"The dolphins have arrived early on our shores, heralding a warm and sunny summer," said a report in yesterday's Sunday Independent. And it goes on to say: "T.P. O Conchuir, resident weather expert in Ballydavid, Co Kerry, spotted two pods of about 40 dolphins in Ballydavid harbour, and says it's yet another sign of a lovely summer to come."
Summer 1999, of course, may well turn out to be a scorcher, but it is unlikely that the dolphins, or any other animals, have any inside knowledge of the fact.
Insofar as their behaviour may be influenced by the weather, they will be reacting to present or relatively recent atmospheric or oceanic conditions, and there is no evidence that they have any skill as long-range forecasters. If one wanted to find a scientific reason to believe such tales, one could argue that the animals have detected some anomalous thermal structure in the ocean, and that this makes them behave in an unusual way, and that this same thermal structure may in due course influence our Irish weather for the better.
But this is a long shot, and the numerous links are too tenuous to be taken seriously.
Strangely enough, history belies the Kerry dolphins. Despite their friendly demeanour, the animals are more associated in traditional weather lore with storms and high winds than with calm, sunny, pleasant conditions.
According to the ancient wisdom, when the dolphins are more active than usual "it foreshows a wind, and from that part from whence they fetch their frisks"; the herd flees the wind, it seems, and approach from the direction from which a storm can be expected. Even worse conditions are in store when they run into bays and harbours, and gambol on the surface, or as the Roman poet Lucan had it, when:
. . . in various turns the doubtful dolphins play,
And thwart, and run across, and mix their way.
For these reasons, dolphins frolicking around a ship were regarded as unlucky omens by sailors in days past. As Dante puts it in his Inferno:
Like dolphins, when a signal they transmit
To mariners by arching of the back,
Prognosticating angry tempests, dark and black
Require that they, to save their ship, take counsel fit.
Some analysts believe this boisterous behaviour of the dolphins is brought on by an electrically charged atmosphere that they say precedes a storm. But then as Julius Caesar remarked in De Bello Gallico shortly after his unforgettable revelation that all of Gaul was divided into three parts, Homines id quod volunt credunt: "Men readily believe that which they wish to believe."