Lots of good stuff from the last few days. I saw the male hen harrier, which is always a treat. After a few years of coming here, my brain is finally trained to notice a distant white dot moving against the landscape. The female is brown and I still can’t pattern-match her at a distance, but if she’s overhead my “raptor!” signal kicks in at least.

Yesterday J, Ms 11 and I went out to look at the pair of little fields we call the secret orchard. It’s a lovely little enclosed area, getting smaller and more enclosed as new baby blackthorn trees spawn out from the hedges. There’s so much blackthorn, and there’s a good amount of elder and rowan at the edges too. If the deer had a predator I think the secret orchard would rapidly become a secret tiny forest. (“Rapidly” being a relative thing when you’re talking about growing trees.) I found a dog rose, which is also always a treat and, hiding away in a corner, there’s broom, a plant I haven’t seen here before.

Behind the secret orchard is a three-room tumbledown cottage. When we got here it was absolutely infested in (invasive, horrible) cherry laurel and (tree-farm escapee) Sitka spruce, and neighbouring cow intrusions had made the ground mucked up and sludgy. Last year we got it all fenced off and had the unwelcome plants removed, and it’s dried out really nicely. The laurel’s coming back already though. We need to murder it better.

I spent some time cautiously poking around in the room that still has half a roof, and it reminded me of a point and click adventure where there are a few interesting items to find but it takes a while to notice them.

Up high on a windowsill: there’s a rusted hair clippers!

Under fallen roof tiles: two lovely red window shutters. I’d love to keep them if we can, but the wood feels pretty fragile.

Sticking out from a pile of wood: it’s a copy of the Irish Farmer’s Journal from September 30th, 1960! I have no idea how it lasted this long but it’s already crumbling, so I need to photograph the pages fast.

Outside the house there were lots of birds: chaffinches, wrens, siskins, robins, blackcaps, and Merlin heard a treecreeper. That’s the second time it’s told me about one around here, but I’ve only seen them in Dublin. I’d love to see one here.

Ms 11 found a big brown scarab beetle (improbably called a cockchafer) and J found a deer antler, which I took home to put in the Collection Of Interesting Things. It’s now nestled in beside the piece of wasps nest, the birds nest, the buzzard feather, and the various old bottles that have shown up around the place. Two shelves of an IKEA Billy bookcase so far, and the rate of Interesting Things to find doesn’t seem to be slowing down.

In the evening, Ms 11 and I went to explore the drowned sitka trees in “umbellifer heaven” below the house and see how many trees we want to mark for keeping. I’d expected one, maybe two, but the sitkas were a good nursery and there’s a bunch of great stuff growing in amongst them: a baby hawthorn, at least three nice elder trees, and a sycamore that’s big enough to be worth keeping. (Sycamores are an introduced species, grow super fast, and are kind of weeds, but I appreciate them as agreeable shade trees.) Also, at least two of the sitkas turned out to actually just be surprisingly healthy branches coming off a massive fallen tree. The fallen tree has lots of tangled limbs and interesting climbable bits and Ms 11 immediately scrambled up on it. If we clean up around it and remove the spikier parts, I think it’d be a pretty great play structure. So that’s a fun project that we’ll try to get some time for this summer.

Best thing from today: a buzzard flew past my face while I was holding the camera. Agreeable of it.

Also from today: a big red bullfinch, a white wagtail, little white moths, lots of wrens and chaffinches, stitchwort, herb robert, milkwort, speedwell, and some oyster mushrooms growing on a log.

Worst thing from today: I went to check on my favourite baby oak tree and it’s dead. The deer stripped all the branches off it. It was in a little hollow surrounded by hawthorns, so I thought it was safe, but I guess they’re pretty determined when it comes to tasty new growth. Jerks. The hazels and rowans along the bursar’s path are pretty much demolished as well. But I found two other baby oaks that the deer don’t seem to have found yet so I guess I should buy some wire to protect those. Also they seem to completely ignore the birch and alder trees, so maybe those need to be the focus for a while until we have a better fencing strategy.

There’s a little meadow beside the house that I call umbellifer heaven because it had a ton of umbellifers (angelica and other frothy flowers) for the last couple of years and it was absolutely buzzy with insects as a result. I went over there this morning for a walk and was surprised not to see many flowers. I hope I’m just too early in the year. There weren’t a lot of insects either, but I saw a gazillion spiderwebs, all flat, no funnel webs. I tried to gently step over them as I walked but they really were everywhere.

All those spiders are good news because they mean lots of spider-eating birds like willow warblers and chiffchaffs, both of which were abundant at the bottom of the field. These two species of birds look basically identical but have really different songs and I wonder whether they hybridize and whether the different songs evolved to stop unsuccessful cross-species mating happening or whether it’s coincidental. I need to go learn more.

Umbellifer heaven has a bunch of half-drowned ratty-looking sitka spruce, presumably blown in from a nearby tree farm, but there are new cones on them so I guess they’re adapting to having really wet feet. We promise ourselves every visit that we’ll take them down and put some useful native trees there instead and some day we will definitely get around to doing that.

Crossing over into the bottom of the field we call “the good field”, I saw new white flowers on the hawthorns, as well as little yellow tormentil, tons and tons of ragged robin, thistles, some kind of springy moss, and a blue thing that the Seek app tells me is carpet bugle (though I’m not sure Seek knows what it’s talking about and I definitely don’t. I need to check with Z and M, who reliably do.) A few new baby willows are coming up near the stream. I saw bog cotton over on the bog (though I haven’t walked there yet on this visit) and masses of yellow flag iris at the bottom of the hill (ditto). And the pond field had a lot of marsh cinquefoil, which was new to me this week so I felt clever for recognising it.

Two other cool things:

There’s a nest of baby swallows in the woodshed again this year, parent swallows zipping around the yard catching flies for them. I haven’t managed to get a picture yet, but any time I make a noise in the shed, two or three little open beaks poke up above the edge of the nest for half a second and then disappear again 😍😍😍

And I went out to restart the composter today, and it’s full of compost! I realise that this is 100% the point of having a composter but it still feels a bit magical when it works. There were lots of happy worms and bugs in there too, so A++ successful compost.

We’re back in Tipperary for a few weeks. I’d planned to be here in February to plant trees, but some annoying big life events happened and I ended up feeling swamped and cancelling the trip to get some brain space back. So it’s been almost a year since I’ve been here. It feels good to be back.

We got in just before 10pm last night as the sun was starting to think about setting. Dusk in Ireland in summer is a slow and gradual and wonderful thing, so while the kettle boiled, I went to see what’s changed. As always, lots of wildflowers have invited themselves into the yard and, as always, I appreciate every one of them. There’s masses of tutsan around the door, willowherb along the wall, bramble sneaking down the side of the shed, foxgloves in the hedge, daisies everywhere.

A cuckoo was calling from up on the hill: they’re so plaintive and eerie, especially when you’re out on your own in the near-dark.

I wanted to look at the pond we dug a couple of years ago, so I crossed the two little fields to get to it, wading through thigh high grass and reeds and warily eyeing the flat patches where deer have been lying down: deer plus long grass means you’re doing a tick check at the end of the day. The grass is so long that I couldn’t see the pond until I was up close, but the ground got squelchier and I could see the flora get more interesting as I got closer: from reeds and buttercups to marsh marigold, ragged robin, cuckoo flower, and this lovely thing I don’t remember seeing before. The internet tells me it’s marsh cinquefoil.

The pond has a little island in the middle of it, intended to give birds a bit of safe nesting habitat that foxes can’t get to. As I got near, a couple of birds zipped off the island, a pair of brown blurs, so we might have succeeded. I need to go back and stake out the pond a bit when it’s brighter and see if I can figure out what they are.

Two ducks flew high overhead, silhouetted against the setting sun. Another crossed the same path a few minutes later, then another 30 seconds after that, then another… giving me a weird sense of deja vu until I realised it was doing slow circles. I didn’t see any ducks here until last year, and I haven’t seen them on the pond yet, only the stream, but I still like to think that our pond invited them in.

Walking back to the house, I heard a bird call that I hadn’t hear before, a weird croaky raspy clicky thing. The Merlin app says it’s a sedge warbler, which is apparently fairly common but new to me. I’ll keep my eyes and ears (and camera lens) open for it over the next few weeks.

Z had laid a fire in the fireplace for us, which was incredible of her. We sat around the fire for an hour enjoying being back, then went to bed with the moon shining bright through the bedroom window.

It’s been raining since we got here. Three weeks of soggy sky. While we’ve had a few patches of sun, they haven’t lasted long. The few times I brought my camera out of the house, I ended up having to keep it dry under my raincoat.

But yesterday was dry and bright and I raced out for a half hour walk between two meetings. The bursar’s path was thick with birds, really incredible numbers of wrens, chaffinches, chiffchaffs, willow warblers, robins, bluetits. Tons of swallows swooping and chirping. Down the end of the path, Merlin claimed to hear a kingfisher. That’s the second time it’s flagged one near our place, and I don’t think it’s very likely (both places were near running water, but I’d expect them to need denser forest), but I’d love it to be true. I’ve never seen a kingfisher and they’re on my wish list for the land along with barn owls and curlews and the marsh fritillary butterfly. I want to send a memo to them all to say that they would be welcome here.

I hadn’t planned to visit the moos, but they saw me in the distance and started yelling. I thought they were being bratty and asking for more protein kibble, but I’m glad I went to check: they didn’t have water. It turned out that the digger working on our drainage had disconnected the pipe, so their trough stopped automatically refilling and became empty enough and light enough that they knocked it over.

I’ve been bringing the cows a bucket of kibble every day and standing around talking to them, and it’s definitely making them more relaxed around me. They still back away when I scratch their necks, but some of them will now come and sniff at my outstretched hand, just in the way our cat Lucy used to. Tech people always talk about “pets vs cattle”, but I think these cattle can become pets with time.

The water pipe wasn’t easy to fix, so we had to haul water from the yard to give us time to find the right hose valve. The buckets of water confused them: Olive kept coming back as I walked across the field to see if my bucket had magically started to contain kibble. I told her I’d been telling people that belties are unusually smart and she was kind of embarrassing me, and I think she took the feedback well.

Later L visited and we went to have a look at what was in her field: angelica, grasshoppers, funnel webs, yellow flag (not currently flowering), stitchwort, sycamores, hawthorn, ragwort, selfheal, eyebright, dandelion clocks, goose grass, lots of things. Also a teeny tiny cute frog.

There’s still lots going on. We have a new stove (yay!) so we can now make a fire without asphyxiating. We have a drainage channel that might (pleeease!) make the house less damp. We have cleared out a horrifying mass of rubbish from the yard and ordered three (!) full size skips to take it away. We’re investigating more sturdy cow infrastructure to make vet visits less traumatic for everyone (but god it’s so expensive and we’re not sure yet). We’re working on a plan for where we can put trees and where we can have more water.

We have only ten days left here. I’m a bit in denial about that.

J and D spent Thursday welding a roof and side for our cattle crush so that Friday’s vet visit would go better than our disastrous previous attempt. (Spoiler: it did not.) While they did that, Z and I took on a parallel project.

We have two cows, “the miscreants”, who haven’t joined the herd yet. These two have already shown us that they don’t believe in paths, staying where they’re put, being herded, fencing, or really any of the conventions of modern cow society. They’re staying with a neighbour who has sturdier cow infrastructure than we do, and we’ve been working on a plan to bring them home. But on Friday we had the vet visit planned and, since we were going to have the rest of the gang all corralled in the yard anyway, it seemed like a good time to integrate them all.

We mostly use lightweight temporary electric fencing and it mostly works. I mean, Olive the big matriarch cow is clear that she stays because she chooses to stay, and Del Boy the plonker gets himself on the wrong side of the fence sometimes, then stays close by so he can be with his people. But the babies at least believe in the magic white tape. No way was that going to work for the two troublemakers, and we weren’t confident we could herd them across a couple of fields without losing them. So on Thursday afternoon Z worked on building a sturdy new paddock right beside the road, and I joined her when I finished work for the day.

The wooden fencing is harder to get into the ground than the plastic, and its more complicated too. You need to stop the metal wire from grounding on the wood, so we threaded pieces of hosepipe like beads onto the wire, and hammered staples around the beads to hold them in place. The field is on a steep hill covered in long wet grass, and the spool of wire was hard to haul around and kept getting tangled. Heavy work. There was continuous misty rain and clouds of midges came out in full force. As night fell, I remarked out loud that a reasonable universe would reward us by having an owl fly by, but it didn’t happen. (We got a bat, which is pretty good, but I really would like to see an owl some time.) It was close to midnight when we finally accepted that we just couldn’t see the staples we were hammering in, and then I came home, had a much needed shower, and passed out.

On Friday morning it was raining even more, but it was still a lot nicer to finish the work in the daylight. There was lots to see: butterflies, white tailed bees, a grasshopper, lots of funnel webs, tons of wildflowers, wrens in the trees. I think I heard a eurasian treecreeper a few times, which would be lovely to see here. The top of the field is doing some nice succession, little trees coming up around the gorse and bramble, so I guess the deer don’t get up there much. It’s a good field in the daytime.

By noon we’d finished up the wire, then added a ring of the lightweight electric fence tape around the whole thing too so that the miscreants could start believing in its magical powers. We built a corridor along the road to our house so it would be easy to get the herd up there as soon as the vet had finished. We planned out how we’d get them into the paddock, then go get the two troublemakers in a borrowed horse trailer. We set up a sort of “airlock” situation for letting the two in without letting everyone else out, and played out a few scenarios for what could go wrong: what if the animals bolt right here at the gate? What if they get into the ditch? We had a whole game plan. But we didn’t get that far.

The vet arrived right on time and we moved the herd into the new and improved cattle crush without much drama. Maybe we are getting better at this? Nope: the seven babies freaked out and ran up the wall again, crashed into the roof we’d added to the cattle crush, okay good it’s working… and then somehow squeezed through the little gap between the bars that’s several feet off the ground, and took off down the field again. Seriously, cows? Once again, we were left with Olive huffing and annoyed in the cattle crush. The vet checked her TB tested, at least, and she’s good. We caught the babies more easily this time, but after that we had no enthusiasm for trying to move them again. So the miscreants are still separated and our elegant new paddock is still empty.

We weren’t feeling great about our decision to get cows, and I have to admit that the word “steaks” came up a few times as we drove up to our neighbour to tell him we weren’t ready to take the troublemakers home after all. He was understanding, even though he’d gone to the effort of getting our two girls into a little enclosure so they’d be ready for us. It was my first time meeting them and, like the other belties, they’re lovely little things.

Our neighbour’s been working with cows for longer than I’ve been alive, and I learned a lot just by watching how he interacted with them. He said he thinks someone might have treated them badly in the past: when he went up to them first they were shivering and scared. But he stood there petting them and talking to them until they calmed down. They still aren’t going to be eager to be around humans for a while, but he reckoned that if we are persistently around them, if we’re gentle and kind and talk to them a lot, they’ll start feeling safer.

The vet gave similar advice about the yearlings. He said talk to them every day, bucket feed them, get them used to associating us with calm good things. So today I brought them all out the protein kibble they like and, instead of putting it in buckets and getting out of their way, I stood there a couple of feet away, just talking to them, telling them that they’re good babies and everything is okay and we’re going to treat them well. I’m still honestly a bit scared of Olive, but I stood there and told her I appreciated how she takes care of the herd, and I gave her some extra food for her efforts. She didn’t care about my opinions, but she liked the food. I’ll do that again tomorrow.

Before he left on Friday, the vet told us that galloways are tricky. They’re bred to be wild and take care of themselves on the mountains, so they’re small and agile and very smart. You can teach them to be herdable animals who want to work with you, but it’s harder than a more stupid, placid breed would be. So a lot of what we learned about keeping cows is just not going to apply here, and it will take more robust cow infrastructure if we want to make this work. The vet suggested (very politely) that we should consider more of an entry level cow.

The next few days are jam packed with other projects: the stove guy is coming to replace our stove and fireplace, the national parks and wildlife service are coming out to talk about wetlands and trees and farm plans, and we’ve got a guy with a digger doing a massive earthworks and drainage project around the house that includes coordinating with the ESB to move an electricity pole. (Also I have a full time job.) So we’re going to be flat out for a few days, but then we’ll sit down and work on a plan and a budget and see if we can make it work with the herd, or if it’s just more time and money than we can realistically invest right now. In the meantime, I’ll feed the herd and talk to them every day. I hope we can figure it out.

We’re a mile down a narrow dirt road here, so yesterday started with wacky chaos when three unrelated vehicles arrived at exactly the same time just as I’d started buttering my toast. We'd expected the van, which was coming to collect two big mattresses for recycling. But there was also a massive lorry dropping off a skip (a dumpster, for Americans) a day earlier than we expected, and also, randomly, an agricultural consultant cold calling to see if we wanted help applying for government conservation schemes. Our lane doesn’t have enough space for even two small cars to pass each other and there was a bit of a puzzle as we figured out how to get everyone turned around and headed back in the right direction, but at the end we had an 8 cubic yard open skip, two fewer queen size mattresses, and the phone number of the consultant. And I went back to eat cold toast and that was the straightforward part of the day.

Yesterday was also the scheduled date for TB testing the cows. What happens with a TB test is that your animals volunteer to walk into a cattle crush, an enclosure that they don’t like but that holds them safely still, and then the vet examines them, and then they calmly trot back into their paddock. Well that’s optimistic so we prepared by feeding them well and then paddocking them right beside the entrance to the cattle crush and giving them an hour to adjust and feel comfortable with the situation so everything would be low drama. Ahaha. What actually happened is that all the yearlings absolutely freaked out, scrambled up and over the wall at the side of the cattle crush and ran like hell. Belties are little but they can clear a surprising distance when agitated.

After several cups of tea Z and I went out to bring them home, an undertaking that went from optimistic (“they’re in the field next to the paddock so let’s just walk up and nudge them in the right direction”) to cautious (“well, if we do a big circle and don’t startle them we can get them back into the right field”) to resigned (“maybe we put up a fence in this field and they just live here now?”) right back to optimistic (“what if we brought out the matriarch cow to lead them home”), then took a side trip through “well the matriarch cow is now stuck in the bog and refusing to walk backwards” and so on. Add in alarmed ducks flying out of the stream when the cows thundered past, the cows getting most of the way home and then NOPEing off in the other direction, a few comic pratfalls, and well, just add the Yakity Sax music and you’ve got comedy gold. Honestly, that’s when the various vehicles should have arrived: just imagine two guys walking by with mattresses at the same time! But it still made for a good enough story that J had to stop the car today because he was laughing too hard to drive.

I mean, it’d be funnier if we didn’t have to pay another 400 euros for the vet to come out again, but still, I appreciate it as a day I’ll remember. The vet’s coming back on Friday so J went out today to buy welding equipment and tomorrow he’s going to extend the cattle crush to have a roof and metal bars on the side that’s currently a stone wall.

I took no pictures yesterday so I’ll leave you with a picture of the last time we had an escapee. The one who’s on the wrong side of the fence is Del Boy and he is, in Z’s words, a complete plonker.

It’s been very wet and windy, so this afternoon I volunteered to go up the hill and make sure the hay is still rainproofed. There are a huge pile of bales up there covered with plastic held down with old car tyres (as is traditional!), and if the plastic gets loose at the edges and the hay is exposed to rain, it will rot. Also, wet baled hay can spontaneously combust, which is one of those facts that seems like a myth but turns out to be a well studied truth.

There was so much to see on the hill today. I caught the reed bunting at last, a pair of them in fact, calling to each other down by the stream. And I got the willow warbler too: a very quick glimpse before it saw me and shuffled out of sight. I’ve been hearing these two birds since I got here, so it was cool to finally see them and add them to my ebird life list.

Raptor Point had no raptors, but there were tons of dandelions and lots of new berries on the hawthorns. Dandelions aren’t exactly rare, but I I haven’t seen many yet this year and love them because there are always bees and hoverflies and other welcome insects on them. The bank opposite Raptor Point had bilberries: not ripe yet, but I’ll be watching. I saw stitchwort, self heal, purple clover. A couple of white tailed bumblebees were bumbling around. There are a gazillion different kinds of grass and leaves. We have good plant diversity on the hill and want to keep it that way.

I walked up to the sycamores where we planted a ton of trees last year, and oof, it was not good. Some are chewed, some are trampled. A lot of them are just… gone. Not chewed on, but uprooted, just a little dent in the ground where the tree was. Only the ones we planted inside gorse bushes are doing fine. I was feeling pretty grim by the time I got to the top of the hill, to the ring of sycamores we call the Shepherd’s Hut. The trees we planted there are pretty trashed too, eaten away with the tree protectors chewed off and dumped nearby. Some of them might survive, but most don’t look happy.

The exception was that there’s one kind of tree that’s they’ve mostly left alone. Birch, I think. Weirdly, the deer took the tree protectors off those and then didn’t eat the tree. This makes me think that (a) we should plant more birch and (b) it looks like we’ve accidentally trained the deer to tear open any black plastic tubes they find to see if something delicious is inside. Welp.

I’m trying to be philosophical about the lost trees: we always said this was going to be a learning exercise and we definitely learned some things. But ugghh.

When I got to the hay, the plastic had indeed come up in places, but not too badly. I stuck my head under the plastic to make sure it wasn’t wet, and it was sort of earthy and biological, but still seemed in good shape. Hay smells amazing. I pinned the plastic back down, readjusting the tyres so they’ll hold better, I hope. We’ll check again in a week or so.

The gorse thicket beside the hay was full of meadow pipits. I don’t know what’s going on with the pipit explosion this year, but it’s good news: the pipit’s a primary food source for the hen harrier, our local endangered raptor.

There were some mushrooms in the hay field, which is new. I took pictures to show Z, who is a super experienced forager and goes on expeditions to where there are good mushrooms.

Walking back, I stopped to watch a little green grasshopper. It was very aware of me watching it: as I moved around to try to get a better look at it, it sidled around its blade of grass, always staying on the other side of the grass from me. So I didn’t get a good picture, but I decided to leave and stop stressing it out. I hope it thinks it outwitted me.

This evening, Z came over and she and I went out to move the cows. We noticed more mushrooms in a bunch of places, including under the beech trees right beside the house. Probably they’re not actually new, just more visible because the cows have been shortening the grass. We didn’t see then when we cut the grass with the strimmer last year though.

Z thinks that one of the mushrooms is prince agaricus, an edible kind. She took one home to do forager science on it and confirm whether it’s actually good to eat. Fingers crossed!

Night rolls in slowly this time of year. It’s 10:49 now and it’s really only just crossed the line between “dusk-ish” and “actually dark”. Around 9pm I felt done with work for the day (I’m working approximately New York hours while I’m here) and headed out to see whether the deer had pulled the protectors off the trees again. But then on a whim I changed course and cut across the pond field instead to see if the reed bunting was still in the big willow. It still was, or at least that screechy-creaking call was still there, but there was still no sign of the bird.

Out in the quiet, I could hear the water flowing under the big willow. Willow grows where there are little streams or drainage channels and I knew it would be very wet down there, but it’s the first time I’ve heard the water moving under it. The wind was picking up and thrashing the willow branches and the long grass around, and it felt very wild out there even though it’s not that far from the house. I saw a pair of wood pigeons heading home from a day of pigeoning, a few little white triangular moths, one bigger brown one. There was a nice-looking funnel web, occupied.

The Merlin app heard a willow warbler, which seemed plausible, and a common grasshopper warbler, which was less so: it’s a (not actually common) bird I hadn’t heard of before. I heard the loud grasshopper sound the app was pointing to, but it seemed more likely that it would be a grasshopper or cricket. Still, I wanted to be proved wrong, so I followed the sound through increasingly swampy and unstable ground in the increasingly dark dusk, until it started feeling like I was making stupid life choices and I gave up.

The grasshopper warbler apparently “favors damp grassy thickets, heaths, and other rank shrubby habitats, often near water. Very skulking, and rarely seen unless singing. Sings from perch in grass or low bush, mainly late in the day (sometimes at night): a prolonged, insectlike, reeling trill.” That’s basically the situation we were in, so it could be one, but I’m not sure enough to log it on my eBird life list. eBird also describes the bird as an “extremely skulky warbler”, by the way, which I think is delightful. I’ll go look for the extremely skulky warbler again a bit earlier on another evening.

A pretty quiet day. I spent the morning catching up on online chores, and then the afternoon gutting the spare bedroom so I can turn it into an office. There are some cracks in the walls, so I had one of those yak-shaving adventures where you need to work down a stack of tasks before you get to the one you want: I wanted to check for water damage in the attic, so I brought in the ladder, but it’s too short for me to get to the attic from it (arguably I’m the one who’s too short; it works for everyone else who uses it), so I had to go dig around in the shed and uncover and assemble the bigger ladder, then eventually get up into the attic with a torch and move some boards around so that I could get to right above the spare bedroom and convince myself that there isn’t a water problem.

I heard bats in the attic all last summer, so it wasn’t a surprise that the place is covered in bat poop. No bats though. I hope we didn’t disturb them. I bought a bat box from birdwatchireland.ie and I was hoping to offer them an alternate roosting place before they got sick of us and moved out, but I haven’t found somewhere to hang it yet. Good luck out there, bats. I hope you found a good place.

My only real excursion outside was to open up the next segment of the bursar’s path for the moos. They don’t know me yet, and I was sort of charmed that the babies’ first instinct was to run and hide behind Olive.

They did successfully cut the grass on the path, but even just overnight, they’ve mudded up the ground a lot. I think this is just part of the process of mob grazing: they spend intensive time in one area at a time and then we let it rest for the rest of the year. We won’t really know until next year what it does to the land though.

I thought I was good enough with electric fences to reposition one of the “gates” without turning off the fence and BAM I was wrong. Ow. God. 5000 volts up one arm and down the other. My heart pounded for 30 minutes afterwards. I will turn off the fence in future.

The yard is still full of swallows. It’s amazing. I heard a chiffchaff and a song that Merlin said was a bullfinch, though I’ve never seen one around here. Merlin also keeps hearing a willow warbler, which I also haven’t seen. That said, they’re generic little brown birds and… we have quite a few of those in Ireland. I got a copy of The Birds of Ireland, a Field Guide, a fantastic book which includes pictures of birds from every angle… but a lot of the ways to distinguish between two birds are like “this one is bulkier” or “this one has a slightly longer beak”. Which, cool if they politely line up beside each other and wait while you scrutinize them.

I’m coming around to J’s approach: just call everything a duck until proven otherwise.

Ms 10 and I went for a walk this morning to see how things are going on the other side of the stream. Usually we would take the orchid path down to the ford, but Z’s cows were in that field and we didn’t want to bother them. (The cows are little belty Galloways, very cute gormless yearlings apart from Olive, the fierce matriarch who I’m still a bit wary of. She’s also cute but, uh, assertive.)

So we skirted around the field instead and waded through the long grass (shoulder high for Ms 10!) and went past the hazel patch and skidded down the bank to wade across the stream. Ms 10 splashed around and I inspected every orchid to see if I could find the white orchid that M is looking for. Some day, but not today.

I showed Ms 10 the path I call “the wren path” because there was a really good wren on it once. We climbed up on the bank and stood at my favourite place for looking out over the land and sky, which she declared should be called Raptor Point. I like it!

We walked past where we planted a bunch of wild cherries last year as future replacements for the ash trees that are dying from ash dieback. Most of the cherries were too overgrown right now to see, but I think they’re probably fine. At the end of the field we got to the Thinking Willow, the tree that kindly grew horizontally and arranged itself as a comfortable seat. Last February we planted a quarter acre of baby trees beside the thinking willow, our first real copse, and I wanted to see how they were doing. Not great. The deer had chewed off the tree protectors (twisty plastic things that curl around the tree trunk), and a lot of the trees were heavily predated on. Ugh, poor trees. We knew that this corner was on a deer path, but it was a really nice sheltered corner and we decided to take the risk. I guess the deer were like “thanks for setting up a restaurant on our commute!”

I wound the tree protectors back on, though it felt like kind of a futile gesture. We need a fence around there /o\

On the walk back from the thinking willow, we saw ragwort, foxgloves, yellow flag iris, a cinnabar moth, and a bunch of stripey cinnabar caterpillars. A goldcrest was hopping around the hawthorns by the stream. There were many, many swallows too (none of which I managed to photograph). Lots of bees, and a lifetime supply of butterflies. Chewed trees aside, it all feels very buzzy and healthy out there.

Z came over when we got back and we went out in the rain to move the cows. One of their reasons for living here is that we think they’ll make a good lawnmower, so we wanted to test that theory on the bursar’s path, which is very overgrown. We set up new electric fence along the open side of the path, and filled in the gaps in the hedge side with a “dead hedge”, which means you just block holes with sticks and branches and whatever you find. High tech solution! (It works great.) Then we made a little corridor from the current paddock to the bursar’s path and opened the gate. After some encouragement, the cows politely relocated themselves, eating down the grass while they moved. They’re all in the new area now, and we’ll see tomorrow how well the lawn-mowing goes. To be honest, preparing the path for them probably took as long as using the strimmer would have done, but the cows use a lot less oil!

While we were out on the path, I checked up on my secret favourite baby oak tree, the one I planted in a hollow down between a couple of hawthorns. The tree has still grown a really surprising amount, more than the other oak trees. My theory is that there was a little forest floor ecosystem already down there, and it’s got an unusually high amount of fungus in the ground. No idea if that’s plausible, but it just looks forest-ier in that hollow, and when I climbed down there a few months ago it just felt like a place a tree would do well. Z suggested that we should put compost on a subset of the other trees For Science, so we might do that and see how much difference it makes over the years.

This morning we walked over to the far edge of the land, where J wanted to talk us through a silvapasture experiment he was thinking about. The ground changes frequently over there: there’s lush meadow, then thistles and buttercups, then springy heather and the beginnings of a bog, then long grass and rushes that are a pain to trudge through. J and Z brought a soil testing hypodermic and took a lot of samples, talking about the wetness of the land, the ratio of clay to sand, the mineral content, how deep the bog goes.

While they learned things, I photographed the skylarks and meadow pipits that live in the valley. It’s a wide expanse of grassland and at first it looks like there aren’t any birds there, but every few minutes there’s a loud song, and one rises up up up very high, singing its little tiny heart out, hovers up there for a few seconds, then dives back into the grass. It’s an absolute delight. I can’t tell the difference between skylarks and meadow pipits, though I think the ones that sing loudly like that are larks. (Merlin isn’t great with photo recognition for irish birds. It always suggests a bunch of things, half of which only live in the US. The sound recognition is better though.)

The land is criss-crossed with berms, little raised walls made by digging a drainage channel and dumping the soil. I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to them before, but I see now that they make a nice “edge” habitat: they grow ferns and bilberries and galium. Mining bees nest in them. We’re looking at creating a few others in places that could use more “patchworking” of the land. They’re a nice alternative to waiting 10 years for a hedge, or planting tall trees that would welcome hooded crows near a ground nesting site.

We’re scoping out places for our next ponds. With climate change barrelling towards us, we’re prioritising getting more standing and moving water around the place: we think the place will be more resilient if it has a lot of water options. One site we looked at today used to be a pond, but was filled in years ago. It’s still sludgy and wet though, tending towards becoming quaking bog in a way that’s a little scary to walk on. Z told a story about a digger in a bog that was stuck for years and kind of became a tourist attraction. We would like to avoid that, so we might make peace with that area just staying kind of swampy. There are a few other good pond sites available, tbd.

We met a pair of deer, who stood and watched us for a while before bounding off.

There are some badger holes along the lane, which F told us yesterday were still in regular use: the entrance was bare of plants. Apparently badgers are very clean and pull their bedding out to clean it in the sunlight, though, and they hadn’t done that, so the badgers weren’t at home. At the entrance to the field I saw a bunch of (probably) badger snuffle holes, places where they dig up the grass to find earthworms or bugs. Lots of ragwort on the lane too. It’s so cheerful.

After lunch I finally went to collect that piece of torn off wasps’ nest I saw a few days ago. Success! The reed warbler was still singing deep inside the willows in pipitville, and I still didn’t see it. On the way back, I stood watching a pair of barn swallows as they zipped back and forth over the pond. Something about the scene sparked a memory: we didn’t see any swallows on this side of the hill last year, and we’d wondered if we weren’t offering them good places to nest. I remembered that over the winter Z had cut a gap through the bushes on the side of the woodshed to see if they’d start going in the tiny window there. I just looked and yup, there’s a nest in there. I feel great about that.

This morning I went to check out the trees we planted along the lane we call The Bursar’s Path. Everything’s looking pretty healthy, and many are distinctly taller. There are some that have half-size tree protectors–we cut the tube in half because the plant was so tiny–that now could easily use a full size one. Some things have been chewed on by deer, but generally everything’s growing well.

We left the path and waded through long grass up to where the ground starts turning into bog. We looked for the wild cranberries Z saw a while back, but couldn’t find them. Next time we find them I really need to mark it on a map or stick in a flag or something.

There’s a ton of tiny baby willow coming up in that area, really masses of it. That’s a normal thing to happen (ecological succession!), but the willow will slowly change the biome and that means there won’t be an area for cranberries any more. I love willow but it’s kind of our default here. We might do an intervention in that area, tbd.

Speaking of interventions we need to do: we walked out on the bog and briefly saw a deer, but it saw us too and it was gone in a flash. The deer are fun to see but they overgraze everything, and so the hill isn’t continuing the ecological succession into the native forest that we would expect to find. I want to put deer fence around a few acres and come back in ten years and see what happened. Deer fence needs to be tall so it’s expensive and time-consuming to put in that much of it, but I think it’ll be worth it (whenever we get around to doing it.)

I took blurry pictures of a few meadow pipits, a maybe-a-skylark, a couple of wood pigeons and something that I’d swear was a kestrel, except that I haven’t seen them land on the ground before. They’re always up in trees being judgey. There were a few funnel webs, but no spiders. J saw a baby frog, but I missed it.

On the ground: lots of sphagnum, lichen, and a good amount of bog asphodel. Lots of butterflies and moths. Too many horseflies on the path, but it was nice and windy on the bog, which kept them away.

For the rest of today: I’m going to try to find the torn off bit of yesterday’s wasp’s nest, and I’m going to build an IKEA chest of drawers so we have somewhere to put all of the clothes that are sitting around in piles.

I’m back in Ireland for a month. This afternoon I had a quick walk around to see what’s what and how things have changed.

The pond looks healthy: a good amount of life including water spiders, boatmen and absolutely massive dragonflies that J and I took it in turns to fail to photograph. The willows we shoved in around the pond look good. Horsetails and other plants have started growing up out of the pond, and coming in from the sides too, making it look less regular and more like a natural pond. The island in the middle has tall grass. The island’s supposed to be a safe fox-free place for birds to rest and nest. I hope that’s working for them.

Around the pond there’s a good amount of water aven and forget-me-not, a little bit of meadowsweet and ragged robin, and lots of orchids. Well, about 15 orchids, but that’s a lot of orchids.I saw two or three plants with cuckoo spit (froghopper larva) on. A few dewy spiderwebs. Tons of ringlet butterflies everywhere, and some little white triangular moths. No frogs, but they’ll show up. It’s a froggy place.

I heard a screechy bird that Merlin said was a reed bunting, so followed the sound down to pipitville, the place at the bottom of the bog where I first saw tons of meadow pipits. (I now know there are places on the land with many more pipits and also some skylarks, but when I found pipitville, it had the most I’d seen until then. Taxonomies are like that.) The reed bunting kept calling, but it was too deep inside the willows to see. It’s a life list first for another day. But there was a good amount of bog cotton on the ground, which I always enjoy, and a buzzard sailed by very high up, so it felt worth the trek.

On the way back, I found a papery wasps nest in the long grass, with a few wasps sitting on top of it and a chunk of torn off nest a couple of feet away. The wasps didn’t seem bothered by me, but I only took a few photos before quickly moving on. M said later that probably a badger had found it and gone in looking for grubs. If the queen survived, the wasps might try to rebuild. Good luck, queen! I might try to go find the torn piece later. It’d be a cool thing to have in a jar. (This is how mad scientists, get started, pretty sure.)

Back in the garden, there’s lots of raspberries and strawberries to be picked. Tutsan (my favourite!) growing wild in the yard and a new mullein coming up: I saw its shoot last year and built a little wall around it so we wouldn’t accidentally step on it, so it’s lovely to see it. A wren trilling in the bushes leading to the bursar’s path. Damn, it’s good to be back.

Since I had an extra weekend here, we scheduled another couple of plantings. Yesterday we put in a quarter acre copse beside the thinking willow: four oaks and a community of 50 other trees to keep them company. It's all on lovely sunny gentle hillside. I hope they like it.

We also added a bunch of wild cherries into a hedgerow that has a lot of sick ash. I don't think any of the ash will make it, which is rough, but the cherries will be the next generation, and the birds will love them.

Today we planted all the rest of our alders into a riparian woodland. It creates a sparse wildlife corridor from some other patches of trees, which feels like it's probably useful for some animal or other. But even if not, alders are beautiful.

We were careful about where to plant: not on bog or heath, not anywhere that would provide predator cover near the big open area where the pipits and skylarks nest. But I think we found good places, and I look forward to alder catkins in five years.

We've been saying occasionally that we'd love to put in some art installations along walking paths. A real "yes we'll get around to that some time" project, but M's dog got us started today by pulling a bunch of stones out of the stream and leaving them beside the alders. Don't know why he does that, but I think it's our first art installation.

Other things from today: little red hazel flowers; weird squidgy lichen; primroses; a holly I hadn't noticed before (I love hollies); a kestrel soaring; the first daisies I've seen this year; red, yellow and green varieties of willow; a chunk of an eggshell; a ditch full of frogspawn.

C drove me to the train station and we stood watching a murmuration of starlings doing that thing they do (look up a video if you haven't seen it: it's spectacular), and a bunch of rooks hanging out being social.

And now I'm oudda here! Morphing back into city Tanya. Damn, I'll miss this place. (I just noticed that allegedly-city-Tanya has twigs in her hair )

Lovely walk up the hills to check on the new trees. They seem happy: not chewed on, upright despite strong winds. I was too lazy (I mean, cough, cough, still recovering from covid) to walk down to the alders, but I spied on them with binoculars and they seem pretty happy.

Some other stuff along the way:

Grey wagtail on the stream. Grey wagtails are very yellow but less yellow than yellow wagtails. Naming is hard. The wagtail part is accurate at least.

A big cloud of dragonfly shaped bugs on the stream too. I hoped they might be baby dragonflies, because we saw a few big ones last year and they were amazing, but M says they're probably damselflies. Well that's good too.

I found this sideways willow a while back and thought it might be a nice place to sit and have a bit of a think. I tried it out today and can confirm yes successful thinking occurred.

Mostly I thought about how we're protecting individual trees but if we want a little forest ecosystem we really need to fence out the deer or they'll eat everything new that comes up. But we have a few years to start thinking about that. Getting some trees in place is a good start.

I enjoyed how cool it is how trees of the same species make a collaborative crown instead of tangling together. I love that.

Finally, I stopped and looked at this rowan growing inside a hawthorn. It's on a path I walk a lot[1], but I'd never noticed it until Léan pointed it out last weekend.

Rowans are tasty but adult hawthorns are spiky and the deer mostly leave them alone. Clever baby rowan.

[1] the place I think of as "the wren path" even though I only ever saw one wren there–but it was a really good wren!

The night sky is *incredibly* beautiful right now Jupiter, Venus and a glowy almost-new moon, and the night is icy and clear.

Ahaha ok let's start with the lede. I said out loud, like a fool, "I wish I could stay another week." And then an hour later... well, my cold is actually covid.

The longer version: I got up at 7:30 for a last walk around the land. Masses of frogspawn in the pond. Hazel catkins. Wrens blasting song at a volume that something the size of a satsuma really shouldn't be able to manage.

Came back to the house. Made coffee. Locked up the house. M came with the car and I put on a mask because I've been coughing a lot. Negative tests all week but giving someone a cold is bad form in 2023.

As I got into the car I said, "last time I left here the hen harrier came to say goodbye. It's too early in the year for it to be up in the hills, but maybe it'll send a delegate." Then a freaking massive raven flew in and, *I swear to god*, flipped upside down, did a fancy aerial display, and left again.

Look, I'm a science nerd and not remotely superstitious but this place has something special going on.

I hocked my lungs up inside my mask on the 10m drive to M's house and she went in to get me cough sweets and one more covid test JUST IN CASE.

And then a second covid test to confirm the first one.

And then we came back here and I unlocked the house and now I'll unpack again I guess!

Flight pushed back to next Monday. Credit to Delta: when I said it was covid they didn't charge change fees on my non-changeable non-refundable extremely basic economy ticket.

Today we planted 53 trees on the hill. A tree-expert friend advised us to plant oaks among other trees, not in a line. He said they like to be in a group. Although I know he meant "they need a wind break", I have this whole headcanon now about how oaks like being with friends, talking through their roots, building a community. So we surrounded them with rowan, birch, and blackthorn, and started the copses near existing gorse, hawthorns and sycamores. We hope you find community here, oaks!

We dug up the little ash tree that was growing under the house. I hoped we could replant it somewhere but it already had ash dieback disease :-(

I'm sitting outside here looking up the hill at the line of sycamores I always see from here. We planted rowans between them, but the rowans aren't visible from here yet. But maybe some day I'll sit here and see them too, and the hawthorns and birch, and they'll be just as much part of the standard landscape as the sycamores are right now. I shouldn't count my trees before they fully take root, but it feels amazing to think about having them in the landscape.

It's so good how trees connect you to time. We're planting two year old oak whips: that means that two years ago, someone collected acorns and started growing them. The rowans might not start making their lovely orange berries for another 15 years. The birch could flower after 5 years, but it might be 10. It'll be at least 40 years until the oaks make acorns and 80 until the trees are mature. Oaks are such a gift to the future.

We had a good crew yesterday for planting including three absolute powerhouses of children. I love how much energy and enthusiasm they brought to planting, playing in the stream, searching for frogs, etc. Kids are so great.

We planted more birch and rowan and willow but also the first of our oaks and a couple of tiny holly plants.

It drizzled all day, but the massive rainbow across the top of the hill was a pretty good consolation.

Today's the last tree day. My cold has gotten to the real spirit-crushing stage, and I don't have the energy to make coffee or cook eggs so I'm trying to bootstrap being a functional human by eating oranges and reading the entire internet. Good luck, me.