Another Life: Twenty Novembers ago I was musing on how this month could feel in the city: "a murky limbo of a month; a time of unremitting hiatus, writes Michael Viney.
Even the glow of the shop windows is borrowed from December. At the end of the day one heads homewards, let down again, through an acrid dusk of unswept chimneys."
Even in the country, I suggested, November had no better reputation, and quoted from a mesmerising dirge that had stayed with me since childhood: No sun - no moon! No morn - no noon, No dawn - no dusk - no proper time of day . . . No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds - November! Thomas Hood was writing in London in the early decades of the 19th century and thus sharing with Dickens some of the bitterest winters since the Little Ice Age. Add in a constant pall of smoke from open fires and frequent temperature inversions and it's no wonder his days were gloomy.
In the 1980s, even Dublin was still waiting for laws on smokeless fuels to ease its burden of aerial particulates (imagine, otherwise, the potent evening cocktail of coal-smoke and traffic fumes).
As a child in England's big freeze of 1946, I remember the enchantment of waking to ice-ferns on the inside of the bedroom window: my own breath magically congealed into arching fronds that exactly replicated those green graces of nature. We are promised a "normally" cold winter, but not one to grow ice-ferns, even if the central heating fails.
Now, in November, it is rain (and wind) that hastens the decay of autumn - achieving, in Connacht as elsewhere, its own sodden kind of beauty.
Beside the garden pond a great clump of royal fern, Osmunda regalis, stopped me in my tracks the other morning with its sheer intensity of smouldering colour, a bonfire of burnt sienna.
This is also the shade of wind-felled bracken rotting in the fields and on the mountain.
Does one have to be a painter, tuned into colours, to find November's landscape so rewarding? Not, of course, that nature always does exactly what it says on the tube, but Connemara lakes on a sunny morning really do flash with cobalt, borrowed from summer seas, and sedges and grasses in the bogs really do call for madder, alizarin and (later) a lion-bright yellow ochre.
I will not even start on the ocean sunsets. And even here the rain intensifies things, extending dramatic silhouettes from the wings like those of a Vietnamese shadow theatre, or filling the air with a sensual, violet light. Such sensibilities are all a reward of "being keen on nature".
What the big wind left of the leaves will fall more or less on cue, for the trees are slow to change botanical habits engendered over millennia. As cover dwindles along the island's hedgebanks, and dawns and dusks fit more readily with human routines, there are occasional glimpses to be had of foxes, badgers, stoats and pine martens; even of our increasingly rare barn owls. Field mice wander indoors, pygmy shrews breathe their last on doorsteps, odd-coloured frogs turn up underfoot in the garden.
"Is this unusual?" is the question that closes many of the contributions to "Eye on Nature", as if rarity was necessary for the record. This feature has, indeed, offered many fascinating observations over the years (it began in 1988). But it was never planned to add a great deal to scientific knowledge; rather, to communicate what ought to be the eager human pleasure and curiosity in encounters with nature.
In the reflective time of autumn, many of the letters and e-mails to "Eye on Nature" look back at questions and discoveries dating to summer holidays and now unearthed with the holiday snaps: that's fine, we're not out to make news. But as winter deepens, what are specially welcome are offerings that share a continuing affinity with the outdoor world and wildlife beyond the bird-feeder.
This is when estuary mudflats fill up with migrant waders, along with herons and egrets, and the lakes and floodlands carry flotillas of migrant swans, geese and ducks. But nature in November is also small, near and still: tree seeds and hedge-berries, ferns and mosses in the woods, lichens on the rocks. Going to look for one thing is to be surprised by another. The seashore, too, is an arena of utter chance, especially now that the ocean is changing and new things are drifting north.
But there are thousands of old things, ordinary, strange and even beautiful, to be met beside the winter waves. "Is this unusual?" Well, it might be. The thing is, you were there.