Another Life: If I must go to Dublin - and many contented years can pass between one expedition and the next - I like to take the train that heads into the rising sun, writes Michael Viney
Thus, a week or two ago and before things warmed up, I trundled out from Westport into an Ireland silvered by a late frost; wraiths of mist rose from the lakes and traced each stream through the fields. The sun rolled over the drumlins, got stuck now and then in a thicket of thorns, and finally blinded me with spring.
There's still a lot of Ireland that hasn't been built on. Each approach to a railway station, it's true, runs a gauntlet of brand-new estates, the mud scarcely dry on the toytown cul-de-sacs. But in between are the boggy brown bits and endlessly empty hectares of green. I let my imagination see all this covered with miscanthus, the "elephant grass" of biofuels. Waving four metres tall in perennial clumps, it will hide all the fences and most of the hedgerows, subsuming petty boundaries into broad, wind-tossed savannahs.
The view from the train will be transformed - perhaps rather splendidly if Miscanthus giganteus is left late to dry before harvesting for burning in autumn. Then it may turn purple or russet and its feathery seed heads (like pampas grass) could just take the fancy of finches, gold and green. Not much else of our wildlife is likely to feed on it, but corncrakes could find its cover convenient in spring and some insects may thrive in its dense, dark microclimate.
Another shadowy growth became insistent as the train moved east and trees grew taller and more plentiful. The sharp sun put a glitter on the ivy that swaddles virtually every trunk and branching canopy. Ash trees, in particular, stretched pale arms from their sombre, evergreen shrouds.
Ivy is everywhere in Europe, but in Ireland its vigour and opportunism must, I think, must be unique. And while as ready as the next eco-nut to praise its value to birds and insects, I do have some sympathy with the obsession of the anti-ivy lobby. To anyone with ivy on their mind, the final hour of the journey into Dublin must be a cruel ordeal, as line after line of shapely trees is blotted and blurred by the wanton sprawl of Hedera helix.
My visit to the capital had cultural imperatives, among them a visit to the Irish Museum of Modern Art to see Howard Hodgkin's big retrospective. It was a good experience, as they say, but the colours shine even more brightly in my big book of reproductions. And then, about to leave, I was lured by the twitter of flocking starlings into the darkened labyrinth of Jaki Irvine's installation, The Silver Bridge (too late, it's over). Eight looped videos, some running on giant screens, drew this bemused Rip van Winkle into her bird-and-bat-haunted reverie.
Some of it, certainly, was about the human distance from nature. And in late afternoon, as it happened, I found myself outside the Natural History Museum in Merrion Square, just as workers from Government Buildings were going home. As they hurried past me to their buses and the DART, handbags and briefcases swinging, I stood mesmerised by some odd behaviour I had just seen through the railings. A solitary herring-gull was tap-dancing on the lawn.
Let me be more precise. The bird lifted each webbed foot alternately and brought it down sharply on the close-mown grass - an action at times so rapid that the feet became a blur. It kept this up for minutes on end, sometimes in an attitude of nonchalance, like Gene Kelly, sometimes tilted watchfully towards the ground. At long intervals, it would pause and peck around in a short radius at whatever small insects had emerged - for "foot-paddling", as it's called, is a food- winning strategy, shared by woodcock and plover and several other birds. As generally explained, it imitates the pattering of rain sufficiently well to fool earthworms into sticking their heads out.
I had never seen the behaviour before. But two readers have reported it to Eye on Nature over the years, each in relation to herring-gulls "running on the spot" or "foot-tapping" on the manicured grass of the Trinity College grounds, a mere wing-beat away from the Natural History Museum.
Go on the web and you will find it similarly noted from the lawns of the University of Sussex, at Brighton. Make of this what you will.
I was not, as it turned out, the only observer of the dancing gull. As, at last, it flew off, I met the glance of another motionless watcher at a far curve of the railings. He had, I think, a beard and curly hair - at any rate, an air of happy complicity in a small bit of time out.