I glanced out the window of my back room recently, which looks out over a school playing field. My attention had been captured by something in the distance bouncing around the grass.
At first, I thought it was a grey squirrel, but its bushy tail was horizontal and not vertical and the animal seemed to be too long. Admittedly, I know very little about bushy tails or body lengths of living creatures, so it could well have been a lemur or a bush baby or indeed a grey squirrel.
Regardless, I dashed downstairs to dig out binoculars I’d purchased years ago to keep track of the birds bobbing about on the Liffey. I worked in a Dublin office back then and would gaze out at the water, absentmindedly, when avoiding work.
By the time I’d taken them out, adjusted them and pointed them in the direction of the mystery animal, there was nothing to be seen. Of course, the whole encounter may well have been influenced by a podcast I’d been listening to.
READ MORE
It was about the Loch Ness Monster and how our minds can easily jump from a rational, sensible view of the world to deciding that a dinosaur had taken up residence at the bottom of a lake. And while I’m interested in animals in a general, loose kind of way, I’ve actually seen very few out there in the wild.
This is in contrast to some friends who, during the summer, spoke of seeing what appeared to be a cat on a branch while walking through a wood on two separate occasions.
In neither case did it turn out to be a cat, of course. It was, in fact, a pine marten. Listening to those stories, I was convinced had I seen this “cat” on a branch, I would have instinctively thought “oh, there’s a cat on a branch”. I would have continued to think this until it or I wandered off home. Why would I think otherwise? Pine martens are, after all, very much on the mysterious end of the native animal scale, as far as I’m concerned.
I recently confessed to some children in the primary school I work in that I’d never seen a hedgehog or a badger and had only once set eyes on a red squirrel.
This led to a plethora of stories of how they’d spotted all three. The children in question were adamant red squirrels can be seen in the Phoenix Park on a daily basis, bounding from bough to bough.
I found myself asking if they were sure about this. They didn’t take kindly to such scepticism, digging their heels in to the point where these red squirrels were as good as somersaulting from tree to tree for all to see. I abandoned ship in the end.
[ Old Men of the Canal – Frank McNally on the herons of Percy PlaceOpens in new window ]
We could all agree on foxes, though. Everyone has a fox story. I’d once been walking to school when a dog came from nowhere and joined me along the route. I remember thinking that this dog was so chilled it might as well be puffing on a cigarette. The dog then grew tired of me and wandered off in another direction. As I watched it strut off into the distance, it slowly occurred to me that, well, you can guess the rest.
I like to think I’m reasonably knowledgeable when it comes to birds, but I discovered during the year that I’d been teaching an inaccuracy for years. I always considered the wren to be the smallest bird in the country, but apparently this is not the case. That accolade belongs to the goldcrest. I found this out at a dawn chorus event on Killiney Hill.
[ Two dragonflies tied up in afternoon delight in CorkOpens in new window ]
The Green Council in the school had decided this encounter with nature was worth getting up early for. Some hardy families and equally hardy school staff had duly obliged.
On the morning in question, it was difficult to distinguish between the calls of the various birds once they got into territorial mode and made their presence felt. Even so, it was hard not to be impressed by the volume of these calls compared to the size of the callers.
As far as nature went, the highlight of the morning was a stunning sunrise that swept over Wicklow and Dublin Bay.
That long, bushy creature dancing around the playing field could have been anything. While my exposure to the nation’s wildlife has been limited and my knowledge of this wildlife equally so, I console myself in knowing that whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t a dinosaur.
Well, probably not.
