I have a bird song identifying app on my phone. I occasionally use it and for the last couple of weeks every time I have, it’s turned out to be the common nightingale. The storied nightingale, evocative of sultry nights and the fiendish sophistication of the mainland, that contiguous stretch of humanity that flows from Calais to Tianjin. What a treat, non? It’s uncanny but after spending 56 years of my life never having knowingly heard the common nightingale, now I hear it morning noon and night. I had heard what the Japanese will tell you is the Japanese nightingale years ago, a warbler with the beautiful name of uguisu, but it’s always cool to run into the original OG. It’s odd, it feels odd when something you have always thought of as rare and precious turns out to be common and precious, for precious it is with its beautiful varied singing, sometimes staccato sometimes lyrical. Just earlier I saw a 25 cm or so red backed weasel looking fella running across the path. The hounds saw it and made to make chase, the size differential kicking their prey drive into gear, rather than their other stock response, the fear retreat. A few days prior to that I saw a good sized snake of the metre longish variety, a sighting that prompted me to do some research on the local fauna. Turns out that snakes here have a low strike rate. Most internet articles contain the same data point, namely, that no one has died of a snake bite, or was it no French person, since a long time ago. Speaking of snakes, and referring to the photo below, when walking back to the house in the dark from our final 10 legged walk of the 24 hr period, I came across a flattened tableau…of a snake and a frog together in death by automobile. I surmise that the snake nabbed the frog and the car, that instrument of divine intervention, the kamivan, got him or her. It was a good sized snake, a metre plus, probably the same kind as I saw on the path, and relatively harmless if the identification I made on the back of my online investigation was correct. There are wild things here you don’t get in Ireland, and there will be encounters. When I take the dogs out for their final walk, when it’s getting dark, or is dark, or about to start getting dark, they often just stand there almost transfixed listening to the Summer or is it still Spring sounds, the frogs ribbeting, the chorus of competing nightingales, dogs barking in the distance, a medley of sounds that spring from a warm climate, something completely new to our Irish hounds.
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