ANOTHER LIFE/Michael Viney: April light is all of a piece with the wind off the hill, keen-edged and searching. It glances through dun tufts of rushes to sharpen the fresh spears of yellow flag, and stripe the hollows of lazy beds with a bolder shade of green. The whole landscape is tuning up to spring: glowing slashes of viridian across the sea, bright emerald sifting through the hawthorn hedge; wave-caps and lambs gleaming from the same white paint-pot.
The lambs have been conjured up morning by morning, first the fuzzy black twins, then a multiplying mêlée of white ones. They bounce up the field bank to add us to their inventory of the world: marching man, breathing heavily, and a dog pretending not to see them.
For the next few weeks, I will be alternately charmed by their lissom agility (those astonishing, spring-heeled leaps) and irritated by the panicky clamour of bleating loss and reunion that washes ceaselessly across the hillside. The gambolling of lambs - a word so specific to them - drifts down from the French gambade, the leap or bound of a horse; it also moves through sober discussions of the role of play in animal life.
Science has problems with behaviour that seems to have no function or goal - almost a working definition of playfulness. "No behavioural concept," says Edward O. Wilson, the father of sociobiology, "has proved more ill-defined, elusive, controversial, and even unfashionable." It is also hard to devise a test of what constitutes a make-believe activity with no apparent goal but fun.
This, of course, has only spiced the challenge of deciding what play is "for". Zoologists generally agree that play is part of the socialisation of mammals (do childhoods of solitary computer games make misfits later on?) There's also fairly wide agreement that animal play is a way of rehearsing movements and impulses, and perfecting skills, in the safe embrace of infancy. A whale calf, for example, sticks close by its mother and, once it has learned to "breach", may leap exuberantly out of the water up to 80 times in an hour. Young dolphins, too, practise aerial leaps, spins and fin-slaps, all of which have a use in adult life.
Some play rituals are shared between species in a quite intriguing way. I have watched a score of blackface lambs, in a loose, woolly gang, charging up and down for the sheer exuberance of it and playing "King-o'-the-Castle" on the highest ridge of ground. It's a scene from any infant school playground - and also, sometimes, from a hillside where red deer calves are enjoying themselves. As ecologist Frank Fraser Darling saw it: "King-o-the-Castle would start by one calf mounting the hillock and occasionally rising on its hind legs. This would seem to serve as an invitation, for others would look up, leave their mothers and run towards the hillock . . ."
So sheep, red deer and people - perhaps most mammals - need to find pleasure in pushing and shoving for a brief supremacy.
Apart from the occasional mock-butting of heads (later the serious and violent contest between competing rams), lambs do not go in for the rougher kinds of social play. They do not need the wrestling and biting that many predatory animals, from kittens to wolf cubs, enjoy.
Play-fights need special signals: I like the fact that rhesus macaque monkeys, preparing to wrestle, look at their partners upside-down through their legs, just like human toddlers. Japanese macaques also gather snowballs, but haven't got around to throwing them. Among primates, such elaborate play is scarcely surprising. I'm more surprised by it in birds, and not just the notoriously intelligent ravens.
Consider the kind of game-playing by swallows reported to "Eye on Nature" by two separate observers. The first, watching adult birds which had not even begun to lay, told how "one swallow would carry a hen feather while the other three gave chase. The first swallow would drop the feather and another would pick it up as it floated in the sky. This game went on for at least five minutes . . ."
A second reader wrote that "I have seen a swallow drop a feather, turn 50 yards away, catch it before it had fallen 10 feet and repeat the trick five times."
And now, in the journal Animal Behaviour, a study of just this kind of game, played by American herring gulls, is the first proof that birds do, indeed, play. Gulls and crows often smash mussels or clams by dropping them on to rocks. But sometimes the gulls do a series of drops, catching the clams before they hit the ground - just like the swallow with the feather. The researcher was sure there had to be a sensible reason for doing this, but ended up with play as the only explanation.
Publication of Nature in Ireland's Gaeltacht, a pocket guide in English by Padraig O Briain (GaelSaoire, €7), gives immediate pleasure in its sheer enthusiasm. The scatter of seven official Gaeltacht areas, from Co Donegal and north Co Mayo down to Cape Clear and Ring, embraces virtually the whole variety of Ireland's wildlife habitats and many of our most precious landscapes.
The author annexes four national parks (Killarney, Connemara, Glenveagh and Mayo) into his brief and readable distillations of geology, flora and fauna. This labour of love could certainly tempt prospective eco-tourists into travelling the island Gaeltacht by Gaeltacht. But one misses any hint of cultural connection: even a rudimentary glossary of wildlife names in Irish would have helped (think of the colourful names for the heron, changing from one Gaeltacht area to the next: Cáití fhada, Joany an scrugaill, Nóra na bportach . . .).
The photographs are splendid and enticing, the editing sometimes dire.
Along with attracting American birdwatchers and German amateur botanists, one hopes the guide will deepen the Gaeltacht's own appreciation of wildlife and thus help to prolong the sanctuary it offers to many species.
The Horizons column resumes next week