Bliain - Part 10
10th May 2021
Part ten of my project to make a photograph every day for a full year, or bliain in Irish. Find Part 9 here.
27th April
Darker weather returned this morning, with heavy clouds dragged across the sky by a fresh northerly. I spent time trying to photograph some fulmars, with the emphasis on trying. These stout seabirds are among the most capable fliers in the entire bird world, and it’s pure joy to watch them interacting with all the invisible wind on a breezy day. Anybody who’s familiar with them will know and love the way they’ll use the updraught along a cliff to come level with you as you walk by, stiff wings dipping left and right in twitchy movement to keep steady while that big, black eye eyeballs you. I envy their incredible bodily ability, the weightlessness and confidence of it all. Fulmars have only been breeding in Ireland for little over a century, having expanded their range from more northern areas in that time. They are adapted for windy weather, using strong air currents to slingshot them across huge areas of ocean with minimal effort. This ability to cover massive distances has been part of their success; if fish stocks collapse locally they can go further afield without incurring a net loss of energy. A male fulmar tagged with a GPS tracker on Eynhallow in the Orkney Islands was recorded undertaking a 3,900 mile foraging trip over two weeks in 2012. It left its nest and took a fairly direct line towards the Mid Atlantic Ridge, which is two thirds of the way to Canada at that latitude. It spent some days feeding in a productive patch of sea and caught the Gulf Stream back to the west coast of Ireland, before tracking north along the coast towards Eynhallow, where its partner was waiting on their eggs. Not only is this trip an incredible physical feat for an animal moving under its own steam, but the navigational ability required to undertake such a journey across what to humans appears as featureless ocean is phenomenal. To learn more about fulmars, and other seabirds of the Northeast Atlantic, read The Seabird’s Cry by Adam Nicolson. It’s one of the few books I’ve read more than once, and I’ll read it again soon. By bringing together beautiful and poetic writing with brilliant scientific research, history and folklore, it makes for really great reading for anybody interested in the natural world.
28th April
Today is another fine spring day, cool in a steady north wind but bright and cheerful. Here’s a trio of wildflowers from the garden; a buttercup attended by a pollinating fly, a daisy, and a scarlet pimpernel. Buttercups (like daisies and dandelions) come in a variety of different species, many of which look very similar and are tricky to tell apart for the amateur botanist. I think this is meadow buttercup, but don’t quote me. The word daisy comes from “day’s eye”, a reference to this particular flower’s habit of opening and closing with the daylight hours. My garden is particularly rich in them along the borders of the lawn, and all those bright little eyes staring up at the sky certainly cheer the place up. Scarlet pimpernel is similar but fussier, only opening its flowers when the sun shines brightly. My tripod put this particular one in the shade, but it tolerated my brief infringement of its sunbathing for long enough to allow me make this photo.
29th April
This is a scene I was more excited about at the time than I am now, looking at the photos on the computer screen. It’s much easier to be enamoured with the energizing suck and surge of that saltwater pushing its way around the rocks in real life I suppose. Usually by now I’d have started the summer work season of bringing people out around those islands. Given how big a feature of my life The Blaskets have been for the past five years it’s unusual that this is the first time they’ve featured in this project, 129 days in, though the long lockdown Ireland was in up to recently explains that. It’s probably no harm, given that a disproportionate number of my daily photos for the summer months are likely to be from around the islands.
30th April
For maybe two weeks of each spring at home I’m treated to a beautiful display of green fire on bright mornings, when the sun crests the hill behind the house and lights the fresh leaves bright against the shadowed peak beyond the trees. It can make for some lovely backlight to photograph birds in, like this female house sparrow.
1st May
In pre-Christian times in Ireland the year was divided into four seasons, at the beginning of each of which was a celebration. Bealtaine marked the coming of summer, and these days it’s celebrated on the first of May (by those who still like to observe such things). As a tip of the hat to the pagan ways myself and a friend headed up to the pointed peak of Cruach Mhárthain for sunrise. This humble hilltop is arguably the best bang for your buck mountain walk in Ireland, being less than half an hour from the car and with views that could compete with any mountain summit in the country. It was a beautiful sunrise indeed, though I can’t quite get my head around the fact that it’s May already. I’m not sure if it’s just me but I think 2021 has been a far stranger and more timewarped, challenging and unsettled year so far than 2020 was, and the idea of summer doesn’t quite fit in with that. That said, it’s here now, and hopefully it’ll be a good one.
2nd May
Today I went for a walk in Killarney National Park to see firsthand the damage caused by the big fire a week ago. It was a somber day, though I was glad to see that much of the woodland around where I was walking remained relatively intact, with the trees on the edges generally preventing the fire from spreading into the interior. Sadly, huge swathes of bog were totally burned, leaving next to no vegetation behind, and displacing or killing countless numbers of invertebrates, birds, frogs and other wildlife. The fire, which affected about half the land area of the park, was almost certainly set intentionally. Finding out who did it will be next to impossible unless somebody owns up. The whole fiasco has been agitating me since it started, though the fire itself isn’t really what gets to me. Killarney National Park is in a dire state. Despite all you might read about it’s pristine beauty its wildlife and habitats have been under threat for decades due to invasive species, overgrazing by deer and sheep, and ultimately, terrible mismanagement. In fairness to the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) government funding for anything related to nature conservation is meager in Ireland, but all the same, it can’t be said that the resources that are available are being used well in the case of Killarney. Most of the woodland in the park is slowly dying. You needn’t be a trained ecologist to realise that there are next to no young trees in many of the old oak forests, due in part to overgrazing by deer, and in some instances sheep, which shouldn’t even be inside the park boundaries. Another threat to the native woodland is Rhododendron ponticum, an invasive shrub brought in for ornamental gardens in the 18th century that thrives on the acid soils of Irish mountains, to the point that it’s often the only thing growing in the woods. Its unpalatable leaves deter herbivores, and its thick, dense canopy quickly shades out anything beneath it, killing off any ground vegetation and preventing native plants from growing beneath it. The Irish Wildlife Trust has been calling out many of these issues for years, but little has changed. To read more see here, here and here to start. Obviously most people’s reaction to the fire is one of outrage, but this anger is tempered by the idea that “at least it’ll grow back.” Sadly, most of what’s growing in Killarney is rhododendron, and it’s smothering what’s left of the increasingly rare woodlands. Through successful greenwashing by government departments, and misinformed advertising campaigns, the majority of the population isn’t aware that even before this fire Killarney National Park was in a terrible state. A local news website recently posted an article with reference to the park being in “magnificent condition.” Ask any trained ecologist about the park and I don’t think they’d use that phrase. From an ecological point of view the park has been in decline for a long time, and a huge blaze like this is like another nail in the coffin. A healthy, robust ecosystem could shrug off a disaster like this. An already severely diminished one doesn’t have the resilience to undo the damage the fire has done. If you’re reading all this and thinking it sounds like a whole lot of negativity and moaning then please consider the value of experts. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic the vast majority of us has been very thankful to have leading epidemiologists, virologists and public health experts advising our governments on how to deal with this new coronavirus through good science and research. Through heeding this advice and adapting to the necessary changes we have managed to avoid huge amounts of death and illness, and still maintained stability in our society. Why do we not appreciate the advice, all of which is also rooted in science, of climatologists, conservation biologists and ecologists? Because our values don’t prioritise anything but our own misguided and selfish human needs is why. The Kerryman had a front page article after the fire with the line “Thankfully, there was no loss of life” starting the second paragraph. It should have read, “no loss of human life.” The fire caused enormous loss of non-human life, but that doesn’t register with most people because for myriad reasons most of us consider humans beyond or above or somehow separate from all other living beings on the planet. While it’s easy to label the idea of our inherent interconnectedness with the Earth as radical, hippy nonsense, there is no end of science to prove it as fact. I don’t hate humans. My life would be so much the worse without human connection, culture and technology. But I despair for our collective blindness to the non-human, and our arrogant sense of entitlement to all of the Earth. We are so deep in our humancentric fantasy that we can’t even comprehend the truths of the real world anymore. The fire that ripped through the National Park was devastating, but what’s far worse for me, who feels as much kinship for non-human life as I do for my fellow species, is how it shows how bleak the outlook for the future of life on our planet is. I do believe that positive change is coming, but not as fast as it should.
3rd May
Some weather came in during the night, bringing plenty of rain and wind and putting an end to a fortnight of mostly dry and bright conditions. The breeze was quite strong, first out of the southwest but gradually veering around to northwest as the day went on, following the course of the unseen sun. It’s been awhile since the wind blew this hard. I lit the stove as soon as I came downstairs in the morning and spent the majority of the day alongside it. I had to eventually go outside and make a photo, and this local shed ticked the box for me. I like the simple if inelegant method of keeping the roof on, though it’s not really working that well is it?
4th May
Looking northwest from Acres Hill as a shower passes east of Lispole before sunset. The weather for the last few days has very much been in keeping with the Scairbhín, an Irish weather phenomenon from in around the beginning of May. I believe the word comes from the first half of the phrase ‘garbh mí na gcuach’, which means the rough month of the cuckoo (the last fortnight of April and first fortnight of May.) During this period it’s very common to get cold and blustery weather between spells of calm and sunshine, a real mixed bag of conditions. Which in reality, isn’t a whole lot different to the rest of the Irish weather year, but by having a name of its own it at least seems to ring truer around now than at any other time. And as a friend of mine pointed out, the sudden weather changes can be very detrimental to early seedlings and newborn livestock, making them perhaps more noteworthy than fickle conditions in the rest of the year. Today was cold in a fresh northwest wind, but bright between short-lived showers. The landscape has really greened up over the last week or two, and though the temperature is low there’s a feeling of summer taking root. It seems to me that in Ireland we don’t have an even spread of time across the four seasons. As Michael Viney puts it in A Year’s Turning, his lovely collection of nature writing from his home in remote Mayo, “the seasons merge with each other and borrow from each other, so that only the calendar keeps track.” Eventually enough variables will have come together to allow it be said that one season is established (though it may feel like another), and soon the waters are muddied again as another season begins to take hold. In my mind spring and autumn are more like short buffer zones between the main events of summer and winter, which seem to last longer than either of those transitional seasons. With this view November to February is winter, March and April is spring, May to August is summer and September and October is autumn. But then maybe some people live for the equinoxes, and would want these to be the points around which the year swings. In reality it’s all arbitrary; it doesn’t really matter what we call anything. The earth will circle the sun regardless of our academic arguments about what happens when, and the vagaries of Irish weather further reduce the need for a strict classification. David Flanagan, a friend of mine who wrote a rock climbing guide for Ireland, sums it up nicely in the introduction to his book: “We have seasons but the weather doesn't pay a massive amount of attention to them. Of course the winter is generally colder than the summer but that’s about all you can say with certainty.”
5th May
Another cool day of sunshine and shade with northerly winds. A daylight photo nearly escaped me after staying longer at a small job than I’d expected to. As soon as I got home I went out in search of a quick and easy image on the green lane behind the house and returned before long with this – a “see-through” view of a dandelion gone to seed. The dark conditions pushed the camera near its limits, so this isn’t technically very acceptable, but the scene itself is quite interesting and beautiful I think. This daily photo project has me using my macro lens a lot more than I usually did in the past and I’m really enjoying it. The patterns and shapes in the close-up details of the world are a welcome change from the usual wider landscape scenes I feel less and less interested in pointing a camera at.
6th May
A blue tit singing its song on a blue sky morning. This poor ash tree’s fresh new leaves have been burned by the cold winds this week, and the low temperatures must be testing for the birds too. Most of the birds at the feeders in my back garden these days are the resident house sparrows. The winter influx of various tit species has dispersed again, leaving just a few greats and blues, along with small numbers of robin and blackbird, and a few green, gold and chaffinches. I’d love to see what other species I could attract if I was free to do what I pleased with this half acre. For a start most of the lawn would be reseeded as wildflower meadows and I’d plant plenty of trees and dig a small pond. It would be so nice to create these little pockets of wildlife habitat and have life thriving all around your home, but for now I’ll have to settle with what puts up with a mowed lawn on an open and windy hillside.
7th May
Last night my friend Jaro and I headed out along the coast near Kinard and rolled out sleeping bags for a few hours rest before the Milky Way rose around 3am. There was a small but powerful swell heaving against the cliffs, and as I lay out on the rocks I could feel its muscle coming up through the stone. It was perfectly clear overhead, without a trace of damp or dew. I could have happily gone back to sleep when the alarm sounded, but I eventually got out of the sleeping bag and attempted to make a few photographs. If this one looks dark it’s because it was dark out! I’d rather leave it as is instead of brightening it way beyond how it looked in reality. For best affect try looking at it in a dark room. The sea stack is known as An Searrach (The Foal) and the rock to the left is Máthair an tSearraigh (The Mother of the Foal). Why the left hand rock isn’t known as An Láir (The Mare) I don’t know, but interestingly there is a similarly named pair of offshore rocks not too far away from here. They are An Fiach (The Raven) and Máthair an Fhiaigh (The Mother of the Raven) off Ceann Sibéal. In that instance the mother is the one further out to sea, and I’ve read that her position is to protect her offspring from the worst of the swells. In the case of the foal and the mare, it’s the youngster that takes the brunt of the weather.
8th May
The clear skies I enjoyed in the early hours of yesterday morning lasted til daylight, but as the day wore on the cloud came in on a strengthening wind, and by evening it was gusting powerfully and raining heavy showers. The wind stayed strong for much of today, though it was mostly dry and bright. It seems a bit late in the year for such sustained strong wind, but maybe not anymore. The unsettled weather patterns predicted by climate scientists in the last few decades have by and large become the new normal. I pottered around at home for much of the day and when evening came I started to wonder what I was going to do to get my daily image. I went out to the garden to assess the potential for sunset and a break in the clouds sent me running back in for the camera. I was quickly back out to snap this brief, simple, sky scene. Back in the early years of my interest in photography I used take photos of the skies beyond the skylight window of the converted attic that was my bedroom. This was in around 2004 to 2006. After those few years I had quite a range of colourful cloudscapes seen and photographed. I still have the collection of cheap glossy prints of those suburban skies. They remind me of a particular period in my life, and there’s something reassuring in the idea that fifteen years later I’m still gathering together collections of photographs born of a fascination for the natural world. Maybe I’ll start a similar sky series from my current home. The outlook from here is certainly sufficient to take in the vastness of the upper atmosphere, and there’s weather enough to ensure a steady stream of beautiful colours, shapes, textures and light.
9th May
Another breezy, hazy day. I drove out to Dún Chaoin in the evening with a few preconceived ideas for a photo in mind, but none of them worked. Frequent soft showers eventually sent me to hiding in the car, and when the radio came on it was airing a play about Peig Sayers. This seemed fitting given where I was, overlooking the Blaskets, though it was the gritty and unsentimental language that kept me listening more so than the serendipity of the situation. I drove back north along the road and parked with a clear view of An tOileán Mór, The Great Blasket. Peig is the most famous figure from this now-famous island, though she is sadly an object of derision to many people. Her memoirs were part of the school curriculum for generations of students from the 1940s, and the tales of tragedy and harsh living in a dwindling island community, combined with the nation’s strange aversion to the Irish language since the founding of the state a century ago, left many with a bitter taste of their native tongue and nothing but contempt for a woman who deserves none of it. With my attention now firmly in the grasp of the play I lost all interest in photography, and settled for this dull and dismal scene, shot from the front seat of the car as another shower passed over the island. It’s nothing exciting but it fit the tone of the play well. You can listen to it here. It’s a refreshing change from the usual mawkish blurb you’ll read in tourism brochures, and an excellent take on the condescension and commodification outsiders often bring to “underdeveloped” and “primitive” communities.
10th May
The last time I was in this wood was three weeks ago to the day, and though it was beginning to go green back then the place was like a different world this evening. So much growth has sprouted in that short time that once familiar paths were now obscured, along with the light levels under the thickening canopy. The air was thick with the heady scent of wild garlic and the songbirds and wind rustling the millions of leaves made for nice music under the trees. And the sun even shone briefly. Summer is upon us, and it’s lush in the woods.
Find Part 11 here
27th April
Darker weather returned this morning, with heavy clouds dragged across the sky by a fresh northerly. I spent time trying to photograph some fulmars, with the emphasis on trying. These stout seabirds are among the most capable fliers in the entire bird world, and it’s pure joy to watch them interacting with all the invisible wind on a breezy day. Anybody who’s familiar with them will know and love the way they’ll use the updraught along a cliff to come level with you as you walk by, stiff wings dipping left and right in twitchy movement to keep steady while that big, black eye eyeballs you. I envy their incredible bodily ability, the weightlessness and confidence of it all. Fulmars have only been breeding in Ireland for little over a century, having expanded their range from more northern areas in that time. They are adapted for windy weather, using strong air currents to slingshot them across huge areas of ocean with minimal effort. This ability to cover massive distances has been part of their success; if fish stocks collapse locally they can go further afield without incurring a net loss of energy. A male fulmar tagged with a GPS tracker on Eynhallow in the Orkney Islands was recorded undertaking a 3,900 mile foraging trip over two weeks in 2012. It left its nest and took a fairly direct line towards the Mid Atlantic Ridge, which is two thirds of the way to Canada at that latitude. It spent some days feeding in a productive patch of sea and caught the Gulf Stream back to the west coast of Ireland, before tracking north along the coast towards Eynhallow, where its partner was waiting on their eggs. Not only is this trip an incredible physical feat for an animal moving under its own steam, but the navigational ability required to undertake such a journey across what to humans appears as featureless ocean is phenomenal. To learn more about fulmars, and other seabirds of the Northeast Atlantic, read The Seabird’s Cry by Adam Nicolson. It’s one of the few books I’ve read more than once, and I’ll read it again soon. By bringing together beautiful and poetic writing with brilliant scientific research, history and folklore, it makes for really great reading for anybody interested in the natural world.
28th April
Today is another fine spring day, cool in a steady north wind but bright and cheerful. Here’s a trio of wildflowers from the garden; a buttercup attended by a pollinating fly, a daisy, and a scarlet pimpernel. Buttercups (like daisies and dandelions) come in a variety of different species, many of which look very similar and are tricky to tell apart for the amateur botanist. I think this is meadow buttercup, but don’t quote me. The word daisy comes from “day’s eye”, a reference to this particular flower’s habit of opening and closing with the daylight hours. My garden is particularly rich in them along the borders of the lawn, and all those bright little eyes staring up at the sky certainly cheer the place up. Scarlet pimpernel is similar but fussier, only opening its flowers when the sun shines brightly. My tripod put this particular one in the shade, but it tolerated my brief infringement of its sunbathing for long enough to allow me make this photo.
29th April
This is a scene I was more excited about at the time than I am now, looking at the photos on the computer screen. It’s much easier to be enamoured with the energizing suck and surge of that saltwater pushing its way around the rocks in real life I suppose. Usually by now I’d have started the summer work season of bringing people out around those islands. Given how big a feature of my life The Blaskets have been for the past five years it’s unusual that this is the first time they’ve featured in this project, 129 days in, though the long lockdown Ireland was in up to recently explains that. It’s probably no harm, given that a disproportionate number of my daily photos for the summer months are likely to be from around the islands.
30th April
For maybe two weeks of each spring at home I’m treated to a beautiful display of green fire on bright mornings, when the sun crests the hill behind the house and lights the fresh leaves bright against the shadowed peak beyond the trees. It can make for some lovely backlight to photograph birds in, like this female house sparrow.
1st May
In pre-Christian times in Ireland the year was divided into four seasons, at the beginning of each of which was a celebration. Bealtaine marked the coming of summer, and these days it’s celebrated on the first of May (by those who still like to observe such things). As a tip of the hat to the pagan ways myself and a friend headed up to the pointed peak of Cruach Mhárthain for sunrise. This humble hilltop is arguably the best bang for your buck mountain walk in Ireland, being less than half an hour from the car and with views that could compete with any mountain summit in the country. It was a beautiful sunrise indeed, though I can’t quite get my head around the fact that it’s May already. I’m not sure if it’s just me but I think 2021 has been a far stranger and more timewarped, challenging and unsettled year so far than 2020 was, and the idea of summer doesn’t quite fit in with that. That said, it’s here now, and hopefully it’ll be a good one.
2nd May
Today I went for a walk in Killarney National Park to see firsthand the damage caused by the big fire a week ago. It was a somber day, though I was glad to see that much of the woodland around where I was walking remained relatively intact, with the trees on the edges generally preventing the fire from spreading into the interior. Sadly, huge swathes of bog were totally burned, leaving next to no vegetation behind, and displacing or killing countless numbers of invertebrates, birds, frogs and other wildlife. The fire, which affected about half the land area of the park, was almost certainly set intentionally. Finding out who did it will be next to impossible unless somebody owns up. The whole fiasco has been agitating me since it started, though the fire itself isn’t really what gets to me. Killarney National Park is in a dire state. Despite all you might read about it’s pristine beauty its wildlife and habitats have been under threat for decades due to invasive species, overgrazing by deer and sheep, and ultimately, terrible mismanagement. In fairness to the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) government funding for anything related to nature conservation is meager in Ireland, but all the same, it can’t be said that the resources that are available are being used well in the case of Killarney. Most of the woodland in the park is slowly dying. You needn’t be a trained ecologist to realise that there are next to no young trees in many of the old oak forests, due in part to overgrazing by deer, and in some instances sheep, which shouldn’t even be inside the park boundaries. Another threat to the native woodland is Rhododendron ponticum, an invasive shrub brought in for ornamental gardens in the 18th century that thrives on the acid soils of Irish mountains, to the point that it’s often the only thing growing in the woods. Its unpalatable leaves deter herbivores, and its thick, dense canopy quickly shades out anything beneath it, killing off any ground vegetation and preventing native plants from growing beneath it. The Irish Wildlife Trust has been calling out many of these issues for years, but little has changed. To read more see here, here and here to start. Obviously most people’s reaction to the fire is one of outrage, but this anger is tempered by the idea that “at least it’ll grow back.” Sadly, most of what’s growing in Killarney is rhododendron, and it’s smothering what’s left of the increasingly rare woodlands. Through successful greenwashing by government departments, and misinformed advertising campaigns, the majority of the population isn’t aware that even before this fire Killarney National Park was in a terrible state. A local news website recently posted an article with reference to the park being in “magnificent condition.” Ask any trained ecologist about the park and I don’t think they’d use that phrase. From an ecological point of view the park has been in decline for a long time, and a huge blaze like this is like another nail in the coffin. A healthy, robust ecosystem could shrug off a disaster like this. An already severely diminished one doesn’t have the resilience to undo the damage the fire has done. If you’re reading all this and thinking it sounds like a whole lot of negativity and moaning then please consider the value of experts. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic the vast majority of us has been very thankful to have leading epidemiologists, virologists and public health experts advising our governments on how to deal with this new coronavirus through good science and research. Through heeding this advice and adapting to the necessary changes we have managed to avoid huge amounts of death and illness, and still maintained stability in our society. Why do we not appreciate the advice, all of which is also rooted in science, of climatologists, conservation biologists and ecologists? Because our values don’t prioritise anything but our own misguided and selfish human needs is why. The Kerryman had a front page article after the fire with the line “Thankfully, there was no loss of life” starting the second paragraph. It should have read, “no loss of human life.” The fire caused enormous loss of non-human life, but that doesn’t register with most people because for myriad reasons most of us consider humans beyond or above or somehow separate from all other living beings on the planet. While it’s easy to label the idea of our inherent interconnectedness with the Earth as radical, hippy nonsense, there is no end of science to prove it as fact. I don’t hate humans. My life would be so much the worse without human connection, culture and technology. But I despair for our collective blindness to the non-human, and our arrogant sense of entitlement to all of the Earth. We are so deep in our humancentric fantasy that we can’t even comprehend the truths of the real world anymore. The fire that ripped through the National Park was devastating, but what’s far worse for me, who feels as much kinship for non-human life as I do for my fellow species, is how it shows how bleak the outlook for the future of life on our planet is. I do believe that positive change is coming, but not as fast as it should.
3rd May
Some weather came in during the night, bringing plenty of rain and wind and putting an end to a fortnight of mostly dry and bright conditions. The breeze was quite strong, first out of the southwest but gradually veering around to northwest as the day went on, following the course of the unseen sun. It’s been awhile since the wind blew this hard. I lit the stove as soon as I came downstairs in the morning and spent the majority of the day alongside it. I had to eventually go outside and make a photo, and this local shed ticked the box for me. I like the simple if inelegant method of keeping the roof on, though it’s not really working that well is it?
4th May
Looking northwest from Acres Hill as a shower passes east of Lispole before sunset. The weather for the last few days has very much been in keeping with the Scairbhín, an Irish weather phenomenon from in around the beginning of May. I believe the word comes from the first half of the phrase ‘garbh mí na gcuach’, which means the rough month of the cuckoo (the last fortnight of April and first fortnight of May.) During this period it’s very common to get cold and blustery weather between spells of calm and sunshine, a real mixed bag of conditions. Which in reality, isn’t a whole lot different to the rest of the Irish weather year, but by having a name of its own it at least seems to ring truer around now than at any other time. And as a friend of mine pointed out, the sudden weather changes can be very detrimental to early seedlings and newborn livestock, making them perhaps more noteworthy than fickle conditions in the rest of the year. Today was cold in a fresh northwest wind, but bright between short-lived showers. The landscape has really greened up over the last week or two, and though the temperature is low there’s a feeling of summer taking root. It seems to me that in Ireland we don’t have an even spread of time across the four seasons. As Michael Viney puts it in A Year’s Turning, his lovely collection of nature writing from his home in remote Mayo, “the seasons merge with each other and borrow from each other, so that only the calendar keeps track.” Eventually enough variables will have come together to allow it be said that one season is established (though it may feel like another), and soon the waters are muddied again as another season begins to take hold. In my mind spring and autumn are more like short buffer zones between the main events of summer and winter, which seem to last longer than either of those transitional seasons. With this view November to February is winter, March and April is spring, May to August is summer and September and October is autumn. But then maybe some people live for the equinoxes, and would want these to be the points around which the year swings. In reality it’s all arbitrary; it doesn’t really matter what we call anything. The earth will circle the sun regardless of our academic arguments about what happens when, and the vagaries of Irish weather further reduce the need for a strict classification. David Flanagan, a friend of mine who wrote a rock climbing guide for Ireland, sums it up nicely in the introduction to his book: “We have seasons but the weather doesn't pay a massive amount of attention to them. Of course the winter is generally colder than the summer but that’s about all you can say with certainty.”
5th May
Another cool day of sunshine and shade with northerly winds. A daylight photo nearly escaped me after staying longer at a small job than I’d expected to. As soon as I got home I went out in search of a quick and easy image on the green lane behind the house and returned before long with this – a “see-through” view of a dandelion gone to seed. The dark conditions pushed the camera near its limits, so this isn’t technically very acceptable, but the scene itself is quite interesting and beautiful I think. This daily photo project has me using my macro lens a lot more than I usually did in the past and I’m really enjoying it. The patterns and shapes in the close-up details of the world are a welcome change from the usual wider landscape scenes I feel less and less interested in pointing a camera at.
6th May
A blue tit singing its song on a blue sky morning. This poor ash tree’s fresh new leaves have been burned by the cold winds this week, and the low temperatures must be testing for the birds too. Most of the birds at the feeders in my back garden these days are the resident house sparrows. The winter influx of various tit species has dispersed again, leaving just a few greats and blues, along with small numbers of robin and blackbird, and a few green, gold and chaffinches. I’d love to see what other species I could attract if I was free to do what I pleased with this half acre. For a start most of the lawn would be reseeded as wildflower meadows and I’d plant plenty of trees and dig a small pond. It would be so nice to create these little pockets of wildlife habitat and have life thriving all around your home, but for now I’ll have to settle with what puts up with a mowed lawn on an open and windy hillside.
7th May
Last night my friend Jaro and I headed out along the coast near Kinard and rolled out sleeping bags for a few hours rest before the Milky Way rose around 3am. There was a small but powerful swell heaving against the cliffs, and as I lay out on the rocks I could feel its muscle coming up through the stone. It was perfectly clear overhead, without a trace of damp or dew. I could have happily gone back to sleep when the alarm sounded, but I eventually got out of the sleeping bag and attempted to make a few photographs. If this one looks dark it’s because it was dark out! I’d rather leave it as is instead of brightening it way beyond how it looked in reality. For best affect try looking at it in a dark room. The sea stack is known as An Searrach (The Foal) and the rock to the left is Máthair an tSearraigh (The Mother of the Foal). Why the left hand rock isn’t known as An Láir (The Mare) I don’t know, but interestingly there is a similarly named pair of offshore rocks not too far away from here. They are An Fiach (The Raven) and Máthair an Fhiaigh (The Mother of the Raven) off Ceann Sibéal. In that instance the mother is the one further out to sea, and I’ve read that her position is to protect her offspring from the worst of the swells. In the case of the foal and the mare, it’s the youngster that takes the brunt of the weather.
8th May
The clear skies I enjoyed in the early hours of yesterday morning lasted til daylight, but as the day wore on the cloud came in on a strengthening wind, and by evening it was gusting powerfully and raining heavy showers. The wind stayed strong for much of today, though it was mostly dry and bright. It seems a bit late in the year for such sustained strong wind, but maybe not anymore. The unsettled weather patterns predicted by climate scientists in the last few decades have by and large become the new normal. I pottered around at home for much of the day and when evening came I started to wonder what I was going to do to get my daily image. I went out to the garden to assess the potential for sunset and a break in the clouds sent me running back in for the camera. I was quickly back out to snap this brief, simple, sky scene. Back in the early years of my interest in photography I used take photos of the skies beyond the skylight window of the converted attic that was my bedroom. This was in around 2004 to 2006. After those few years I had quite a range of colourful cloudscapes seen and photographed. I still have the collection of cheap glossy prints of those suburban skies. They remind me of a particular period in my life, and there’s something reassuring in the idea that fifteen years later I’m still gathering together collections of photographs born of a fascination for the natural world. Maybe I’ll start a similar sky series from my current home. The outlook from here is certainly sufficient to take in the vastness of the upper atmosphere, and there’s weather enough to ensure a steady stream of beautiful colours, shapes, textures and light.
9th May
Another breezy, hazy day. I drove out to Dún Chaoin in the evening with a few preconceived ideas for a photo in mind, but none of them worked. Frequent soft showers eventually sent me to hiding in the car, and when the radio came on it was airing a play about Peig Sayers. This seemed fitting given where I was, overlooking the Blaskets, though it was the gritty and unsentimental language that kept me listening more so than the serendipity of the situation. I drove back north along the road and parked with a clear view of An tOileán Mór, The Great Blasket. Peig is the most famous figure from this now-famous island, though she is sadly an object of derision to many people. Her memoirs were part of the school curriculum for generations of students from the 1940s, and the tales of tragedy and harsh living in a dwindling island community, combined with the nation’s strange aversion to the Irish language since the founding of the state a century ago, left many with a bitter taste of their native tongue and nothing but contempt for a woman who deserves none of it. With my attention now firmly in the grasp of the play I lost all interest in photography, and settled for this dull and dismal scene, shot from the front seat of the car as another shower passed over the island. It’s nothing exciting but it fit the tone of the play well. You can listen to it here. It’s a refreshing change from the usual mawkish blurb you’ll read in tourism brochures, and an excellent take on the condescension and commodification outsiders often bring to “underdeveloped” and “primitive” communities.
10th May
The last time I was in this wood was three weeks ago to the day, and though it was beginning to go green back then the place was like a different world this evening. So much growth has sprouted in that short time that once familiar paths were now obscured, along with the light levels under the thickening canopy. The air was thick with the heady scent of wild garlic and the songbirds and wind rustling the millions of leaves made for nice music under the trees. And the sun even shone briefly. Summer is upon us, and it’s lush in the woods.
Find Part 11 here
Comments
By Ann O Connor: Fab photos By Mark Sexton: Love the milky way pic!