - as this one did not far outside the village - cannot expect to be immortalised as a benign spirit of the woods.
From now on, indeed, the Irish countryside will need to adapt to a native predator quite as significant in impact as the alien and much-despised American mink. A friend in north Mayo who last month detected a marten family holed up in a dying ash tree overhanging his lawn noted not only the emptiness of the magpie nest above, but the agitation of nearby ravens at the apparent loss of their first brood and a general absence, indeed, of the usual small-bird nests. Woodcock and pheasant grew suddenly scarce around him last winter, and even mink and feral cats seem to have disappeared from his particular stretch of river.
Could he, he wonders, be harbouring a super-predator? The pine marten's appetite is certainly keen and omnivorous: not only roosting birds and the occasional squirrel, but rats and mice, rabbits and hares, frogs, beetles and earthworms, shore crabs and fish. In autumn, blackberries stain its droppings purple, and sloes, ivy berries, woodland fungi and nuts may keep a marten going for months on end.
The "pine" in its name is far too exclusive, though conifers are clearly the main route of its recent spread. Clear-felled forestry with a new growth of ground cover makes a particularly attractive hunting ground. But mixed and deciduous woodland, pastureland, even open moorland can support a solitary marten of either sex, marking out its territory with droppings, urine and a rub of anal musk. The twisted scats, James Fairley tells us in A Basket of Weasels, have "a distinctive, pleasant sweet smell, rather like violets". Indeed, he insists, "the marten itself is a delightfully perfumed beast".
Where the food supply is rich, as in mature woodland, there may be one marten per square kilometre; on the moor it may need 10 times as much territory. As numbers grow, it seems inevitable that pine martens will, here and there, become as controversial as mink. Free-range poultry and gun-club gamebirds may all need extra defences. As Sue Callaghan waited to capture her kits, she received two further calls - one from a farm family that had just lost its chickens to martens; another from settlers who had found a marten in their mink-trap. However, you need a licence to trap pine martens: it is a protected species.
Such little problems seem likely to multiply, as Martes martes leaps on to become the most celebrated, as well as the most beautiful, of Ireland's wild animals. Today's glimpses will join up into a wide popular acquaintance and enjoyment. As reports come in of martens rummaging through golf-club rubbish bins, how soon, I wonder, will it join the fox as Ireland's suburban raccoon?