Marquess Mews

Morocco Magic

2012-01-23T03:40:00.000-08:00

Tahir Shah has started a new blog:

Yesterday he posted a superbly written article he wrote about Marrakech for 'Lonely Planet.'

Please, please have a look at this blog.

Superflight

2012-01-16T09:04:00.000-08:00

In far South Africa a barn swallow dreams of long light days at the top of Glenshane Pass in Ireland, of abundant insects and a nest full of healthy fledglings under the eaves of the Ponderosa Bar. The time of the gathering of swallows for the long migration north is approaching. Feeding on the wing, sometimes skimming the surface, sometimes soaring, they will accompany storks along the Great Rift Valley; but, while the long-legged ones cross the Eastern Mediterranean into Turkey, swallows fly over the Sahara quenching their thirst at oases along the way. I have seen them swooping to drink from a swimming pool in Casablanca.

These days we are rarely tempted to watch television, but the series, "Earthflight", being broadcast by the BBC is a feast for the eyes leaving many memorable images. Migrating grey cranes arrive in the Camargue only to have their peace shattered by a troupe of wild white horses. After feeding, rest and recuperation the birds continue to their breeding grounds where a male begins his strange athletic courtship dance. A female joins him in a pas-de-deux and soon all the colony's males are leaping into the air.

In the skies over Rome a huge flock of starlings appears as a superorganism, darkly shape shifting like a jinn. A maurauding hawk overhead is confused by the ceaseless movement and leaves empty taloned . Starlings, we are told, migrate to Siberia.

In Finland an osprey spreads its magnificent wings before plucking a fish from water, and a hungry bear cub scales the trunk of the tree near whose top the bird perches eating its catch. Seeing the osprey reminded me of a radio programme last year where a female osprey called Logie was tracked from West Africa to her nesting site in Scotland. For all its breathtaking photography, television rarely produces the sense of involvement in a creature's fate that a radio programme or even a website can generate.

Five Migrating Cuckoos

2011-12-30T04:00:00.000-08:00

No one knows for sure yet, but it looks as if the five male cuckoos tagged in South-East England by the British Trust for Ornithology, are now in their winter quarters. Just after the December solstice all five were transmitting from West Central Africa in, or around, the Congo Basin.

Each cuckoo's journey was unique. Their departure dates were weeks apart as were arrival dates. Two birds chose westerly flight paths, through Spain and along the coast of North-West Africa, before continuing in a south-easterly direction on the final legs. The other three chose more direct routes, through Italy, across the Mediterranean into North Africa, then across the Sahara. Each journey was punctuated by stopovers of several weeks, at the end of flights which could well have been gruelling, covering up to 2200 Km over a two day period.

It is amazing that all five birds should reach their destination without mishap, and that five birds with breeding grounds around the same area should find themselves close together after having been separated by up to 3600 Km. I used to think that bird behaviour was governed entirely by instinct and that instinct was a property of the species followed blindly by each individual. Free will was not something I associated with birds.

It is hard to imagine such a journey being made without knowledge, at least knowledge, conscious or unconscious, of the destination. I suspect each bird also has knowledge of the hazardous regions to be crossed. It avoids very long flights over the sea, and rests and refuels before attempting a desert crossing. This knowledge cannot have been acquired through learning because the cuckoo's surrogate parents know nothing of migration to another continent. It is possible that this knowledge is resident in the bird brain having been put there through reactions initiated by cuckoo DNA. It is also possible that that the knowledge is resident elsewhere, and cuckoo DNA initiates reactions that result in the cuckoo being able to access it at the appropriate time.

Fascinating!

Saw Therapy

2011-12-22T07:59:00.000-08:00

As Christmas approaches I protect myself from paralysis by cliche by - weather permitting - daily saw therapy. The smaller branches that were attached to the huge limb, torn off one of our beech trees in last May's storm, are gradually being reduced to firewood. Beech makes an excellent fuel. The fine twigs are ideal for kindling and the logs, laid on a single layer of coal, blaze brightly before being reduced to a soft, fine ash that fertilizes.

Saw therapy only works if you use a manual implement. Men, the main sawers in this area, prefer power saws. Their whining and groaning (the saws', not the men's) is to my mind devils' music that overpowers and replaces the comforting rhythm of old-fashioned sawing.

The therapeutic effects are not confined to rhythm. I have reprieved pieces of wood from being burned because of the subtle beauty of their bark. Among them were long digits whose skin gleamed with the pink of newly minted copper or the orange tint of copper alloy. They were adorned at intervals with finely-ridged metallic bands and marked with patches of silver grey containing dark microflecks and microstreaks. they had dark lenticel pores in the centre of tiny goosepimples, or small raised rhombuses, or between two tiny lips.

No two pieces of wood are the same. For me, humble beech wood rescues me from pre-Christmas boredom and is a symbol of the unlimited possibilities in Creation.

Santa

2011-11-14T07:45:00.000-08:00

Junk mail pushed through the letterbox this morning announced that, for £5 it would be possible to visit Santa's Grotto. Mercenary people would appoint someone wearing a red costume with a large buckle, black boots and a white beard to dispense mass-produced toys to children of this area.

When I was a child Santa Claus was a magical figure. Part of the magic was that he travelled on his reindeer-drawn sleigh to bring presents to children on only one day of the year, Christmas Eve. The rest of the time he spent in his igloo in the North Pole making toys for all the children of the world. This Santa made toys for children because he loved them. He only came down the chimney when they were asleep; so they never saw him. They had to imagine what he looked like. Then someone produced Christmas cards with the vulgar image of the Santa with which we are all familiar and that was the beginning of the end of the magic.

The Student Prince

2011-09-27T06:03:00.001-07:00

I might have been ten, perhaps younger, when I was swept off my feet by The Student Prince. For many years afterwards I believed that, once I had shed my cygnet’s drab feathers and become a swan, I would be spirited away to a magical place called Heidelberg where a prince with the handsome dark looks of Edmund Purdom and the powerful, passionate yet tender voice of Mario Lanza would see me and instantly fall in love. It was a successful, if not the only, attempt by the Spirit of Romantic Love to get me to do its bidding.

As a teenager I was attracted more to classical music than to pop. Music of all sorts, I am now convinced, powerfully links the physical and the spirit worlds. Performing music, listening to music not only arouses transient emotions but can alter the course of a life because it is spirit which motivates and energises. In thrall to the Spirit of Romantic Love, you can become blind to the charms of mere mortals. Even worse, you can convince yourself that a mere mortal is The Student Prince and burden him with unrealistic expectations.

Last week I was speaking to a young relative and was struck by how his life seems to be following a similar trajectory to the one mine followed for a couple of decades. As well as sharing genes, classical music, its performance and audition, played a part in both our lives.

We belong to a culture where we listen to music because we enjoy it. We are aware of emotions it may arouse, but our society is still blind to other, perhaps far-reaching consequences, it may have. It can affect our breathing rhythm and heart physiology. Because heart signals radiate some distance from our bodies they can be replicated in those around us causing entrainment which is driven, for better or worse, by the most powerful force in the system.

I am certain that knowledge of the effects of music exists in the human race. Perhaps the knowledge will be shared with the rest of us when the time is appropriate. At least this is my hope.

In Other Orbits

2011-09-19T04:10:00.000-07:00

I am sitting on our three-seater sofa with one cat energetically grooming himself on my right and the other carrying out an identical process on the left. Soon white fur will gleam, charcoal and tan parts will look sleek with mats removed and claws will be carefully bitten trim. I have even seen Sherpa engaged outdoors in what appeared to me to be a teeth cleaning exercise using fine twigs broken off shrubs as a toothbrush. Cat dignity depends on effort being put into personal grooming and to urination and defecation rituals which ensure that waste is hygienically disposed of. What is strange about cats is how little effort is put into cleaning bedding and resting places. When these start to look grubby the cat simply moves on finding somewhere more salubrious to lie while its human friend does the laundry. Cats could learn to flick debris and brush hairs off their sheets couldn’t they? And remove wrinkles to make their bed more comfortable if they really tried. They watch humans doing these things just as they watch everything we do, but no matter how much time they have shared with us, it doesn’t seem to occur to them to imitate us.

Sitting on the sofa, I imagine cat genes launching cats at appropriate times into permitted orbits of behaviour. Those first orbits allow feeding and movement, but soon kittens come under the influence of the Hunting Planet and the varied play, which so fascinates us, begins. The Star of Knowledge has many planets which reflect its light and, throughout their lives, cats slip effortlessly between them. The Warrior governs defence of territory. The Protector teaches them to avoid danger, food poisoning and parasites and seek therapy through eating grass. The Lust and Love Planet has as its domain friendship, courtship, mating and care of the young.

There are however things which the Star of Knowledge cannot teach a cat.

Sandwiches

2011-09-12T08:03:00.000-07:00

What for me was an insight woke me in the middle of the night. Before I went to sleep I had read a short piece from Tahir Shah’s new book Travels With Myself. It was called The Magic of the Ordinary, where, in writing with the qualities of a recorded daydream, a scruffy stranger tells Tahir that to understand the extraordinary you must first learn to appreciate ordinariness.

At three or four in the morning I found myself thinking about sandwiches, bought from a bakery at the end of over five, sometimes wet and windswept, hours exploring the city of Derry with my friend Karole. The bakery was near the bus station and round the corner from a pub called Sandinos, which doesn’t sell food but very generously told us where we might find some to eat with a creamy half Guinness and a cup of coffee.

Through the darkness of my bedroom I saw rays from the past, present and future converge on the soft, fresh bread that enveloped the fillings. Some originated from the time when our human ancestors began to cultivate grain, others from when they learned to use fire to cook. Closer to the sandwich were the people who extracted and refined metals to build ovens. The rays anastomosed and rebranched like ivy climbing a tree. Connected to the bread were mills and power plants, ports, salt mines and tarred roads, water reservoirs, money and people picking cotton. I could have followed a ray where yeast, seen with the aid of a microscope, appeared as individual ovoid cells, budding while gas oozed out; or been taken on a tour where the details of anaerobic respiration were explained. It didn’t seem outrageous to imagine that the number of connections surrouning the sandwich might approach infinity. What was certain was that there was much more to ordinariness than meets the eye.

I heartily recommend Travels With Myself to anyone reading this blog. It entertains, but is much more than entertainment. As is written on the back cover, ‘all the pieces in this book are designed to spark the imagination and to act as a catalyst for thought.

Travels With Myself is available now from Lulu.com and can be bought through Amazon in about six weeks’ time.

Nomad

2011-09-02T03:21:00.000-07:00

The night before last we watched on television an actor discovering the origin of his nomadic spirit in the grandfather who deserted his grandmother within days of his mother's birth. This maternal grandfather was a member of a well-known family of travelling showmen. I suspected that spirits ran in families. This programme lent support to the idea.

I haven't heard that spirits, like the hunting instinct or the one to protect territory, have been located in the human genome Perhaps there is a parallel form of inheritance which allows them to be passed down through generations, not only in humans but in other animals.

In our part of the world where land is considered the property of individuals and large mammals are constrained within human territories, any nomadic instinct our four-footed associates might have is well and truly crushed. It's different in parts of Africa through which wildebeest and elephants can freely migrate.

Instincts may, or may not, be passed on through the DNA, but it is interesting to use the gene metaphor and think of territorial and nomadic instincts as alleles. The territorial instinct is the dominant allele (at least in the developed world.) The recessive nomadic allele is most likely to survive when copies are inherited from both parents.

There is another possibility. Instincts, as fire spirits, when frustrated by conditions in the material world, can shape-shift into other forms. The travelling showman can become a wandering dervish.

Night Life

2011-08-31T05:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I wrote to a friend that the place where I live doesn't have a very exciting night life, especially during the week. I don't miss having the sort of night life I had in mind when I wrote that because, cuddled up beside John I can have a fantastic night life ... dreaming.

End of the Marching Season

2011-08-28T11:45:00.000-07:00

We are nearing the end of the Marching Season. Music can arouse, or more rarely calm, spirits. This is something to which we give very little thought in the so-called developed world. I suspect our use of music excites some spirits at the expense of others. Marching bands usually play what excites territorial spirits. Pop music concentrates on the spirits connected with romantic love or their more earthy counterparts. Not exactly a spirit balance, I suggest.

Portballantrae

2011-08-19T04:25:00.000-07:00

One evening, several years ago, Catriona and I went for a walk along the strand at Portballantrae. It was dusk when, on our way back, we approached the footbridge that crosses the River Bush where it flows into the sea. Catriona, who can hear high-frequency sounds to which I am oblivious, stopped suddenly. It wasn’t long before we both saw what she had heard — a huge colony of hundreds of bats. We stood, mesmirised, while they circled overhead before disappearing as mysteriously as they had come.

I accepted there was no chance of seeing bats when I went with John to Portballantrae a few days ago. The tide was out. There was only a trickle of water in the stream that flows through grey stones and then sand; so we continued across it to the end of the beach where we found a path through mature dunes. Soon we came to the narrow guage railway that connects Bushmills to the Giant’s Causeway, and we were almost at the terminus. There is a cycle path close to the track and weaving across it. We followed it back. Unkempt ground lay beyond the fence on our left. Closer to us were harebells, the occasional burdock plant covered with burrs and snails among marram grass; but diversity disappeared when we came to the golf course. We returned to the car park, bought sandwiches and coffee at the supermarket and sat beside a circular metal table.

It was only then that I noticed nearby a building with a slanted roof that was covered with plants. There were long strands of hay-coloured grass at one edge, but most of the roof was covered with a low reddish plant, possibly a species of sedum. I have heard of green roofs, but this is the first I have seen and, unlike John, I felt excited.

He thinks I have become obsessed by Jinn. That, however, does not stop me saying that, where you find a rare green roof, there must be a guardian jinn.

Two Magpies and a Demon

2011-08-10T03:23:00.000-07:00

Magpies, unlike cats, are not finicky eaters and consume with relish the food Banjo and Sherpa reject and which I am unable to spice up for human consumption (usually by me). From unseen vantage points our resident pair watch me as I carry it out and scatter it on the grass. I have hardly time to return to the kitchen before they descend gradually like black and white long-tailed aircraft, skim over the ground, land and hop the short distance towards the food. Until recently Banjo showed no interest in what remained uneaten on his saucer.

It was therefore with great surprise that I saw him one day recently walk over the short grass and moss to where I had scattered the food. With disbelief I watched his jaws moving for a short time before they closed. The magpies landed, first the male who strutted towards pieces of food farthest from the cat. Both came to pick up meat, fly off with it and return for more. As the food disappeared, Banjo moved to position himself crouching, his tail sweeping widely from side to side, close to a tasty morsel. One by one the pieces were lifted into the air until there was only left — the one closest to Banjo. When a magpie came to claim it, Banjo pounced and the bird retreated. I watched fascinated the male magpie’s repeatedly unsuccessful determination to capture the morsel, but didn’t see how the drama ended because the stalemate ended while I went upstairs to tell John.

The following evening we had a repeat performance when John joined me at the kitchen window. What we saw Banjo do is not in the repertoire of a typical cat. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m sure this behaviour is unique to our male cat. What is going on in his mind is open to speculation, but it looks to me as if Banjo, the animal who enjoys teasing me, intended to deceive the magpies. He forced himself to eat distasteful food knowing that they were watching him, and to give them the impression that he intended to eat it all.

Deception is something we associate with humans, but it has its origins in the animal world especially among primates. In his book Born Liars Ian Leslie tells how creativity in humans shares the capacity which allows us to deceive. Before we learn to use language we practise deception; but it is not until we are around four years of age that we realise the enormous potential for getting ourselves out of trouble and furthering our own interests that lies in lying speech. Telling a deliberate untruth requires the knowledge that others can think differently from ourselves. It also depends on memory and imagination. However the illusion that lying is the answer to our problems does not last long. Within a few years we discover that, if we tell too many lies, we lose credibility with those among whom we live. Maintaining this sort of fiction costs energy, induces anxiety and restricts our ability to be truly creative.

Our human development does not end when we see that telling the truth is generally preferable to lying, because the ability to deceive others makes us vulnerable to the innumerable deceptions in which the human race, often unwittingly engages.

There is an alternative explanation of the cause of lying. An ancient legend attributes it to Sut, consummate liar and father of lies. He is a fire spirit, son of Iblis who is better known to Westerners as the Satan who tempted Adam and Eve and was responsible for their banishment from the garden of Eden. Of couse this story is not to be taken literally.

I see a ladder with non-verbal deception as its base, divine creativity at the top and many rungs in between.

Maelstrom

2011-07-30T04:05:00.000-07:00

I saw no icebergs while I was in Norway in my early twenties. After a long train journey from Trondheim to Bodo, struggling to keep awake so as not to miss incomparable scenery — fjords, mountain peaks, farms where hay was strung between lines to dry and apples ripened in large orchards — I caught the coastal steamer, the Hurtigrute, to Torsken on the island of Senja. There I joined volunteers from Norway and other parts of Western Europe. For six weeks we camped in the local school. The girls slept in one classroom, the boys in another and we gathered around a long table in a third to eat. The local people supplied us with food — fresh cod from the fjord, whale steaks, sweet, golden goat’s cheese for which we gradually acquired a taste as we developed the skill to slice it razor-thin with an osthovel. Once our Norwegian volunteer cook made pancakes and assembled them with fruit and cream into a delicious gateau, and one afternoon, towards the end of our stay, we were invited into a local house for a feast of cakes and pastries. In return for this hospitality we went with picks and shovels to a stony field close to the wooden church. We repaired the stone wall surrounding it and levelled the ground, turning it into an embryonic park.

July and early August were exceptionally fine that year, but the mountain peak visible from the school was white. I argued that it was made from marble even as we climbed through fragrant shrub to reach snow. Torsken was 69°N, well beyond the Arctic circle which I crossed in the train. From the deck of the Hurtigrute, on the way home, I watched the sun at midnight, still above the horizon.

The people on that remote island had welcomed a youth camp, mainly because it was an opportunity to meet people from other cultures. I suspect we did not live up to their expectations. There was a language barrier, and, unwittingly, with youthful heedlessness, we formed a group that usually excluded them. No doubt we considered ourselves superior to fishermen and their families because we had received more education; and so an opportunity was lost.

Yesterday victims of Anders Brevik, who killed over seventy people in a bomb attack in Oslo and a nightmarish shooting spree on a nearby island, were buried. He claimed to be the defender of a Norwegian way of life, yet, according to the Independent, he despised the farmers among whom he recently lived, considering them unrefined. Tanned and using bodybuilding to make him appear like a God, he considered himself the saviour of Europe. What an Ego!

It seems that Anders Brevik is not the head of a Crusader army. There is no iceberg of which he is the visible tip; but, what he seems to have done is concentrate some of the thoughts about the power of individuals, that swirl like a maelstrom around our western world, while failing to balance them with thoughts centred on responsibility to others.

There are, course, other icebergs floating in our waters.

Free Spirits

2011-07-17T06:03:00.000-07:00

The cuckoo comes in April,

He sings his song in May,

In leafy June

he changes tune,

In July he flies away.

True?

This year I was walking in the garden when I heard a single, unmistabable ‘cuckoo.’

Collared doves, which sing, ‘Cuckoo coo,’ nest in the conifers, and wood pigeons with their, ‘cuckoo coo cuckoo,’ come for beech nuts; but ‘cuckoo’ is a rare sound these days. I was so surprised I forgot to note when I heard it. It was probably May.

The British Trust for Ornithology managed to trap five cuckoos in East Anglia, and release them with solar-powered tracking devices on their backs. They were amazed to find that the bird they called Clement left for France on 6th June. Two other birds left in the middle of June and one at the end of the month. The fifth bird, Lyster, is still making short forays around his English base in the middle of July. Far from there being an internal cuckoo clock that strikes sometime in July to say, ‘Go,’ the male cuckoos seem to please themselves.

I was brought up to believe that birds don’t have intelligence. They have instincts which they follow mindlessly.

As there is no fixed time for the departure of the cuckoo, there is no fixed route. Clement spent up to a month in wooded regions in France before flying quickly through Spain, across the Mediterranean and into Algeria. He is now over the Sahara on the Algerian-Mauritanian border.

The other three migratory birds flew in a general southeasterly direction. Martin, like Clement, flew to France before continuing to Northern Italy. Chris spent at least a week in the Netherlands, then travelled to Italy through the Moselle region of France. He was last seen in the Po Delta World Heritage Site.

Kasper is the bird who, so far, has shown most stamina. He flew from England to Antwerp, crossed the Alps in eastern Switzerland and was detected on the outskirts of Rome. Then he travelled 1,367 miles SSW to Algeria. He, like Clement, is now in the Sahara.

You have to admire the courage and adaptability of these irresponsible globetrotters. They seem to be truly free spirits until you realise how vulnerable they are. They seem unable to escape the fate that decrees they lay their eggs in the nests of a limited number of not impassive host species. Cuckoos don’t appear to have the option of exercising creativity building nests or inventing more complex songs; and they don’t experience the parental satisfactions of pair bonding, egg incubation and watching fledglings learn to fly.

Still, those of us who visit the BTO website will be keeping our fingers crossed that Clement, Kasper and the others will safely cross the Sahara. We are interested in finding out their final destinations, how they will spend our winter, when they will decide to start next year’s flight north and whether they will choose a different route. No doubt more surprises are in store.

The Red Lantern

2011-07-10T06:13:00.000-07:00

‘The Last Storytellers’ is a book that puts into print stories from the Moroccan tradition of oral storytelling, which goes back almost a thousand years and is now in danger of extinction. Accompanied by his guide, Ahmed, Richard Hamilton sought out in Marrakech five authentic storytellers, who are no longer young but have no-one waiting to don their djellabas. Typically, they are men who followed what they saw as their fate, in spite of the disapproval of orthodox Islam and opposition from families who regarded storytelling as little better than begging.

These storytellers may be aged, poor and frail, but their stories are rich in detail and full of vitality. The first story in the collection was told by Moulay Mohamed who, with a heart condition, is now too weak to tell stories in public. It tells of a poor, lowly sweet seller who leaves Marrakech, crosses the Atlas Mountains and travels through the desert in the hope of finding success. He stumbles across a great city in a lush valley, whose incredibly wealthy Pasha offers him hospitality. When it is time to leave, the sweet seller hesitantly offers his host the only thing he has in his possession, a lantern made of tin and red glass. Although the Pasha’s treasury is full of gold and jewels, he has never seen a red lantern before, is delighted with the gift and gives the sweet seller twelve loads of gold and jewels in return. Back in Marrakech, where he now lives in a magnificent mansion, the former sweet seller receives a visit from the wealthy brother who showed him no compassion during his unsuccessful years. This man learns the source of his brother’s fortune and sets out on a similar journey ... but I won’t give the ending away.

To me this story is a reminder that outward observances do not bring the desired results if there is something amiss in the heart. Imitation is a jinn we share with at least some of our primate relatives. It’s the jinn that makes us want what everybody else has and do what everybody else does; but our mirror neurons also allow us to exercise empathy and a purer spirit — compassion.

This Sunday morning, when ‘The News of the World’ carries its farewell montage of famous front pages, I was looking at a different photo montage, one constructed by Omran Sahar. It is made up of five photos, four from the drought stricken Horn of Africa. They show underfed children whose eyes plead for food. The fifth photo shows, against a golden background a prosperous-looking Arab man dressed in western clothes.

Ruins of my Past and Present

2011-07-01T09:12:00.000-07:00

There were few things our father enjoyed more than discovering relics from the past. At a time when progress was all that mattered, he brought us to see the humble reminders that our physical occupation of a place is limited by time.

What we were brought to see was within walking distance or a very short drive by car from home. There were a couple of abandoned mills which no longer ground corn, but had dams with plant-covered walls up which we loved to scramble. There were mill races and mill wheels which no longer turned. These were from the recent past.

Three churches in ruins stand within a couple of miles’ radius of the town. The nearest had a carving in stone of The Crucifixion thought to date from the tenth century. It was built on the site of an ancient monastery. Another stands atop a hill. The third, Killylagh Old Church, is not far from a small loch, on a narrow road leading to the foot of a mountain called Carntogher.

When we climbed the Carn we followed a stony path and our father told us we were on the road used by stage coaches when they travelled between Belfast and Derry. Our town was half way between the two cities and had an inn where travellers could spend the night and where horses could be stabled and fed.

I have a hunch that the road taken by the stage coach followed a more ancient route. Perhaps it is just a coincidence, but close to it are other places we visited. The strangest of these is the Sweat House where people sat around a fire in a cabin before jumping into a well nearby. More mysterious are the earthen ring fort and the dolmen.

Since our father’s death people have come to me looking for information about the things that interested him; and I have found it hard to convince them that I am a different person with my own interests. Now I find my husband is fascinated by local history and I am being pulled back to my youth and the things I saw and was told.

Remembering and uncovering the past is a powerful animal instinct, an important part of the animal survival kit. Cats learn from previous experience, remember where potential prey is to be found, know that a fox or another cat has been visiting by the scent it left. Adapted by human creativity, the instinct shape shifts into a variety of forms. It would not surprise me if the same local history jinn which possessed my father, was alive and well and haunting my husband’s computer room.

Savage Pleasure

2011-06-21T04:15:00.000-07:00

I only realised that hunting is an animal instinct deep in the human race when I read Thomas Harris’ ‘The Silence of the Lambs.’ Hunting driven by pleasure is a theme of the book.

Many people disapprove of cat behaviour. Cats are not only superb hunters, but they are perceived to enjoy hunting, to take pleasure in the chase. As kittens, and less frequently as adults, they enjoy playing games which hone their hunting skills, games that we as children whose play was rarely supervised by adults, also played. Hide-and-seek and tig sometimes require a player to act as predator, sometimes as prey. In a situation where it is understood that the prey is not in real danger there is also pleasure in being preyed upon. Why else, as young children, would we, to our shame, have taunted an old man to come and catch us, as we stood at a safe distance ready to disappear through the open door of an outhouse when he responded? Now our male cat taunts me by audibly sharpening his claws on a carpet I value more than others, ready to run when I appear to chase him.

Long before we left primary school we became bored with these childhood games. The boys turned to Cowboys and Indians as a form of play hunting, and I assumed that hunting was something other people did. Sportsmen on horseback hunt foxes with hounds and many of us regard this as a cruel sport. Police forces hunt criminals and those whom the state considers enemies; but, when we hunt for a mate, a house, a bargain, treasure, we’re not really hunting, are we?

‘Problem-solving is hunting, it is savage pleasure and we are born to it,’ wrote Thomas Harris. These words made me interrupt my reading of this gripping book, showing me myself and others (including animals) in a new light.

May Storm

2011-06-13T04:45:00.000-07:00

On the last Monday of May, unusually for this time of year, there was a storm. Our three massive beech trees became giant seaweeds swaying in the current. Watching from a window I saw a stream of leafy broken twigs flowing at eye level from south to north. A voice on the radio repeatedly interrupted the scheduled programme to tell of roads all over the country blocked by fallen trees; but it was mid-afternoon before a great limb was torn from one of our beech trees, the tree on which W. Moore had carved his name in 1914, probably before he set off to fight in the Great War realising he might never return.

The bulk of the torn limb was taken away by the men who cleared the road. Beech is a hardwood the colour of dried pasta. I can think of no reason why it cannot be turned into beautiful furniture, but the fate of this beech branch is to be sawn into logs and burned. Meanwhile we import shesham wood furniture from India where carpentry skills have not died out. The price of oil and other fuels has been steadily increasing, so it is not surprising that the largest remaining chunks of wood also disappeared. That left a heap of unwanted branches blocking the footpath.

One day last week John and I started to dismantle the pile disdained by power-saw owners. We threw, heaved, pulled and dragged branches back into our own territory, returning the next day to continue the work. Using muscle power I sawed up a few of the smaller, shorter branches and burned them for comfort during these June evenings when the temperature can drop, untypically, to a few degrees above zero.

Two long pasta-coloured gashes mark the places where the limb became detached from the tree. What should we do next? The beeches may be coming to the end of their lives. John has just found a google map showing how mature trees lined this road in 1860. The lifespan of a beech is reckoned to be between 150 and 200 years, but it may survive up to 300 years.

The people who planted the trees thought ahead. Future generations would enjoy their beauty, their nuts would provide food for birds, their branches fuel for people, their timber could be shaped into chairs or staircases or parquet floors. But it was not to work out that way. Trees are now not a resource but a financial liability to their owners. A day’s work by a tree surgeon could cost the equivalent of a year’s minimum wage.

I see a very large jinn called the Free Market striding the Earth, determining what we eat, how we keep ourselves warm, what we wear, how we earn our living. With a cup of coffee beside me, I am aware of the benefits it has brought, but also of the way the straitjacket has been steadily tightening.

Freetown John

2011-06-05T12:30:00.000-07:00

I was not aware of the existence of John O’Neill Walsh, of Freetown Sierra Leone and Magherafelt Ireland, until my husband returned from the Public Records Office and said he had found his will. John, the brother of one of my ancestors, died in Freetown in 1822. Among his possessions were a table, ten wine glasses and books.

Freetown John can’t have been an old man when he died: he bequeathed property to aunts. What was he doing in Sierra Leone? Husband John suggested he was in the British navy or army, but we soon discounted that. Perhaps he was a trader?

By coincidence I happened to read ‘Ox Travels’ a recently published collection of stories by thirty-six travel writers who have donated all their royalties to Oxfam. I was surprised to find two pieces were set in Sierra Leone. Aminatta Forna recalled being entertained by a street performer while she waited at Hastings Airport; but it was Tim Butcher’s story, ‘Letting Greene go’ that provided a sketch of the city and beamed a light on its past.

Thirty years before John O’Neill Walsh died some of the first slaves to be freed gathered to have a service of thanksgiving under the massive cotton tree which still stands in Siaka Stevens Street. While he lived conscience-stricken Britain had its navy scour the ocean for ships of less enlightened nations which still transported slaves. The navy’s aim was to rescue them and resettle them in Sierra Leone. By 1827, five years after his death, Fourah Bay College, the oldest university in colonial Africa, had been founded as an Anglican Missionary School and Freetown was on its way to becoming ‘The Athens of Africa.’ Perhaps John, with his books, emphasising his Irishness with his middle name, taught in a school which provided more elementary education.

Even if you don’t have family connections with Sierra Leone, I heartily recommend you read ‘Ox Travels’. Nicholas Shakespeare’s account of his journey to Benin with his sister and Brazilian brother-in-law in search of the former street boy’s ancestors is an appetite-whetting starter for a varied feast. Peter Godwin finds himself in grave danger in his native Zimbabwe when he is brought to a secret diamond mine; Ruth Padel’s Burma has people who turn into tigers at night; a veteran matador allows Jason Webster discover the symbolism in bullfighting; Rory Stewart describes the creation of the Turquoise Mountain project in a threatened section of medieval Kabul. These are only a few of the stories which come to mind as I write this.

If ‘Ox Travels’ was published before John O’Neill Walsh embarked on his journey to Sierra Leone, I’m sure he would have put it in his trunk.

Lingering Thoughts

2011-05-29T08:28:00.000-07:00

There is an assumption in our culture that unspoken and unwritten thoughts simply disappear. We have no evidence that they survive, but neither have we evidence that they vanish, violating the law of conservation of a still unknown mass or energy.

Three places make me favour the hypothesis that thoughts do not degrade as rapidly as we ... think.

The first place is a Breast Care Centre where I have a yearly appointment. It is a place in the basement of a hospital where many women who have experienced breast cancer wait to see a surgeon, or an oncologist, or to have a mammogram. Before I go I take the precaution of applying underarm antiperspirant but, long before I am seen by an expert, my clothes are damp from the sweat of fear. Yet, during the year following my diagnosis I managed to live five days a week for five weeks in a hostel on the site of the hospital where I was having radiotherapy. This hospital was situated in grounds where mature trees grew, birds made their home and laughter could often be heard. I remember my stay there as a happy one.

Self preservation is an even more basic animal instinct than defence of territory. Confronted by a predator we have the biological equipment to enable us to fight or flee; but it is impossible to vanquish quickly or escape from the predator called cancer. Fear is an emotion designed to galvanise us into action. We feel trapped when we have to spend lengthy periods in a waiting room, haunted by the trapped thoughts electric with emotion of those around us and those who have waited there in the past. There is, I sense, a terrifying jinn in the Breast Care Centre.

The other places are both kitchens with tiled walls and floors, where an unhappy thought seems to pull towards itself previous unhappy thoughts that have been lurking in the walls, waiting for an opportunity to invade what I think of as my mind and to have fun disturbing me until they become exhausted.

Last week I saw a table and chairs in a shop window, fell in love with them and bought them. We badly needed new chairs and our kitchen table had been inherited by my mother. When they were delivered I felt a calmness enter the room. Only then did I realise the significance of the wrought iron in the chair backs. Jinn are deterred by iron and now I can think a single unhappy thought and then let it go, without being plagued for hours by its associates.

Five Claimants

2011-05-22T04:42:00.000-07:00

Here are five claimants for the title of Jinn:

Nationalism

Loyalism

Republicanism

Sectarianism

Racism.

Each can be seen as a set of beliefs, but is it really alive? There are many reasons why I think so.

Like humans jinn are born and die, but their lifespans are much longer, frequently lasting hundreds of years; so they survive the death of the humans most closely associated them. Al Quaeda does not cease to exist because Osama bin Laden was assasinated.

Birth assumes a parent and I see the origin of each of my five claimants in a very powerful instinct found in many vertebrates. It is the impulse to find a territory where it is possible to feed and breed, to mark that territory and to defend it against invading members of its own species and other threatening species. Both our cats, male and female, mark and defend territories. The male rubs the side of his head several times against the French door when I open it to let him in. Birds in the garden are constantly delineating their territories by flying around the trees and shrubs which form the boundary and singing on each one. We have walls and fences and title deeds. In each case an individual, or a small related group, claims and defends a territory.

Each of my five proposed jinn lays claim to a superterritory and defends it against individuals and other superterritories. Nationalism, Loyalism and Republicanism are obviously connected to physical territories. Sectarianism is associated with a mental one.

A recent BBC radio programme expressed surprise at the apparently inexplicable behaviour of Northern Ireland teenagers too young to have experienced conflict. These kids are using social-networking sites to promote Sectarianism. The assumption is that, once politicians sign a peace deal, Sectarianism vanishes; but jinn live on. They haunt places and possess people. Adolescents are particularly vulnerable to them as ancient genes insist they establish a territory with a view to mating. At fourteen they are in no position to own a car, never mind a house. They can’t even lay claim to an intellectual field.

The presenter of the programme was particularly shocked by the virulance of the language used on the social networking sites; but jinn have emotions similar to ours. It is not surprising that humans possessed by them display hate, fear and envy when marking their virtual territories.

Like humans, jinn marry. In Northern Ireland Nationalism and Republicanism are ofter married to Sectarianism; but the apparently opposed Loyalism is also the spouse of this hairy legged, sharp-clawed one.

Jinn are said to have another formidable capacity. They shape shift. After the Good Friday Agreement, when Nationalism, Loyalism and Rebublicanism were put into bottles, stoppered and flung into the Atlantic Ocean, Sectarianism quietly shape shifted into Racism.

Hooved Feet and Hairy Legs

2011-05-15T04:17:00.000-07:00

In my review of And the Bull Kills You I wrote that the detective finds within himself both the bull and the bullfighter, and, in a book which confronts sex and violence, I don't think this is too far fetched. Some of the jinn we have to deal with are connected to our animal instincts. Something compels us and our mammalian relatives to preserve ourselves and our genes.

When I was a teenager there were whispers of a tall dark charming stranger who frequented dance halls and of whom we needed to be very wary. Women had discovered that their dancing partner had cloven hooves. I don't think any of us believed these reports, at least literally. The cloven hooves were a metaphor for the devil, one of the jinn, who preyed on innocent girls to satisfy his animal instincts.

In the story of Solomon and Bilquis, the beautiful Queen of Sheba, it is she who is rumoured to have jinn among her ancestors. Determined to find out if the story is true, Solomon has constructed in his private apartments a glass floor under which fish swim in water. Standing at the other end of the room, Solomon beckons to Bilquis to come to him, making her lift her skirt instinctively to keep it out of the water and allowing him to see her feet and legs. He sees that her feet are not hooved, as people have claimed, but she does have another jinn characteristic, hairy legs. Fortunately this problem is not insurmountable. Solomon has his jinn prepare a hair removing lotion of slaked lime and ash.

Or the Bull Kills You

2011-05-15T04:06:00.000-07:00

This is a review I wrote of Jason Webster's first detective novel. It is set in Valencia where the detective, Max Camara finds himself investigating the murder, after a bullfight, of Spain's best loved Matador. Jason Webster recently wrote in his blog that writing for him is a process of discovery, a quest to find his authentic self.

‘Or the Bull Kills You’ is a vivid masculine energising book by a writer unafraid to confront the reality of violent death.

As in any good murder mystery, the identity and motives of the killer (or is it killers?) remain concealed until the end. Chief Inspector Max Camara of the Valencia Cuerpo Nacional de Policia resists the temptation and pressures on him to indict the most obvious suspect. Instead, using the tactics of the bullfight, he gets to know each of the suspects, observes the weaknesses of each, assesses their capacity to torture and kill and predicts their responses before moving in for the final confrontation.

To really appreciate this book you have, like a matador, to be in control and refuse to rush. Then you realise that Camara is not only a detective: he is also a mystery. In parallel with the revelation of the hidden lives of the suspects is the revelation of a side of the detective he has previously refused to acknowledge. Who among us really likes to admit he, or she, is driven by animal instincts? By identifying with the bull, Camara acknowledges he has within him both bull and bullfighter. Using the art of the matador to control the bull within, rather than denying its existence, he learns to benefit from, rather than be at the mercy of, animal vitality.

I suspect this is a book which will be read mostly by men, but for me it was engrossing and I hope that it will find many more readers among women.

Legends of the Fire Spirits

2011-05-08T04:37:00.000-07:00

I am intrigued by the idea that cats might be jinn.

Here is a review I wrote of a book about jinn. It is by Robert Lebling with a foreword by Tahir Shah and is called Legends of the Fire Spirits.

How do you write for sceptical westerners about things, beings or forces so subtle they are undetectable by ordinary human senses and, until now, by scientific instruments? Robert Lebling has done just that, undeterred by the risk of incurring ridicule from those of us unwilling to concede that there is much we still do not understand; but who saw Osama bin Laden as the embodiment of evil clashing with good in the form of Barack Obama; and the marriage of Kate Middleton to Prince William as the union of a mortal with a supernatural being.

‘Jinn’ is a word derived from an Arabic root which means to ‘conceal’ or ‘cover with darkness’; but the darkness is not total. The spirits created by God from smokeless fire can take on the features of any living being they desire apart from those of a prophet or imam, but when they interact with humans, who are more dense and made from clay, there is an energy change. Robert Lebling has searched for these energy bursts in pre-Islamic writing, the Koran, the Hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammed), folktales, history, European literature, the Internet and the writing of maverick scientists. With time and space compressed a picture emerges, fashioned from metaphor and legend.

Although Jinn are physically fundamentally different from familiar living creatures, we see a race similar to us in many ways, sharing our emotions of envy, love, hatred, fear resentment, anger. Some Jinn are helpful to mankind. Others are powerful and malicious. From them humans have found it necessary to devise forms of protection, and not just in Muslim countries. Here in the West people wear blessed medals, bless themselves with holy water and put sprigs of conifer, blessed on Palm Sunday, behind pictures as protection against evil spirits.

It wasn’t until after I started to read this book for the second time that I really appreciated how extraordinary it is. It deserves to be read for several reasons. Besides being entertaining it provides, as Tahir Shah writes in his introduction, ‘a window into Arab and Islamic society that is usually clouded over, opaque to all except Arabists and scholars of Islam.’ By gazing through this window with an open mind we may discover something useful. Spiritual forces, whether we call them Jinn or not, whether they are material entities, a form of electromagnetic radiation, thoughts, or none of these, are complex and inescapable. Robert Lebling concludes that we may never really understand them, but ‘we can understand how they affect us, and how we respond to them and how we interact with each other as we try to deal with them.’

Happy Christmas

2010-12-19T05:23:00.000-08:00

A very happy Christmas from the magpie that eats leftover cat food; from the robin that perches on the aerial of my car, eats bread from the window and poos on the roof; from the copper-budded beech trees to which snow still clings; from the squirrel that crouches on a branch, body motionless, upright tail undulating like a snake; from dripping crystal icicles filled with light that hang from the gutter; from the two cats, John and me; from Iain mcGilchrist and Robert Twigger whose books I am slowly reading. At some level we are all connected.

Protecting Herself?

2010-12-02T07:44:00.000-08:00

Here, it rarely snows before Christmas, and when it does it is something ephemeral, wet and slushy and vulnerable to the daylight rise of a few degrees. This year temperatures recorded in November set new records, and we had real snow that still persists days after we first woke to find the ground white. We were taken unawares. A hard winter once every few decades is to be expected, even at a time of global warming. Two hard winters in succession?

We are provided with plenty of news about the disruption caused by the snow, but no-one predicted its arrival, or gave a definite date for its departure, or attempted to explain why we should be blown upon by winds from Scandanavia and Siberia rather than from the Atlantic. In the absence of an explanation my mind has been seeking to provide an answer. This morning the name, James Lovelace, came into my head, and after James came Gaia. Perhaps a rise in the earth's temperature causes an increase in volcanic activity, and residual volcanic dust in the atmosphere, causing reflection of sunlight into space, brings about a lowering of the temperature. Gaia protecting herself through one of her homeostatic mechanisms.

Sorry

2010-10-28T11:17:00.000-07:00

Sorry, there's no blog this week. I'm writing a story for children.

Sherpa's mystery ailment

2010-10-19T05:30:00.000-07:00

Last week Sherpa, one of our two cats, developed a mystery illness or had a mystery accident. I knew something was amiss when, after several hours of lying in the boiler house, she refused the food I offered her, jumped down from her chair and walked very slowly towards the garden. On the way she found herself on the bottom one of three steps outside the sitting room. Several times she tried to get down from the step, lowering one paw but then withdrawing it before it reached the ground. When eventually she found the courage to get down, she walked slowly over the grass and lay under a shrub. I brought her a saucer of milk in which she showed no interest. Shortly afterwards she disappeared. I thought we had lost her.

Darkness fell and there she was, sitting on the window. I let her in and she jumped on a chair. I offered her meat which she quickly devoured, then I offered her more. It too disappeared, after which she lapped milk from a saucer and half heartedly licked her paws before becoming lethargic again.

She remained in her chair during the night, but after being fed the following morning she went out and once more disappeared. When she returned in the evening she was brighter. In a few days she was her sprightly self again.

I'm left wondering if she disappeared in case I decided to take her to the vet and had come to the conclusion that vets don't work after dark. It is interesting to speculate even though I shall never know the answer.

Nest

2010-10-11T10:49:00.000-07:00

I was pruning the Philadelphus outside the gate when I noticed, too late because I had already severed the branch at its base, a bird's nest high up. I stopped pruning and left the branch suspended, but supported by the surrounding branches, hoping the bird would still use the nest. A few days later I noticed the same nest on the ground.

Its framework was woven carefully from blades of dried grass and fibres torn from them. Whole blades were visible on the inside around the rim, but the bowl of the base had more fibres than blades. The nest was further strengthened by thin wiry twigs like those of heather. These were present on the outside among blades of grass where insulation, in the form of moss and sheep's wool, was also applied.

What really touched me was that the bird had woven a strand of pale pink ribbon, about the same width as the blades of grass, around the top edge of its nest.

Repairing the Fireplace

2010-10-04T12:35:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in front of a blazing fire, the sort of fire we normally light in the depths of winter, with Sherpa, one of our cats, sprawled in contentment across an armchair. This fire should be hot enough, I hope, to set the special cement.

On Saturday, as I wandered around a local hardware shop looking for putty, I picked up a small tub and discovered that there exists a fireproof cement which is stable at temperatures above 1300 degrees Celsius and can be used for repairing defects in fireplaces. Our fireplace had plenty of those. I was aware of horizontal and vertical cracks that needed to be filled so I started the first part of the process: the preparatory cleaning, first with a brush and then with a ragged towel. This revealed more cracks and holes and depressions of which I had been unaware.

The surface needs to be wet so that the cement can adhere to it. I put my right hand into a disposable rubber glove and with this stuffed the cement directly from the tub into the cracks and hollows before leveling it off. It only remained to light a small fire, build it up gradually during the next four hours, and enjoy it with Sherpa in the meantime.

Family trees

2010-09-27T03:58:00.000-07:00

Last week I wrote about the visit paid to us by a cousin, distant yet unexpectedly close. There is a temptation to give in to the addiction of following other branches of the family tree, but I have reservations.

Genes determine our hardware, but our software is cultural and includes language, reading and writing. Our software allows us to access an Internet, a world wide web along whose strands we can, if we so choose, connect with the greatest minds, past and present, across the Planet.

Another assumption demolished

2010-09-23T04:10:00.000-07:00

This blog is a few days late and it has no connection with cats. Instead I need to write about an assumption I had which circumstances force me to correct.

When we were children two miniature photographs stood on a mantlepiece in the small room where we ate, did our homework and relaxed. One photograph showed my father's grandfather, my grandfather's father. The other showed his wife, Elizabeth. I still have both photographs.

Elizabeth's nephew, Richard Stanislaus, emigrated with his wife to Australia at the end of the nineteenth century. His son Austin enlisted as an ANZAC soldier during the first world war, was hospitalised while in Europe and later visited the home where his great-aunt Elizabeth and her husband had lived until their deaths a few years previously. While he stayed with the cousins who now lived in the family home, he met a girl related to his great-aunt, fell in love, married and brought her back to Australia.

A grand daughter of dashing Austin contacted me last year and we exchanged emails. I was struck by the quality of her writing. Last Sunday she came to visit.

I saw her walking past the kitchen window, went to meet her and found myself gazing at a reincarnation of my great grandmother. When I showed her the photograph she immediately recognised herself in it, and I saw her eyes return, time after time, to the little miniature.

I am a hybrid. At different times people have seen in me my mother, my paternal grandmother and my father's sister. I know I share a love of learning with Elizabeth (and with my Australian cousins), but no-one has ever suggested I bore any physical resemblance to her. At an intellectual level I realise it is possible for someone to have a closer resemblance to her great, great grand aunt than another person who is more directly related, but the idea is so counter-intuitive I never seriously harboured it. That is, until now.

Three Cart Horses

2010-09-12T12:30:00.000-07:00

Six weeks of summer spent almost every year of childhood on our widowed grandmother's farm was for me a foretaste of paradise. We were there for haymaking in July and while oats and barley were being harvested in August. Our uncle, helped by a farm hand or two, was the farmer and his partners were three large-boned, muscular horses. If he ever considered replacing them with a tractor, that thought was quickly deleted.

Each horse had his own straw-strewn stable with a half door. When the top half was open he could stand and watch all that went on in the farmyard. Sometimes we, children, would gather windfall apples and, one by one, on the palm of an outstretched hand offer them to those horses in residence. Apples were titbits, interesting additions to a diet of oats and hay.

From the yard a gate led into the Yard Field, the road side of which was a mile long, or so it was claimed. It was never ploughed and abounded in red and white clovers, scarlet pimpernels, bird's foot trefoil, purple knapweed and many other wild flowers. Sometimes the horses, whinnying with delight were led into this bee-humming meadow to romp and graze. In their wake they left horse dung and that, we were told, was the reason field mushrooms could be found growing in this field. We threaded them on to a long grass stalk, brought them back to fry in butter and savoured a taste that is so much better than that of cultivated mushrooms.

Our stubborn uncle's death put an end to farming with horses on that farm. Is there anywhere left in Western Europe where horses pull carts and farm machinery? Is there anyone left with the understanding and skills needed to work with these breeds? Anyone who can fashion their harness? There was once a saddler in the town where I live. Horse brasses mounted on leather hung outside his shop while he adapted his business to produce robust leather school bags. At the other end of the town was a forge. My father once brought me to see the blacksmith shoeing a horse amid a shower of sparks. Soon afterwards he diversified into other types of metal work.

People still keep horses, more lightly built animals for recreation. It is the work horse which has disappeared.

Book Review - Animals in Translation.

2010-09-05T07:45:00.000-07:00

This is my review of "Animals in Translation" subtitled "The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow" by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson.

I was motivated by the BBC “Horizon” programme devoted to her and more recently “The Interview” with her on the World Service, to buy a book by Temple Grandin. “Animals in Translation” had eighteen reviews, seventeen of which were very positive, on Amazon.co.uk, so I ordered it and started to read full of admiration for all she had achieved.

The first chapter offers moving glimpses into her very difficult childhood and adolescence and the start of her involvement with horses. It also divides humans into two clear-cut groups, autistic and normal, and has Temple Grandin making the astounding claim that “she is starting to be able to accurately predict animal talents nobody can see” based on what she knows about autistic talent. “This is a little like astronomers predicting the existence of a planet nobody can see based on their understanding of gravity.” Words like these raise very high expectations.

So what is so very different in the ways animals and autistic people think? They see details to which the rest of us are oblivious, claims Grandin, and they think in pictures. Her work with cattle does indeed demonstrate that these animals react to reflections on smooth metal and puddles, slow fan blade movement, differences in light intensity and other stimuli which people working in abattoirs do not perceive until it is drawn to their attention. When Temple Grandin’s book draws on her own experiences it is at its most convincing. I also found the common sense audits she devised very impressive. She has worked with horses, pigs and chickens as well as cattle. The problem is that she assumes what she has discovered about a few animals can be applied to all, and it is not even clear what she means by “animal.” Perhaps she means “vertebrates” because mammals, birds and occasionally reptiles and fish are included.

Several of the 324 pages are devoted to dogs and are peppered with anecdotes, as is the rest of the book. She gives what sounds like very authoritative advice on the training of dogs, but more than one person reviewing this book elsewhere has pointed out that her theories depend on old, outdated and discredited research.

In a book where the style is slang-spiced, occasionally toddler-speak, conversational, it is often hard to disentangle what is evidence-based from the matrix of opinion, over generalisation and highly imaginative speculation in which it is embedded. Here is a sample of the writing:

“...most of what animals do in life they learn from other animals. Adults teach their young where to eat, what to eat, whom to socialise with, and whom to have sex with. The adults teach the young ones social rules and respect for their own kind.”

Cats are the animals I know best. Our two cats were litter mates and arrived as kittens too small to have reached the stage where they would receive hunting lessons from their mother; yet these autodidacts progressed from learning to catch insects to catching mice once their deciduous canine teeth were replaced by permanent ones. Cats are also well known for regulating their social interactions and sex lives independently of their elders.

To write this review I read the entire book although I was tempted more than once to give up. I remain far from convinced that animals are autistic savants, that music is the language of many animals, or that Temple Grandin has no Unconscious. The book itself seems to contradict the idea that normal people are lumpers who generalise while animals and autistic people are splitters who see the differences between things more than the similarities. It also seems strange that, nowhere in this long book, is there any mention of the specialisation of right and left hemispheres of the brain. If we, normal people, seriously underestimate the intelligence of animals and of people diagnosed autistic, then this book underestimates our ability to train ourselves to see detail.

Cats' Concert

2010-08-29T10:13:00.000-07:00

I bought the book, Animals in Translation, hoping that it would offer insights into the way animals think. Temple Grandin has been diagnosed as having high-functioning autism and has shown an exceptional understanding of animals.

It is well known that children with autism have difficulty learning to talk. Some autistic adults have recalled how, as children echoing the speech around them, they concluded that the meaning of language resided in the tone of voice used by the speaker and not in the words used. Temple Grandin knows of one mother of an autistic child who can communicate with her daughter only through singing. The child understands a command like, "Set the table now," when it is sung but not when it is spoken. As a two-year-old, unable to speak, Temple herself was able to hum Bach while her mother played the music on the piano. As an adult she admits that the only social cue she picks up easily is tone of voice.

Temple claims that it is her autism which gives her a unique insight into the way animals think and she has developed a hypothesis that music is the language of many animals. She refers to the scientific literature to lend weight to this hypothesis. Unfortunately the evidence is fragmentary, her list of references is erratic and the statement of her case far from clear.

Cats are not the animals with which she is most familiar. Like young autistic children, and unlike dogs, they seem to have no, or almost no idea that words convey meaning (Sherpa shows interest when she hears her name). They do understand what is conveyed in the tone of a voice and, contrary to popular perception make a variety of very expressive sounds and not just, "Miaou," as we render it in English. They purr when contented, hiss as a warning, and howl when face to face with a cat that has invaded their territory. Sherpa makes a soft trilling sound when I open the window to let her in. To me it conveys pleasure and acts as a greeting. When Banjo was a kitten he occasionally uttered soft whistles. Apart from purring and trilling which are rhythmic, there doesn't seem to be anything very musical about cat communication, although there may be surprises awaiting us, giving new meaning to the term, "Cats' Concert."

Temple Grandin and the Reviewers

2010-08-23T03:53:00.000-07:00

Temple Grandin is a celebrity. She is also a high-functioning autistic, a woman with impressive academic qualifications. BBC TV devoted a Horizon programme to the work she has done in making American slaughter houses less stressful to the animals. She has a unique understanding of those we rear for food and this she attributes to the way she thinks in pictures rather than words.

Recently I visited the BBC Worldservice archive of interviews, listened to an interview with her and was moved to buy one of her books. There isn't a good book shop in the vicinity so I visited Amazon. co.uk and clicked on the reviews of Animals in Translation. There were a total of 18 reviewers who awarded it stars as follows:

72% 5 stars

22% 4 stars

6% 1 star

The person who grudgingly gave it a single star did so on the grounds that the book was "essentially a self-help book for abattoir owners". Obviously this was a book worth buying. I am about half way through it and hope to write a review when I have finished. In the meantime, reading the book has made me think again about book reviews and the people who write them.

I decided to look at the reviews of this book on Amazon.com and discovered there were 187 0f them. There was a greater spread of reactions, but, amazingly, around the same percentage of people awarded it 5 stars and 1 star. Here are the percentages:

71% 5 star

14% 4 star

6% 3 star

3% 2 star

6% 1 star

I didn't read all the reviews, but I found that many of those that were critical were among the most thoughtful. It was also obvious that many people write reviews when they have very little, or nothing to add to what has been said before. It's as if they simply want to register a vote, usually in favour of what they have read. I am almost certain that many of the most effusive reviewers were influenced by Temple Grandin's celebrity and by her academic qualifications and felt they had to accept everything she and her co-author, Catherine Johnson, wrote. It takes a very confident person to question the famous, but if the feedback celebrities receive is always unjustifiably positive they can end up less connected to reality than the average person.

The pygmy shrew

2010-08-16T01:26:00.000-07:00

Once I noticed Banjo watching an old rose bush at a point where thick roots formed a small arch above the soil. When he started to paw under the arch a shrew ran to escape from him. Banjo watched the little mammal, then began to follow it pawing it so that it changed direction. Eventually he killed it and tossed it into the air. He didn't eat it. Cats generally find shrews distasteful.

It was a pygmy shrew, a tiny mammal few people have ever seen, which weighs 5g (about 50,000 pygmy shrews would need to be placed on the bathroom scales to register my weight). It had a broad, black back, a pale belly, a long tail, small eyes and a slender, pointed snout. Shrews are classified as insectivores but they eat a variety of small invertebrates. Woodlice, spiders and beetles, but also fruits, seeds and small carrion are drawn into the snout and broken up by small, sharp, red-tipped teeth. They forage day and night, alternating periods of activity with periods of rest. Their nests are loose balls of woven grasses at, or just below, ground level.

They don't hibernate in winter, the young, born in the spring and summer ensure that the species survives when their parents die in autumn.

Banjo tired of the dead shrew after playing with it for some time and Sherpa, who had been watching, took over the toy. When she had satisfied her desire to play and walked away, Banjo resumed his playing. When he had enough the shrew was left on a step outside the french window.

Sherpa as scientist

2010-08-08T13:54:00.000-07:00

Doris Lessing writes that some cats display a type of intelligence she describes as scientific. There is no doubt that Sherpa is one of these curious about all that goes on around her.

When she was a couple of months old I saw her stand beside a litter tray where Banjo was doing a pooh. Then I noticed her head was under his tail, watching as it emerged. She soon became a feline authority on the things humans do in private as well as in public.

From a very young age she showed independence, wandering off on her own and leaving behind a lonely little brother. I would find him crying, and then I lifted him or took him to find his sister.

Sherpa was the one who discovered that the chain on the back door could be used as a knocker with which to gain attention when she wanted to go out.

One evening, when I was with Banjo at the front of the house I noticed her coming towards us with something in her mouth. It was an empty bird's nest, made of moss and feathers. She laid it on the ground and began to pull it apart.

Once, while she was not yet two years of age, she found an elastic band and picked it up with her teeth. Holding down the free end with her paw she pulled the elastic and found it stretched. She let it go, picked it up again and repeated the experiment. She did this several times, stretching the elastic a bit more each time. When the band finally broke she ate it.

cat and mouse

2010-08-01T13:42:00.000-07:00

Expect to be given your first mouse at around the time your cat's kitten canine teeth are replaced by adult weapons. Until then it has been honing its hunting skills on insects.

Not long after banjo and Sherpa reached this milestone in their development, a couple came to help us in the garden. While we were having lunch they left their wellingtons at the back door and a dead mouse was dropped into one. It was a field mouse with yellowish brown fur on its back, a white belly, large round eyes and prominent ears.

I have opened the door on a wet evening to a cat howling as if in distress, only to find, too late, that it had a mouse in its mouth. I could only close a door to the rest of the house as the cat placed the mouse on the tiled floor and allowed it to run for safety in the low space under the cooker, or the narrow space between the back of the washing machine and the wall. If only the mouse stayed there until the cat lost interest, and then asked to be let out! No, it came out, was temporarily immobilised under a paw, released, reached safety, came out... Usually the mouse was still in hiding by the time we went to bed.

There was a mouse in the kitchen when I was admitted to hospital for an operation. It was only caught when I returned home and some time later came down to the kitchen in the early hours of the morning to find it frolicking. It left a nest in a drawer that contained gloves, cotton tea- cosies and rolls of gauze. To make its nest it gnawed pieces from a scarf and supplemented these with bits of the brown paper in which the gauze was rolled. The result was a sphere, several centimetres in diameter, as soft and warm and light as thistledown.

Fighting like cat and dog

2010-07-25T11:17:00.000-07:00

During a recent family reunion John was given a photograph. It was probably taken early in the twentieth century and showed a middle-aged lady with a cat on her knee and a dog sharing her chair. When he drew my attention to it John said, 'This makes nonsense of the saying about fighting like cat and dog.' However, on examining the photograph more closely, we both decided we couldn't rule out the possibility that the cat and dog were studio props.

When I was a child we did have a cat and dog who were so friendly that, on winter evenings as they sat in front of the Aga cooker, the cat often licked the dog's ears. They had grown up together since Sooty arrived as a small black kitten around the time that Bran came as a young fox terrier pup.

When strange dogs had the temerity to invade our back yard it was Sooty who routed them. There were no cat-and-dog fights because dogs ten times her size were afraid of Sooty. At least that is how it is remembered in our family.

During her twenty four year life Sooty gave birth to several litters of kittens on a bed of straw in a wooden box in an outhouse. Bran had only to be asked, 'Show us your kittens,' and he went to the back door. As soon as it was opened he trotted straight to the outhouse and over to the wooden box, looking at Sooty and her family before turning to the human who had come to see them.

Bee in a thimble

2010-07-18T12:44:00.000-07:00

Even during these overcast July days sentenced by St Swithen, there is usually a time when the sun is permitted a short period of parole. One day recently I found Sherpa, during one of these sunny intervals, stretched out in a state of torpor near one of the bay windows upstairs from where, when she deigns to half open her eyes, she can observe bird life. As I stroked her silky, sun-warmed fur I looked out and saw bees.

Several years ago a swarm of honey bees came and built a hive above the bay window and under the roof. When I failed to see them this spring I concluded they had been wiped out by colony collapse disorder, or had been discovered by the men who painted the house before they emerged from their winter lethargy (the bees that is, not the men), and had been exterminated.

Apart from white clover, I'm not sure what sustains honey bees at this time of year. It is bumble bees I see exploiting the bounty of St John's wort and foxglove. A few years ago I bought a packet of wild flower seeds in a supermarket, and the foxgloves - or fairy thimbles as we called them as children - flowered for the first time this year among roses where I transplanted them. The tallest flowering stems have reached almost six feet, having produced a succession of blooms that have provided the bumble bees with pollen and nectar for weeks.

Divers rats

2010-07-11T05:32:00.000-07:00

Five minutes’ walk from our house there is a small estate of bungalows occupied by people who have retired. No-one keeps a pet - perhaps they aren’t permitted to - and rats have been coming to raid their bins.

Emotion plays a large part in the formation of long-term memory and I have several memories of rats; going as a child to see the outhouses belonging to a manor in the interval between the death of its last occupant and the demolition of the house, and seeing rats in their hundreds (at least that was my childish estimation); being wakened by their scurrying when staying in the guest room of a Mission in Zambia and imagining that fright would have turned my hair white by the morning; staying in a cheap hotel in London near a tube station which had been bombed and discovering that rats had been attempting to gnaw through the floorboards. Then there was the time when the engine of my Citroen 2CV refused to start and the mechanic who fixed it discovered gnawed potatoes under the bonnet. Rats had discovered we kept a sack of potatoes in the garage and had been climbing up the wide exhaust of the car to cache them. At that time we kept a dog but not a cat.

I appreciate that, like us, rats need food and shelter and that they care for their young, but they can transmit serious diseases and I prefer it when they keep their distance. I suspect that the smell a cat, even one that is not a ratter, leaves behind when it marks its territory is a sufficient deterrent to enterprising rats.

Haunted by Cats

2010-07-04T07:01:00.000-07:00

An article in yesterday's Financial Times tells of an expedition by Tahir Shah and his young daughter, Ariane, to the Moroccan Atlantic port of Sale. From what was a republic in the seventeenth century, pirates sailed far and wide, returning with their booty and slaves.

In the graveyard they find an old fisherman feeding fish heads to the cats which surround him. In Morocco a cat never goes hungry because people believe ghosts of dead humans dwell in them. It turns out that parts of Sale are really haunted because Tahir and Ariane come across nests of cats as they walk along the damp vaulted corridor to the dungeon in the Sqala.

I can't say I recognise in Banjo and Sherpa the spirits of any humans I knew, but once we had a dog we loved very dearly, and more than once, in unguarded moments, I looked at her and saw a very gentle, refined and pious lady with whom we were connected. If you think about it, however, dog ghosts are more unlikely than cats. At least cats have good vision in dim light.

The entire article, 'Barbary Ghosts' can be read on the blog:

tahir-shah. blogspot.com

Banjo, the dissection expert

2010-06-27T05:29:00.000-07:00

I think it must be Banjo who returns with what he has captured during the night and eats it on the steps at the sitting room. Today I saw a whole mouse which must have been surplus to his requirements. During the past week it was only viscera which were left behind. One day it appeared to be the entire viscera of a mouse. The following day the alimentary canal of a larger animal with a prominent caecum like a string of oval red beads was there for our inspection. I wondered if it might be a rabbit, or one of the young squirrels which have been foraging on the grass for the past ten days.

The squirrel children come down from the trees a few times a day to feed on dry, white-gilled toadstools. No parent accompanies them, so it looks unlikely that they are being taught to distinguish between edible fungi and those that could be fatal if eaten (if there are fungi that poison squirrels). At first it appeared as if the little animals took life very seriously, at least while on the ground. Then, as I was watching one of them he suddenly jumped into the air. A moment later he jumped again, but this time he introduced a variation. Before landing he rotated his body as a diver might do while plunging into a pool.

I am as certain as it's possible to be that Banjo's meal did not consist of squirrel.

Newsflash

2010-06-20T07:08:00.000-07:00

Today I’m interrupting my Sunday blog on cats with a news flash. A few days ago I saw five earthworms, all of the same species, all 3-4cm long. They were epigeal worms, dark red in colour with an orange that suggested brandling (or tiger) worms. I found them lying on the surface of soil under one of two blue plastic washing-up basins formerly favoured by New Zealand flatworms, but they quickly retreated into burrows when they were disturbed. They are still in the same place today.

I want to reassure you that I am not dreaming, although if you have read my posts on earthworms, flatworms and alien invasive species (which I wrote before turning to cats), you will realise that seeing earthworms of any species in a garden in the north of Ireland is little short of a miracle. This spring, although often tempted, I refrained from buying locally grown bedding plants. I have a strong suspicion that flatworms lurk in the peat in which they germinated. In 2010 I have seen, and destroyed, only one flatworm. There may be other reasons why the platyhelminths appear to be less plentiful. As a result of work we had carried out by builders earlier this year, there is less damp moss in the places where they previouly congregated. Add to this the unusually small amount of rain that has fallen so far this year. Perhaps life has been less simple for travelling flatworms.

Rosemary's Cattery

2010-06-13T06:36:00.000-07:00

When she came to dinner on Thursday evening, Rosemary told us about the cattery on the farm where she, her husband and family live in Melbourne. With a liking for dogs but a special affinity for cats, Rosemary visited several other catteries before designing her own.

Each cat is housed in a two storied compartment with a carpeted ramp, on which claws can be sharpened, connecting the two. The upper compartment has a window, the lower is darker but from it a cat flap leads to an outside enclosure. Cats usually take a day to settle in. After that they appear very content.

Rosemary restricts the number of residents she accepts, making sure her charges are eating the food their owners recommend. Two cats were left with her for two-and-a-half years while their owners were in Japan. Four was the largest number left by one person. Melbourne has very strict cat control laws and to keep four cats a permit is needed.

Before you rush out to build your own cattery, let me warn you of what can happen to raise your adrenalin to pathological levels. Cats are not usually regarded as burrowing animals and I was amazed when Rosemary told us that two cats had succeeded in burrowing out of their enclosure. Several times she and her son, Lorcan, vainly searched the farm and checked the family's garden, but it was only when the returned owner was furiously berating Rosemary that the wily creatures, miaouing innocently, betrayed their presence.

I don't know which is worse, one of your charges disappearing or having it die. While in her care two cats died. The owners of one of the deceased were in new Zealand at the time and, not wishing to spoil their holiday, Rosemary consulted their solicitor. He wisely recommended a postmortem which revealed the cause of the sudden death as a brain tumour.

Failings

2010-06-06T06:56:00.000-07:00

A few years ago a couple who live nearby produced a circular and dropped a copy through our letter box. There was a photograph of a handsome marmalade cat and an appeal that, if anyone knew his whereabouts, to please inform them. They and their child were feeling bereft.

The following Sunday afternoon the lady called. Oscar had still not turned up and she suspected foul play. Cats do, for reasons known only to themselves, sometimes decide to move home. Sometimes they are killed accidentally; but the level of antipathy towards felines that this couple experienced before his disappearance made them fear the worst.

Many people in the area where we live dislike cats in a way few other animals are disliked. It seems to me that it was not always like this. If there was antagonism towards cats in my youth, I was not aware of it. Now, when you say cats share your home, people often respond by telling you how dirty they are and it is impossible to invite them to your house. The failings of dogs are overlooked even though a few of them have killed children. Humans, of course, don't have failings.

Food from Mars

2010-05-30T05:17:00.000-07:00

Keeping a cat is not easy. Early last week I was talking to Joy in the local supermarket. She was upset as she told me that one of her cats had been attacked by two feral cats and had to have an eye removed.

'I don't feed stray cats,' she said, implying that the animals were hungry.

I have also learned not to feed hungry cats that find their way to the back door. We all know that giving food to cats is like giving money to most charities. They will soon be back looking for more, making you feel guilty if you refuse. Resident cats can become involved in territorial disputes. When I brought Sherpa to the vet to have her badly infected and almost detached tail amputated, I was told that tooth marks were visible suggesting another cat had been the culprit.

The cost of feeding a cat has risen by a rate greatly exceeding the rate of inflation. A 100g tray of the only brand of cat food Sherpa will eat costs over 50p per day, and a cat needs at least two trays a day. Per kilo this food, which contains about 4% chicken and 4% rabbit, costs around the same as the cheaper pot-luck minced beef sold by our local butchers. When it is first opened it usually has an appetising aroma, but very quickly - within minutes - the smell deteriorates. Our pair of resident magpies are the recipients of Sherpa's leftovers.

I'm left wondering whether the 8% refers to the dry or wet weight of the meat because, elsewhere on the tray it is stated that the food contains 10% protein and 81% moisture. Food composition tables show that chicken is made up of approximately 20% protein and cooked rabbit (assuming it can be compared to beef) about 25%. The mysterious brownish matrix must contribute the remainder of the protein.

When I look at the nutrition information on the back of a packet of dehydrated nuggets which both cats occasionally eat, I become even more confused. Kibbles contain 4% cereal and 4% animal or plant derivatives, but a massive 32% protein. If anyone from Mars (the makers of chocolate bars and cat food rather than inhabitants of the planet) happens to read this, could they possibly enlighten me?

Batty Observations

2010-05-23T07:44:00.000-07:00

This year the second half of May has brought warm dry weather and balmy evenings when it is more pleasant to be outdoors. Yesterday, with a half moon high in the southern sky, I walked down the garden path at a time when the birds had stopped singing and retired for the night. Two large bats, black in the fading light, were on the wing. Flying low they followed one another past me and disappeared into one of the tall spruce trees at the back. After I had stood for several minutes waiting in vain for them to reappear, I sat down on the steps outside the front door. There I was joined by Sherpa and watched fast-flying bats approach and veer out of sight.

Once, a few years ago, I opened the back door to find a small dead bat lying on the top step. Had Sherpa caught it? Had Banjo found a dead bat and brought it to show me? I'll never know.

During the winter bats hibernate in our attic. In 1981, when January frosts were severe, we opened the trap door so that warm air from the rest of the house could prevent water in the pipes and tank from freezing. A small bat awoke from hibernation and flew around the house before coming to rest clinging to a curtain.

It must have been early spring, when Catriona and I were returning from a walk along the strand in Portballintrae near the Giant's Causeway, and a colony of hundreds of bats appeared. We watched transfixed as they flew overhead. I didn't know at the time that female bats come together in large maternity colonies to give birth and rear their young. Along the Antrim coast are caves. I can only speculate that is where the nursery was.

Shantytown cats

2010-05-16T05:21:00.000-07:00

We walked from Dar Khalifa through the shantytown down a dusty earth road made uneven by protruding stones. On our left was the mosque and the mosque school, on our right a stall that sold vegetables. It was backed by a high wall and round it customers had gathered. A little farther on, at a place where a profusion of climbing plants spilled over the wall, an adolescent boy wearing a black T-shirt and black trousers which reached just below his knee, was selling white-skinned, earth-free potatoes from a cart over which a clean cloth had been laid. The donkey was nowhere to be seen.

We rounded a corner and found a row of simple dwellings. They were windowless, or had very small windows. The corrugated iron which formed their roofs was weighed down with bricks and on each door a lozenge pattern was painted, but beside plastic water tanks there were satellite dishes. The shantytown had only one standpipe to provide water, but mains electricity.

A large area of common ground separated the shantytown from the tarred road and high-walled villas opening on to it. On part of it short grass grew, elsewhere there were other plants which, from a distance, were impossible to identify. Here egrets had landed and hens, some with chicks at their feet, were pecking. A large flock of shorn long-tailed sheep lay close together.

Nearer the houses, where the ground was bare, leaning tree-branches propped up lines hung with clothes drying and bedding being aired. In the shade of rugs goats sheltered from the hot sun and a magnificent rooster stood proudly with red comb and wattles, a long scarf of silky russet feathers and black curving feathers at his tail. It was here we found cats sleeping in shadow.

Casablanca Cat

2010-05-09T03:19:00.000-07:00

At the end of April Catriona and I spent two full days in Casablanca staying at the Caliph's house, the home of Tahir and Rachana Shah and their two young children. On the recommendation of our hosts we had lunch the first day in a restaurant where the food was said to be as good as that cooked in Moroccan homes.

We sipped delicious freshly squeezed orange juice and nibbled olives while we waited for the first course to appear. This was a tray of dips and salads which we ate with bread. When we had finished the waiter brought our chicken tagines, a half chicken jointed, tender, succulent and subtly spiced.

Hardly had I lifted the conical earthenware lid, when I saw at my feet, sitting in the narrow border of dark earth that separated the tiled floor from the wall, a cat. He (you could tell it was a he from his stance) sat in dignified silence, a haughty beggar. He was a tabby in the sense that his short hair was brindled black on light grey. When I looked up the word 'tabby' in a dictionary I discovered it can also mean a fabric like silk or taffeta with a watered pattern and the word came originally from Arabic. Al-'attabiya was the quarter of (Prince) 'Attab, the part of Baghdad where the fabric was originally made.

He watched me eating my tagine until I could bear it no longer and, surreptitiously tearing off a piece of chicken, and another and another, placed them on the pink tile beside him. When I had finished he moved closer to Catriona.

At dinner that evening we mentioned the restaurant cat to our hosts. Cats, they told us, are found in many public places in Morooco. People respect cats and are considerate towards them because they believe jinns can take the form of a cat.

When we were in Casablanca airport having our passports carefully examined by taciturn immigration officials, Catriona drew my attention to a (you've guessed it) walking silently behind us.

A cat called Lucy

2010-05-02T08:01:00.000-07:00

A ginger cat, obviously a neutered male, used to be a regular visitor to our garden. The cat’s owner was the person who phoned us on the morning of Banjo’s accident and a week later I called to thank her. She brought me into her sitting room where her four cats had already made themselves comfortable. When I told her that the ginger often came to see us she revealed that his name was Lucy.

Lucy is not the only male cat I know who has been given a female name. If you judge by appearances it is easy to assume that a male kitten is female. Banjo was smaller than his sister when he arrived and both were six weeks old. His testes had not yet descended. I can’t say for certain when a male kitten’s testes descend, but it is several months after birth. Initially, when I fed both kittens from the same saucer, Sherpa grabbed the larger share, but even then, when he was small and vulnerable, I had no doubt that he was male. I can’t be more specific seven years later, but his behaviour was male and hers was female.

I’ve decided to write this blog less frequently but more regularly. Next Sunday, I shall write a little about cats we saw in Morocco. Inshallah - please God.

Book Review

2010-04-20T05:53:00.000-07:00

Pleasurable Kingdom

Jonathan Balcombe

There is a chapter in Pleasurable Kingdom entitled Transcendent Pleasures which has a section headed Mad with joy. Here we learn about the delight of chimpanzees, released from their winter quarters at Arnham zoo, and that of other chimps given shelter from rain, about the raptures felt by mules brought to the surface after years working in a coal mine, about the joy of dolphins escaping from purse seine nets, of dogs anticipating walks and cattle let into fields after long winters confined in byres. When elephants meet again after a period of absence they can create pandemonium.

Jonathan Balcombe has created a magnificent hymn celebrating the pleasures experienced by animals, from their delight in play, to the enjoyment they find in food, touch, uninhibited sex and love, to the happiness they derive when exhibiting their skills and intelligence and in appreciating those of others. For too long, those of us who thought of such things at all, have dwelt on the harshness of nature and have not allowed the sweet notes to enter our consciousness.

As we listen to the glorious music the images presented before us in rapid succession seem to contain no shadow, until we are finally shown the long, dark shadow thrown by cruel man. We have to look very closely to see any other darkness, but it is there. We see it when we realise that the pleasures described in Mad with joy would not exist were it not for hardship and loss. The apparent bliss of crows standing in the smoke stream of a chimney or spreading their wings over discarded cigarette butts in a railway terminus, may not be because of intoxication, but simply the relief experienced after removal of the fleas which had been driving the birds to distraction. I suspect that a life of uninterrupted pleasure would be no more satisfying for an animal than it would be for a human.

It seems begrudging to award this book only four stars instead of five. I enjoyed it immensely, but these shadowless, too-numerous animals hopping in and out of my consciousness failed to touch my heart in the way that, say, Doris Lessing’s cats did.

Ice Storm

2010-04-13T02:41:00.000-07:00

During the last week of March there was an ice storm such as I have never seen before. For hours sheets of snow were tossed about by a strong wind. From 6 pm cars were stranded on Glenshane Pass a few miles from here and it was 2 am before all the drivers and passengers were rescued and brought to local halls where they spent the night. A photograph taken from the air the following day showed a thin dark line with a single lane of tiny parked cars crossing the white television screen.

Many people lost their electricity supply that evening. Poles were blown down and overhead cables broke under the weight of frozen snow. As I sat beside the fire with the two cats the lights flickered every few seconds, but we were lucky. The power stayed on.

Banjo and Sherpa react differently when they are forced to stay indoors. That night Banjo was restless and repeatedly went to the door asking for it to be opened. When it was, and he was hit by a blast of icy wind he quickly retreated. Sherpa withdrew, as she did during the worst of the winter snow. She showed no interest in food or lying on a warm lap, but curled up on a chair beside the radiator.

Spring Scents

2010-04-10T12:53:00.000-07:00

Spring Scents

In the book, 'Pleasurable Kingdom,' Jonathan Balcombe writes, 'They (animals) live - I suspect - mainly in the present. I wonder about this when animals can have such a powerful sense of smell, and when I know that a smell can drop me instantly into a specific past.The scent of lilac recreates our walk to primary school. Along one stretch the stone wall of a garden towered above us. Hanging over the wall was a lilac bush which in spring diffused a scent from heaven into the air around it. We could have walked along the path that adults chose, but we often preferred to climb over rocks at the base of the wall.Near the school was a canteen from whose tall chimney descended smells unlike those of home cooking. Recently I detected one of those smells when I passed the factory of a local butcher.The smell of a fox transports me to my grandmother's farm where we spent idyllic summer days in childhood. We were walking along a hedge that separated two fields when our cousin stopped. We noticed a strong distinctive smell and she told us a fox had passed that way.Some years ago we visited a folk park and walked around a variety of traditional cottages. From the garden of one a smell arose that was exactly like that in the garden behind my grandmother's farmhouse. It brought me to a sudden stop.The smells of primroses, bluebells, wild garlic, flowering currant, to name a few, connect me to the places where I saw them as a child.I contrast the memory I have of past weather. People say that this winter was the coldest for fifty years, but I have no memory of a harsh winter about fifty years ago.In the photograph Sherpa has found an interesting smell. I wonder if it awakened memories for her.

Labels: cat, scent

Spring Scents

2010-04-10T12:11:00.000-07:00

In the book, 'Pleasurable Kingdom,' Jonathan Balcombe writes, 'They (animals) live - I suspect - mainly in the present. I wonder about this when animals can have such a powerful sense of smell, and when I know that a smell can drop me instantly into a specific past.

The scent of lilac recreates our walk to primary school. Along one stretch the stone wall of a garden towered above us. Hanging over the wall was a lilac bush which in spring diffused a scent from heaven into the air around it. We could have walked along the path that adults chose, but we often preferred to climb over rocks at the base of the wall.

Near the school was a canteen from whose tall chimney descended smells unlike those of home cooking. Recently I detected one of those smells when I passed the factory of a local butcher.

The smell of a fox transports me to my grandmother's farm where we spent idyllic summer days in childhood. We were walking along a hedge that separated two fields when our cousin stopped. We noticed a strong distinctive smell and she told us a fox had passed that way.

Some years ago we visited a folk park and walked around a variety of traditional cottages. From the garden of one a smell arose that was exactly like that in the garden behind my grandmother's farmhouse. It brought me to a sudden stop.

The smells of primroses, bluebells, wild garlic, flowering currant, to name a few, connect me to the places where I saw them as a child.

I contrast the memory I have of past weather. People say that this winter was the coldest for fifty years, but I have no memory of a harsh winter about fifty years ago.

In the photograph Sherpa has found an interesting smell. I wonder if it awakened memories for her.

Caress

2010-04-09T07:49:00.000-07:00

Mysterious Sherpa unusually has been spending the last four nights outside. On the first three of those nights Banjo was also out, but last night he disappeared upstairs at bed time. When I let Sherpa in this morning Banjo was standing near the door. I saw her rub her cheek against his as she walked past, and was surprised. Since both cats were neutered over five years ago, the most we have come to expect from them is mutual tolerance.

When they were kittens they often cuddled up together. I can remember one occasion when John's brother visited with his dog. After they had departed we looked for our two tiny kittens, but although we searched the house, the garden and even went out to the footpath beside the road, there was no sign of either. Worried we returned to the house. I remember standing at the kitchen sink wondering what to do next, when I heard a soft scratching that seemed to come from the table behind me. Pulling out the drawer that was part of the table I found the pair running round among the cutlery. They had climbed on to a chair and found a gap between the top of the drawer and the lower surface of the table.

Purring

2010-04-08T09:47:00.000-07:00

When I went to visit Banjo in his cage at the veterinary clinic he purred loudly. I left him there for the night and went home feeling greatly relieved. when cats purr it means they're happy doesn't it? It was only recently that I learned that cats can also purr when they are injured.

Today I started reading a book by Jonathan Balcombe called 'Pleasurable Kingdom.' In it he mentioned an hypothesis proposed by Elizabeth von Muggenthaler of the Fauna Communication Research Institute in North Carolina. She thinks it is possible that cat purring has therapeutic properties.

I looked up the paper she presented at the 142nd annual Acoustical Society of America, American Institute of Physics, International Conference. In humans, vibrations between 20-140 Hz are therapeutic for:

bone growth/ fracture healing
pain relief/ swelling reduction
wound healing
muscle growth and repair/ tendon repair.

She says that, although it would be very difficult to carry out an investigation on cats to test whether their purring promotes healing, it is well within the bounds of possibility since they create frequencies that fall directly in the range that has been shown to be therapeutic in humans.

Things you don't expect...(4)

2010-03-30T09:52:00.000-07:00

Inability to defend his (or her) territory can be a great source of distress for an infirm cat. Intruders appear and leave their scents on doorposts and window sills. The sick cat looks out and howls helplessly. It was years, rather than months, after Banjo’s operation, before he could once again effectively defend his territory.

Banjo takes his responsibilities very seriously, and we are given the impression that he is carrying out his duties on behalf of the humans as well as the cats in the family. He expects to be rewarded when he knocks loudly to be admitted after time spent patrolling or on guard. Occasionally he demands that Sherpa relieve him. I have seen him come in and walk directly towards her before head butting her. Then she invariably asks to be let out, but returns soon after.

In the presence of an invader, Sherpa can change from a gentle pussy to a feline Amazon. Taking courage from my presence, I have seen her chase after and pounce on a large gib. Fearful for her safety I could only watch as, to the accompaniment of loud squawking, tufts of cat fur rose through the air before the gib vanished through a hole in the hedge.

We will never know for certain how she lost her beautiful tail. The vet who saved her life by amputating the already almost severed tail and dosed her with an antibiotic to treat a large abscess, said she could see on the patient the marks of a cat’s teeth.

Defence of territory can be a costly business.

Things you don't expect (3)

2010-03-25T06:44:00.001-07:00

The time has come to broach the uncomfortable subject of Banjo’s diet. Our male cat feeds almost exclusively on raw beef mince, preferably the cheapest, pot-luck sort with excess fat removed. The meat must come from a certain butcher’s shop and it is a complete mystery to us how he can distinguish it from meat of similar quality bought elsewhere. Perhaps the secret lies in the mincing machine, perhaps not.

Banjo eats in the evening and early in the morning when he is prepared to ingest food he refuses at other times. He knows that at 5am there is no chance of fresh meat. After I have been to the butcher’s, I present him with a little of the older meat he has previously refused alongside some of the fresh meat and he usually eats both. Sherpa regularly prefers older meat to what has been recently minced.

Occasionally both cats enjoy a small piece of liver or a slice of chicken breast that has been for quick sale. They crunch small amounts of desiccated cat food and search for a saucer that contains milk, but this must not contain too much lactic acid. Conventional advice to cat owners is to provide a saucer full of water. Neither of our cats, to the best of my knowledge, has ever been remotely interested in drinking water.

People seeing Banjo are often surprised by his size. ‘He looks like a small dog,’ they say, scolding me. Banjo is a neutered male, a gib, and it is recognised that removal of testes can result in obesity. Activity and metabolism may be reduced, we are told, and a neutered male may eat more because of altered feeding behaviour. Normally a placid and contented animal, our gib can become annoyed when hungry and pouncing on Sherpa is the way his frustration finds expression.

I have learned not to leave cat food outside the back door having discovered that feline trespassers, on finding this bounty, return in hope day after day mewing piteously. On a couple of occasions I surprised Banjo as he stood on the top step outside the door eating processed cat food, all of which he really dislikes. He was defending his territory.

Sometimes I place food in front of both cats and a couple of minutes later find them looking at it while it is still untouched. When I stroke their heads they start to eat. I have sometimes wondered if Banjo, in particular, asks for food when what he really wants is attention and reassurance that he is still loved.

When I am serving food to visitors I can be sure that both cats will appear and expect to be fed. They find usurpers occupying their favourite seats so there is no question of compounding their discomfiture by ignoring them.

I used to believe that animals ate because of a simple biological instinct. Cats have taught me that I was wrong.

Things you don't expect - part 2

2010-03-18T08:23:00.000-07:00

Through no fault of their own cats are not the easiest of patients. When Banjo was discharged after his operation, James, the vet, gave me a packet of antibiotic tablets with instructions that he was to be given two twice daily. It must have come as no surprise to those in the veterinary clinic when I rang up to say that their patient was refusing to take his medication, even though it was buried at the centre of a delicious meatball.

My experience of taking antibiotics at a time when treatment made me abnormally sensitive to smell has made me more sympathetic to cats. My antibiotics smelt so disgustingly of mould, the only way I could take them without being sick was to keep my nose pinched tightly with one hand while putting a tablet in my mouth with the other and immediately washing it down with water.

For most of the ten days following his operation I brought Banjo to the clinic for an injection. After Sherpa’s operation she was given a single injection of a slow-release antibiotic, for which I was deeply grateful.

Things you don't expect when you bring your cat to the vet

2010-03-15T07:16:00.000-07:00

The phone rang one Monday morning while John and I were still in bed. A lady told us that a neighbour of hers had, while walking his dog, found a large charcoal cat that had been hit by a car.

Banjo was mewing pitifully at the mouth of the lane where he had been left. I brought his bed and he managed to climb into it. Sherpa watched as John drove out of the gate, with me sitting in the front passenger seat holding the box with her brother on my knee. I assumed that she must be feeling very distressed.

At the veterinary clinic Banjo was sedated, X-rayed and found to have a broken femur. The following day he had an operation to insert a metal plate and on Thursday he was discharged.

Sherpa came to meet the car. She had been very happy having the house to herself while Banjo was in hospital, but I expected her to feel pleased that her brother was still alive. Instead, when she caught sight of a cat with shaved and stitched legs and that smelt strongly of antiseptics, she hissed and disappeared. Terror kept her away from the patient for several weeks.

When Sherpa in turn had to have her tail amputated, she received no sympathy from Banjo. Her hostility to him during his recovery was fully reciprocated.

Cats are very different to us aren’t they? Since I started to write this I remembered an event from a time when I was twelve and a first-year pupil at grammar school. One Saturday afternoon I walked with a friend to visit someone she knew who was a patient at the local hospital. Years before, I had happily played in the grounds of this hospital while siblings were having arms encased in plaster of Paris, but on this occasion someone was burning rubber and that smell connected with illness disturbed me so much I avoided the road for a long time sfterwards.

The Incident

2010-01-30T11:38:00.000-08:00

To-day, the day after the 150th anniversary of the birth of Anton Chekhov, I listened to one of his stories on BBC Radio7. Titled 'The Incident', it tells how two children, a boy aged 6 and a girl aged 4, wake one morning to discover their cat has had kittens. The offspring of parents wealthy enough to have their children brought up by a nurse and a governess, they are filled with an interest and curiosity not shared by the adults around them. They treat the three blind kittens like toys and as objects for experimentation. They plan a future for each of the little animals and appoint their uncle's dog as the kittens' father. I shall not divulge how the story ends.

Chekhov has a strong opinion about the beneficial effect of pets in the life of children. Animals show patience, fidelity, readiness to forgive and sincerity, he claims. Living with them can have a greater effect on children than what is imparted during formal education.

Goldfinch

2010-01-11T04:23:00.000-08:00

When it thawed during the night making the snow pleasantly slippery, I walked and slid round the house forming small snowballs and throwing them for Banjo to chase. He stayed outdoors when I was driven inside by icy red hands. Before these had warmed, I heard a cat's cry and rushed out fearing that Banjo had injured himself. Rounding a corner I saw him coming towards me with something in his mouth, and followed him back to the steps outside the back door. There he dropped a little bird which I picked up and stroked. It was the first time I had seen a goldfinch and I was astounded by the bright beauty of the feathers which covered its still warm body.

Banjo had brought the dead bird to show me and expected congratulations and, perhaps, reassurance that the bird was safe to eat. He purred while I petted him, feeling sad at the loss of the beautiful goldfinch whose gleaming gold, black and red on a sandy background had made it conspicuous to an accomplished hunter.

Soon I realised that I, a meat eater, was being superficial, in judging the value of a creature by what pleases the eye. No amount of sentimentality on my part can make a bird immortal and, even if cats did not exist, I suspect we would find very few geriatric goldfinches. The weather, disease or other predators might terminate a vulnerable life. I do not have the knowledge to decide which is more desirable; for Banjo to dine on beef or on goldfinch.

Banjo in his element

2010-01-11T03:00:00.000-08:00

Hair-balls

2010-01-08T08:52:00.000-08:00

In 'James Herriot's Cat Stories we read about a large, sleek, handsome neutered male cat who was at home in a tiny, but thriving sweet shop. He sat at the end of the counter (it was the middle of last century), placid and dignified, watching the owner of the shop whom he greatly resembled, serve his customers.

One afternoon Herriot, a vet, was asked to examine Alfred because Geoff, his master, was concerned by his loss of appetite and lack of energy. He could find nothing wrong with the animal and gave him a vitamin injection, but Alfred continued to deteriorate and was put on a course of mixed mineral and vitamin tablets. When these and other drugs and treatments failed to halt the loss of weight, the cat was brought to the surgery, but X-rays and blood tests showed no abnormality.

Alfred began to look gaunt; his fur was lacklustre, his eyes dull. His master too, lost weight and was showing signs of depression, but then, when the animal started to vomit, something was said which provided a clue to the problem. Geoff revealed how, before his illness, Alfred had groomed himself obsessively, and Herriot thought, 'Hair-balls.'

An operation revealed a large, matted hair-ball in the cat's stomach and several smaller ones in other parts of his digestive system. The operation was a major one and recovery of both Alfred and his master took about a month, but this story had a happy ending.

Our Banjo, like Alfred, is a large neutered male with a luxuriant coat. He occasionally regurgitates hair-balls. I have learned that he needs to have his fur combed with a fine comb, especially when he is moulting. Provided I am careful not to pull any matts he might have, he purrs loudly to show his appreciation.

Photographing Sherpa

2010-01-04T10:33:00.001-08:00

Most of us want to look our best when we are having our photograph taken, and Sherpa seems to be no exception. When she saw me with the camera she decided to have a quick clean-up before looking straight at the lens. The three posts below show her doing this.

How many humans do you know who can do this?

2010-01-04T10:33:00.000-08:00

Please be patient (like me). it"ll just take a few more licks

2010-01-04T10:32:00.000-08:00

Wasn't it worth the trouble?

2010-01-04T09:44:00.000-08:00

Paw Tracks in the Moonlight

2010-01-01T05:50:00.000-08:00

Twelve people writing very similar reviews for Amazon lauded this book. We listened to excerpts on BBC Radio 4's 'Book of the Week' and enjoyed the story of the cat, Toby Jug, but I am rarely tempted to buy books featured on 'Book of the Week' and in this case did not make an exception.

The story begins when the author, going outside after a blizzard, heard the scream of an animal in pain. After a search of the neighbourhood he found a silvery grey cat held by a hind leg in a gin trap. While he freed her she scrabbed and bit him and, when she was released she fled. After he had tended his cuts he made up his mind to follow the blood trail from the trap and came to a derelict barn. In the corner of a hay loft he found the cat with two kittens. By the time he reached the vet only one animal was still alive. Denis insisted on bringing this frail kitten home, if only that it might die by his fire, but, contrary to his expectations, the little creature responded to his attempts to feed it using the washed out ink sac of a fountain pen. While he was at work he kept the kitten in a jug beside the fire, hence the name he gave it, Toby Jug.

Toby Jug became Denis O'Connor's companion, slithering around the back seat of his car, being taken for walks in a chiwawa harness, climbing on to the author's shoulder when he felt threatened. He helped himself to a neighbour's tomatoes when his red ball was lost and, occupying a pannier, he went on a trekking holiday.

The book dissolves preconceived ideas about cats. At least some cats are not obsessed with comfort. Like Banjo in his younger days, Toby Jug romps in snow. Neither has he fear of water. In hot weather he likes to cool off in a bucket of it. A book which makes us think twice before we generalise is to be welcomed.

Walking on ice

2009-12-29T06:10:00.000-08:00

While I was walking home I met a man treading carefully on the icy pavement while his two dogs, full of joie de vivre, ran ahead sniffing the slippery surface. Sherpa too is very surefooted in the snow. Banjo, despite his imperfect hind legs has no fear either.

As children we made slides and unafraid slid down them, confident that our sense of balance and cerebellum once attuned would know which way to lean to avoid falling. For animals and young children walking on ice is left to the unconscious. It is when too-clever adults say, 'Watch, you might fall', and sliding comes under the control of the conscious mind, that we really are in danger of injuring ourselves.

Sherpa slighted?

2009-12-23T05:55:00.000-08:00

Sherpa slept in the boiler house the night before last. Why she slept there and not in an armchair beside the fire, on a night when crisp snow covered the ground and it was forecast that the temperature could drop to -4 C, baffles me. Was she feeling unwell, in need of peace? Was she waiting for another cat? When I left Banjo out at an unknown hour in the morning, she had no inclination to come inside and declined the food I offered.

I wonder if she sought solitude because I have been paying more attention to Banjo recently. She even had to get up from my lap the evening before, a few minutes after settling on it when I went to let John in. Perhaps Sherpa feels slighted.

I try to avoid favouring one cat. Banjo is jealous if he feels Sherpa is receiving too much attention. She is aware of this and knows it is wise to leave my lap when he starts to make a scene. Often the first indication I have that he is on his way to the door to be let in, is when she slips down beside me in the armchair.

It is not that Banjo forbids all intimacy between Sherpa and me. Each cat accepts the other is entitled to love and be loved, and it is only when one regards the other’s demands as excessive that redress is needed. His distress is directed outwards, hers inwards.

Now and again we have the very happy situation where all three of us are on the sofa, she on my lap, he resting a paw, or two, or four on my arm, purring loudly.

Last night Sherpa slept in the house. On one side of me.

Doris Lessing on cats

2009-12-21T04:42:00.000-08:00

Read this book in a private place because there may be times when you cannot help weeping. This is a great book, the product of a master storyteller’s remarkable powers of observation, her understanding of animals and people and her superb writing skills.

Decades after the death of a beloved feline childhood companion, and after acquiescing in the necessary but horrific cull of cats on an African farm, Doris Lessing re-embarked on a voyage of cat discovery. Various incarnations of ship’s cat, vain, flirtatious, self-indulgent, neurotic, courageous, grateful, loving, accompanied her and she was present at births and deaths. She watched and recorded matings, friendships and rivalries, mothers teaching kittens, hunting. She tended animals that were injured or became ill and took on board those that were neglected and needed help.

There was a cat that would only eat lightly cooked calves’ liver and lightly boiled whiting, another who seemed devoid of maternal feelings and who once drew attention to herself by speaking in a language of sausages stolen from a neighbour’s house. One travelled twenty miles across the veld, avoiding predators and crossing two rivers, to return to the farmhouse where she was reared. Another risked her life during a tropical thunderstorm rather than abandon the kittens she had given birth to in a disused mineshaft.

Cats vary in the quantity and quality of their intelligence, Doris Lessing discovered. Rufus, who was constantly challenged by adversity, was calculating and survived by living on his wits. Another male had the inquiring mind of a scientist. Telepathic communication when circumstances permit is not ruled out.

It is to the neutered male, Butchkin, alias El Magnifico, that she is most closely drawn. When they are able to sit quietly together in his old age ‘then he subtly lets me know he understands I am trying to reach him, reach cat, essence of cat, finding the best of him. Human and cat we try to transcend what separates us.’

This book is in essence a love story.

Emotions: Fear

2009-12-08T14:20:00.000-08:00

There is a belief that animals do not have emotions and that cats in particular are cold and unemotional. Fear is one of the most basic emotions and essential for self protection. We don’t always recognise fear in cats because their fears often differ from ours.

Our cats, especially Sherpa, are afraid of what might await them when they leave the house. Sometimes they find it necessary to inspect the garden from upstairs windows; often, after a door has been opened, they need to spend some time testing the outside air or the frame of the door for threatening scents before venturing out. Perception of high frequency sounds, inaudible to humans, may also account for some of a cat’s inexplicable behaviour. I once noticed Sherpa become suddenly alert, and going to a window, saw two bats flying nearby.

Both our cats, but not all cats, fear traffic. Even though the footpath at our house is separated from the road by a wide grass verge, walks with the cats come to an abrupt end as they scramble back into the garden when the first car passes. Stationary cars do not terrify them: Sherpa has sunbathed on the roof of mine.

Journeys in cars recall being brought to the vet, being neutered, being operated on. Our local vets and veterinary nurses treated the cats with great kindness and succeeded in saving their lives. Nevertheless, when Banjo returned to convalesce after having a plate inserted in his leg, he was met by a hissing, spitting Sherpa with back arched and fur erect who refused to be in the same room with him for several weeks. Months later, when Sherpa returned with no tail, smelling strongly of veterinary clinic the situation was reversed.

These cat fears I can understand. What seems to me irrational is the way, while alone in the kitchen with me, Sherpa sometimes nervously looks around her before and while eating.

There are situations where cats are fearless when it is natural for humans to feel fear. Sherpa, climbing a tree, races along branches until only a thin twig is supporting her weight. She climbs through an open window on to a window sill high above the ground. And, of course, she and Banjo have no fear whatsoever of spiders or mice. These humans! How irrational they can sometimes be!

Self awareness

2009-12-06T06:08:00.000-08:00

As I came through the bedroom door, Sherpa, who was sitting with her back to me at a corner of the dressing table where two mirrors meet at right angles, turned her head. I have no doubt that she heard me coming and that she also recognised my reflection as me, but did she equate the image of the cat in the mirror as herself? Does she realise that a unique cat we call Sherpa exists and is it she?

We are told that, unlike children older than two years, primates except gorillas, elephants and at least one magpie, cats fail the mirror self recognition test. This puts their self awareness in doubt. I don’t have access to the original research, so I don’t know the age of the cats tested and whether they had experience of mirrors or other reflective surfaces like puddles before being tested. I do know that both Banjo and Sherpa show a calmness when confronted by a cat image in a mirror, that is never apparent when a feline intruder enters their territory.

Their behaviour is very different to that of the blue tit which happened to see its reflection in the wing mirror of my car. The small bird undoubtedly saw, very close to where it stood, what looked like another member of its species, which failed to fly off when threatened. Bewildered it flew to the back of the mirror, found no bird there and returned to the reflective side. Repeated movements from one side to the other failed to establish a connection between the image and itself. Mirror self recognition was too difficult a problem for the undoubted problem solving abilities of this blue tit.

Mirror self recognition is only one aspect of self awareness. Full self awareness is something which I, and presumably the cats, have yet to achieve.

Toys

2009-11-29T11:38:00.000-08:00

Sherpa once found a broad elastic band. Picking it up with her teeth she anchored the other end with her paw and pulled. When the band had stretched a little she let it go, before picking it up again and repeating the experiment. This she did several times, stretching the elastic a bit more each time. When the band finally broke she ate it.

When Banjo and Sherpa played with the toys I gave them, individual differences emerged. Banjo favoured a toy I made by attaching feathers found in the garden to lengths of chocolate box ribbon. It was rendered especially stimulating by the soundtrack I provided, a rapid ‘chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck,’ as I whipped it along the floor and through the air.

Like Banjo, around human bedtime, Sherpa experienced a surge of energy and expressed a desire to play. She too enjoyed the feathered ribbons, but preferred the dainty silver balls, made from the foil in which chocolate wafer biscuits are wrapped, for the ball games we devised.

As soon as Banjo succeeded in sinking his claws into a ribbon, he held on as tenaciously as a dog would, and the game ended. Once I found him, like a large, charcoal coloured, furry hen, incubating a silver ball. Sherpa knows, consciously or unconsciously, that it is sometimes necessary to let go to allow participation in something more advanced. Wise little animal!

Play

2009-11-28T11:17:00.000-08:00

Banjo and Sherpa are litter mates, brother and sister. Watching them as kittens at play, I could recognise many of the games we played as children; tig, wrestling, climbing, jumping, sliding, hide-and -seek. They challenged themselves to walk along narrow ledges at a height, and once we saw them bounding through long grass like a pair of springbok. They were much more adept at tree climbing than we were, and occasionally would stage dazzling displays of aerobatics for our benefit, basking in the applause they received.

Along with displays of skill we witnessed displays of emotion. Sherpa, more agile and more daring, had an air of superiority which infuriated Banjo and led him to thwart her in any way he could, and her to conceal her talents in his presence. We think such behaviour is unique to human schools and, when discovered, deserves to be reported.

More than once I heard an expert declare that only humans indulged in play as adults. This is not true. Although not as frisky as the young, adult dogs and cats still enjoy play.

Stretching himself

2009-11-26T12:39:00.000-08:00

It is hard to ignore Banjo when he is agitated. One evening about a week ago it was obvious he was. Our seven-year-old neutered tom cat uses very clear sign language to signal his wants, and what was then on his mind was not food, urination, defecation, or defence of territory. He was at the side of the sofa looking upwards. Then he was standing on his hind legs, had anchored his claws in the upholstery of the armrest, and, with a cry, was struggling to pull his body upwards. At first it looked as if he might not succeed, but he persevered and reached the comfort of the sofa by climbing over the armrest.

He has no difficulty getting up or down from the sofa or a bed by the conventional route. Banjo was challenging himself as he had challenged himself a short time before to get down from the sofa via the armrest. Our cat was the victim of a car accident which almost cost him his life. His left hind leg contains a metal plate and an X-ray of his right hind leg showed a dislocated joint. For some time after the accident his gate resembled that of a lizard, but he relearned how to stand upright and gradually to explore more of his territory.

The motivation to do all this came from Banjo, and I have developed respect for the wisdom and courage with which he carries out this stretching of himself. He is pleased when we notice and praise his achievements.

Since we started to share our home with two cats, we have had to abandon many of the assumptions our culture holds about this animal species. I hope to write more about Banjo and Sherpa in the days to come.

Flatworm Mystery Solved (perhaps)

2009-11-22T06:02:00.000-08:00

After an absence of up to four months, flatworms, betrayed by their glistening mucus, appeared in dribs and drabs in early November. Over a week I collected seven New Zealand flatworms (Arthurdendyus triangulatus). The plastic basins resting on mossy tarmac under which these sought refuge also yielded one Australian flatworm, (Australoplana sanguinea), which resembled the New Zealand flatworms but was the colour of apricots.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first Australian flatworm I have seen. On the Habitas Alien Invasive Species website it is stated that these animals are normally dispersed through the horticultural trade. Around the time I noticed both species of flatworm, winter-flowering plants were appearing in a local supermarket and I bought (in dribs and drabs) eight very pretty potted cyclamens. These had been obtained in the fruit and vegetable market in Belfast and originated in Northern Ireland, I was told.

Vermicomposting 2

2009-09-27T07:55:00.000-07:00

Having come across more earthworms than New Zealand flatworms recently, I thought I might risk trying to make my own vermicompost. Kits are produced by a firm in Co Down. They are not cheap, but what Clive Edwards and Norman Arancon have to say about the product in Earthworm Ecology makes me willing to invest.

The kilogram of tiger worms, fed on kitchen waste supplemented by material from the garden, should provide me with a substance similar to peat with ‘excellent structure, porosity, aeration, drainage and moisture-holding capacity.’ It should contain adequate nutrients in a form readily taken up by plants.

Evidence has been accumulating that vermicomposts contain magic ingredients not found in commercial growth media with equal nutrient composition. These are plant hormones and plant-growth regulating substances, probably produced by the bacteria, fungi and other microbes whose activity earthworms increase, and probably stabilised by their combination with humic acids in which vermicomposts are rich. Hence most plants growing in them germinate faster, grow faster and produce better yields.

As if this were not amazing enough, it has been shown that vermicomposts, because of the diversity and activity of the microbes living in them, prevent a range of fungal diseases in a range of plants. Even more mysteriously, several researchers found they conferred protection against insect pests, including aphids and caterpillars. Other researchers reported decreases in plant-parasitic nematodes in their presence.

If this sounds too good to be true, evolution has been around a lot longer than man-made chemicals.

Vermicomposting 1

2009-09-25T05:35:00.000-07:00

Recently I received an appeal from a charity set up by a fairtrade company. They planned to raise money for Indian women intent on setting up businesses to sell compost to farmers producing cotton organically.

By chance, just before receiving this appeal, I had been reading a chapter in Earthworm Ecology, written by Radha D. Kale of the University of Agricultural Sciences in Bangalore. It was about vermicomposting in Asia. Vermicomposting is the process of adding a suitable species of epigeic worm (epigeic worms are found in, or just below the litter layer) to organic matter. Kale believes, ‘the whole human race will benefit if vermicomposting technology is accepted and adopted.’

The Green Revolution came to India in 1961, staving off famine with its high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice, but the ever increasing amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides required to maintain crop yields left a legacy of degraded soil. In 1984 a vermicomposting technology was made available by the University of Bangalore but few farmers were interested because at that time fertilizers were heavily subsidised. By 1990 farming using chemical fertilizers and pesticides had become uneconomical and the advantages of vermicomposts, produced at minimum expense, were becoming apparent. By 2000 the technology had spread throughout India and into Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. It is included in the curriculum of Indian secondary schools, has spawned a cottage industry and has proved invaluable for the removal of organic waste generated in residential areas of cities. The Khadi Village Industries Commission supports farmers financially to establish vermicomposting centres in villages.

Regarding the appeal, I don’t have the wisdom to decide which is better: to send money to the charity, or to let Indians continue to do without interference what they appear to be doing so well. Perhaps, in their concern for future generations, they have something to teach us.

Himalayan balsam

2009-09-17T11:56:00.000-07:00

Sunday’s walk to the river where she engaged in doggy water sports was the highlight of Zoey’s week. It was during one of these walks, probably in the late eighties, that I first spotted Himalayan balsam. The flowers, shaped like policemen’s helmets and ranging in colour from pale lilac to dark violet, dangled from slender peduncles and swayed in the breeze. As autumn progressed I watched their fertilized ovaries turn into five-ribbed green flasks. These became fatter until a point was reached when the slightest touch caused them to burst open along lines of weakness between the ridges. The five sections separated, each coiling like a tight green snail shell, and ten black seeds were catapulted out. To me this was a rare, interesting and exotic plant. I wanted to bring it back to surprise others, but once it lost connection with its water supply, it quickly wilted and the seed capsules lost their potency.

Zoey died, and, without the gentle, intelligent animal, there was no reason to walk among thistles along that straight, narrow stretch of silent, brown water. Himalayan balsam was spreading and became included in lists of alien, invasive species.

Last week, taking advantage of warm September sunshine after a summer of grey clouds and rain, John and I brought cameras to the river. The grass along the bank had been trampled and mined with pats by a herd of cows that had recently grazed there. The place had been transformed. A silver sally had grown on one side of the bridge. Its leaves glinted in the sun. Further along the bank two exotic trees, one with glossy dark green, the other with lighter palmate leaves, intertwined at the water’s edge. Himalayan balsam was present, but not abundant. It clung in small clumps to the vertical river side of the bank, but grew more vigorously around a drain that emptied into the river.

Yesterday we took the canal walk from Toome down to Lough Neagh, looking out for Himalayan balsam. Along the canal and on the shores of the lake we could see none, but there were clumps in swampy ground. The flowers produce copious nectar and John photographed a bee visiting one.

Grey Squirrel

2009-07-29T12:14:00.000-07:00

The stray marmalade cat had given no evidence of hunting skills, but having seen a grey squirrel with its back to him, he could not resist jumping down from the window sill and moving in the rodent’s direction. Like a child playing One, two, three red lights, as long as the squirrel appeared to be oblivious to him he sneaked up on it in all his orange obviousness, but when it seemed about to turn its head he froze. The squirrel let him come close enough to pounce before dropping the toadstool and darting up the trunk of the nearest tree.

I have to admire an animal that runs nonchalantly along a twig as high above the ground as the roof of a two-storey building, and then drops, to land unerringly on a slender twig far below. Or, that leaps across the gap between two trees unconcerned by the roar of traffic on the road below. Or, picks up fungi to eat from ground where the Deathcap grows.

Norman Hickin, author of Irish Nature, is one of the few people prepared to allow that the grey squirrel has ‘many endearing ways’. Political correctness demands that we think of it as the wicked persecutor of the lovable red squirrel. To the best of my knowledge, grey squirrels did not displace red squirrels from the trees around our house. I have never seen the latter here.

In 1988, when Graham d’Arcy was writing his Pocket Guide to the Animals of Ireland, foresters, (horror of horrors), were shooting large numbers of red squirrels as pests because they nibbled the shoots and stripped the bark of trees in conifer plantations. There they were considered to do more damage than greys.

A grey squirrel was the main suspect when, some years ago, I noticed that part of the frame of our kitchen window had been gnawed. I split a red chilli and rubbed the juice into the wood. Damage to the windows ceased.

I had two close encounters with the alien species. The first was in the garden one June, when I went to see if any strawberries had ripened. Under a net I used to protect the fruit from blackbirds, a squirrel sat on its haunches with a large juicy, but not yet red strawberry between its fore paws. On the second occasion I disturbed a squirrel as it rested on the carpet beside an open window. Both times my amazement was met with fear and the rapid disappearance of the animal.

An alien species is defined as one that has been introduced from another country and later become naturalised, but the word ‘alien’ can explode within us, like the seed capsule of Himalayan balsam. Its seeds invade our emotions with unintended meanings, so the unfortunate organism, which was originally introduced by humans, is seen as unfamiliar, disturbing, even distasteful.

We do not encourage grey squirrels, but neither do we apologise for the pleasure we take in watching the antics of this daring animal. Perhaps, again this year, when the beech trees have shed their leaves the bushy-tailed acrobat will gladden our hearts and raise our spirits.

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Cherry Pecking

2009-07-17T08:36:00.001-07:00

There is a cherry tree by the hedge. In April, as the blackbird seduced with pure slow notes tinged with melancholy, white blossom burst from the branches.

In June we stood on the path and looked up. The cherry was marketed as a compact variety, but defied all efforts to restrain its growth and reached a height of twenty feet, or thereabouts. High above us long branches were lined with immature fruit. It was a very heavy crop.

The fruit continued to swell, and in early July I took four black plastic bags, put a few of the lower branches in each and waited. As I feared the uncovered green fruit began to disappear. More than once I passed the tree to hear a flapping of wings among the leaves and see a hen blackbird fly into the hedge.

In mid-July I removed the black bags to reveal plump, gleaming cherries the ripest of which were dark as wine. Above them the branches had been stripped of fruit. As I put the luscious fruit into a tub I heard a loud squawk from the hedge.

Biting through tight skin into juicy flesh, I reflected on how amazing it was that a single bird could consume such an enormous amount of fruit in such a short time and not suffer from belly ache. Perhaps an active substance could be isolated from the blackbird’s digestive system, patented and sold to travellers.

An observation a couple of days later caused me to abandon this idea. There were cherries lying in unexpected places distant from the tree. Perhaps the hen blackbird was not the greedy guts I imagined her to be, but a devoted mother bringing food to hungry chicks.

Earthworms, insects, seeds and berries, it is stated in Wikipedia, are the food of blackbirds. During the breeding season protein-rich animal material is the grub of preference. But, what if no earthworms can be found, as happens in areas where the New Zealand flatworm has become established? Are the young then fed mainly on fruit and seeds?

One day genetic engineering may bring us cherry-flavoured flatworms which will mate with natural-flavoured ones to produce cherry-flavoured offspring. What a treat they would be for baby blackbirds!

A Toast

2009-07-13T01:57:00.000-07:00

Last month I stood beside a shrub that bore an enormous number of showy flowers. The base of the petals of each flower united to form a funnel of a very pale lilac colour. Into each of the five petals the funnel sent rays of pale lilac which were edged with deeper lilac. This background colour was interrupted on the topmost petal by an area of small blocks of yellow orange that had spread to touch the neighbour on either side and converged on the lip of the funnel.

From the shrub came a soft hum as bees worked one flower after another. They returned day after day, honey bees and bumble bees with pollen baskets white and bulging. By mid-July most of the flowers have withered, but the few that remain still attract insect pollinators.

And the name of the shrub? Rhododendron, the genus of plants which is mentioned on the same website as the earthworm-devouring New Zealand flatworm. Rhododendron ponticum, considered to be a forestry weed in lime-free areas and an alien invasive species, is still regarded as foreign although it was brought here as long ago as the eighteenth century.

Until recently I was under the impression that there were only a few species of rhododendron and that all lilac-flowered species were invasive. Loathe to question the experts, I watched with disbelief as the lilac-flowered rhododendrons in our garden stubbornly refused to invade and left invasion to elder, raspberry, blackberry, Veronica, ash and St John’s wort.

Yesterday I consulted the Reader’s Digest Encyclopaedia of Garden Plants and Flowers. Far from there being only a few species of rhododendron, the number exceeds 500 and includes the azaleas. Perhaps the definition of species was different in 1987.

Along with the bees I propose a toast to this attractive genus of plants, of which at least 499 species pose no threat to the countryside, or at least no threat compared to those rampantly invasive species, buildings and tarmac. Please raise your glass of nectar.

The Mystery Deepens

2009-06-21T09:12:00.000-07:00

Arthurdendyus triangulatus No 20 was smaller than average. Wanting to see if it would find its way back to the plastic basin, I lifted it and placed it on the centre of three tiled steps which were nearby. As it was uncurling, its head end, which was a much lighter tan colour, became as thin as the lead of a pencil. This end was repeatedly raised a couple of millimetres above the tile before being lowered again, while it sensed the direction in which to move. Leaving a mucus trail which quickly dried, it first circled towards the edge of the tile before continuing in a straight line towards a wall. This was not the most direct route towards the basin.

I killed the flatworm and continued to hunt for slugs. I was really surprised to find a small earthworm under a black plastic flower pot. This was 1m from where I had put A. triangulatus No 20. Travelling at 17m per hour, the flatworm could have found both shelter and a meal in 3.5 minutes. It seemed unaware of both.

It seems unlikely that the flat worms, on their journey to the plastic basin, cross the steps, and more likely that they travel over, or through, the liverwort, silky wall feather moss and the small, prostrate, white-flowered weed which I am unable to name, at the edge of the bottom step.

More About the Mysterious Alien

2009-06-15T06:17:00.000-07:00

Each time I find a New Zealand flatworm, or more usually two, under the plastic basin that sits on mossy tarmac at the corner of the house, I want to reinstate the Theory of Spontaneous Generation. Before resorting to this a few other theories need to be ruled out. One is that the moss conceals the opening of a tunnel which leads through the centre of the Earth to New Zealand. Another is that a Terricolan Internet exists through which A. triangulatus can book a few days in a quiet spot for undisturbed copulation. The most difficult theory to rule out, but which still stretches credulity, is the one woven from the available scientific facts: the flatworm manages to find the basin using its sense organs, nervous system and muscles.

A triangulatus can move at 17m per hour using the layers of circular and longitudinal muscle which lie beneath its thin ciliated epidermis. The slime it produces protects it from abrasion so it is undaunted by rough tarmac. I suspect its forays take place mostly at night. Because of its disgusting slime it appears to have no Irish predators apart from ground beetles, rove beetles and humans, but it depends on maintaining a moist epidermis to absorb oxygen and to eliminate the waste products of its metabolism, viz carbon dioxide and ammonia.

With their small pigment-cup eyespots we can’t expect flatworms to have a pictorial view of the world, although they can, presumably, distinguish light from dark. They have sensory pits on either side of their head, so it is likely they are attracted to earthworms by their irresistible aroma. What attracts them to moss under basins with leeks growing in them is anybody’s guess.

Once A. triangulatus finds itself in contact with its prey, out comes the reversible, muscular, pumping, enzyme-producing pharynx which until now has lain sheathed on the ventral side of the animal. The unfortunate earthworm is wrapped in a sticky secretion that is derived from slime and, perhaps, from the rhabdites, dark-staining, rod-shaped bodies found in the epidermal cells. This secretion is slightly acid and its enzymes may soften the earthworm’s cuticle and begin digestion before the prey is sucked into the flatworm’s three-branched, cul-de-sac of a digestive system. The mouth of A. triangulatus also acts as its anus.

If food is unavailable, flatworms begin to consume their own organs, starting with unlaid eggs, proceeding through the yolk glands to the rest of the hermaphrodite reproductive system. Next to provide sustenance is the parenchyma, cells that lie between the epidermis and the gut. After that the gut is broken down, then the muscles. The epidermis and the nervous system alone are spared. In this way A. triangulatus can survive for a year without food. When this becomes available again the lost organs regenerate and the flatworm returns to its normal size.

A lesser degree of specialisation can have its advantages.

How to make life easier for yourself and your earthworms

2009-05-27T05:35:00.000-07:00

‘Lawn’ is a euphemism for the grassy area that almost encircles the house where we live. It is not the uniformly green carpet woven from one family of plants that is the ideal of perfectionists. Moss competes with grass for the available space and is sometimes pulled up and left in withering heaps by exploring magpies, but I welcome the primroses that have managed to establish themselves, the violets that grow abundantly, the white centred baby blue flowers of germander speedwell, daisies and white clover with its nitrogen fixing root nodules. I look forward to the edible fungi, the penny buns and the puff balls, and the toadstools that slugs find more appetising than our lettuces.

We used to treat this green like a lawn, mowing it regularly and emptying the contents of the lawn mower basket on to a compost heap. This inevitably led to a deterioration in the condition of the grass, so we fed it using mineral fertilizer. The result was almost miraculous, as I realised when I staggered under heavier and more frequent loads of potential earthworm food to the compost heap.

At a time when it was beginning to dawn on us that the Earth’s resources of fossil fuels were finite, I was struck by the absurdity of using fossil fuel dependent mineral fertilizers to grow luxuriant grass which would need even more fossil fuel to cut. The lawn was put on a no-fertilizer diet, but gradually moss and lichen succeeded the thinning grass. After wet weather the lichen became slippery, and I was only saved from an undignified slide by John’s impatience with all things horticultural. When he volunteered to endure the boredom of mowing grass, it was on condition that the basket was removed from the mower. The result was a revelation. Most of the grass dried quickly and soon disappeared. I could see that this was the way forward. We now leave the cut grass to the decomposers, the condition of the green has steadily improved, and if there are any earthworms thrusting below the surface, they should find palatable food.

There was something else I needed to remedy, the pH of the soil. A light dusting of lime should not go amiss. That done, and by continuing to search for New Zealand flatworms in their favourite congregating place, I hope I done a little to help earthworms in their battle for survival.

Arthurdendyus triangulatus

2009-05-17T04:12:00.000-07:00

When I wrote the last piece I had seen A. triangulatus only a couple of times in my entire life, and not recently. It was when Arthurdendyus was still called Artioposthia triangulata. Then, on an expedition to find out what was eating my pansy buds, I found one among assorted slugs, woodlice, millipedes and ground beetles under a plastic basin. It was curled up like a miniature slice of frilly edged, grey Swiss roll, about a centimeter and a half in diameter and with a dark filling. On paper on the kitchen table it uncurled. It extended its anterior (front) end, then its whole body, becoming a fast moving, narrow, flat band perhaps ten centimeters long. Its dorsal (upper) surface looked black, but was lighter at the edges. Its ventral surface was grey with numerous dark spots concentrated at the sides.

Under a second plastic basin, which was sitting on damp moss that had grown over the tarmac, I found another five. They are very well camouflaged. Sometimes only a thin slick of glistening mucus betrays them. Since early April I have found twelve, and not a single earthworm.

When did you last see a worm?

2009-05-15T11:10:00.000-07:00

I saw an earthworm a couple of months ago. It was visible for a few seconds; a red, ringed anterior end withdrawing into a burrow which had become exposed after I shifted a log. Quickly I replaced the log. Earthworms are very precious in this part of the country.

Charles Darwin published his book, On the Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, in 1881. Struggling against ill health, he devoted his final years to writing about animals which most of us regard as insignificant. The book sold well, better than The Origin of Species. The literate public as well as scientists, not only in England, but much further afield, were interested in worms which were plentiful at that time. Darwin describes how, all around him, he observed an abundance of worms. When he went out at night he saw them ‘crawling about in large numbers.’ If he took a stroll after rain had interrupted a period when the weather was dry, he sometimes found an ‘astonishing number of dead worms.’ On his uncle’s farm he had found ‘a cake of dry earth, as large as my two open hands, which was penetrated by seven burrows, as large as goose quills’. However, although he is sometimes given credit for it, it was not Darwin but Professor Hensen in Germany who made the first estimate of a worm population. He calculated that a hectare of land was home to 133,000 worms. You could expect to find over 50,000 in an acre.

From childhood I remember hours spent in a walled garden. It produced apples and berries and a great variety of vegetables. There were shrubs bordering a lawn, scented roses rambling along wire and a succession of flowers to brighten our days from January until Hallowe’en. In the rich loamy soil worms burrowed, and every cart load of farmyard manure that arrived brought robust immigrants to swell their numbers. Land in the north of Ireland is said to be too acid and too rich in organic matter to sustain a high population of worms, but this is a generalisation.

As the nineteen fifties became the sixties and then the seventies we became aware that worms were becoming scarcer, and began to speculate about the cause. Was it the constant cultivation, the regular digging and weeding, which was disturbing them? Were they filling their gizzards with pellets of the artificial fertilizers we were using instead of manure because they were more convenient and didn’t bring with them troublesome weeds? Was it the herbicides we used to kill the weeds, or the copper sulphate that was put on the soil to prevent potato blight, or the other fungicides and insecticides we sprayed?

Answers to these questions can be found in the key text, Earthworm Ecology by Clive Edwards which is now in its second edition. In this book James P Curry from University College Dublin, has written an excellent chapter which is of great practical value to farmers and gardeners.

Not surprisingly, farmyard manure is an unfailing method of boosting the earthworm population. The plants which provide their food need to have sufficient nitrogen available for their optimum growth, and organic fertilizers are the most natural way of supplying this. Some farmers blame the disappearance of worms on the spreading of slurry on land, but slurry is only toxic if it contains high levels of ammonia and organic salts and is applied heavily. A moderate amount can have an adverse effect after it had been spread, but this effect is only temporary. The worm population recovers and even increases in the long term. To complicate the picture further, pig slurry, like landspread sewage, may contain copper and zinc which are poisonous to most species of worm.

What about mineral fertilizers? Again, moderation seems to be the key. The increased yield of plants is followed by a rise in the population of worms, provided the application of nitrogen is not too heavy and it is remembered that sulphate of ammonia and, to a lesser extent, sulphur coated urea make the soil more acid. Irish worms avoid acid soils and are found where the soil pH ranges between 5.0 and 7.4.

Weed killers? These do not appear to harm worms directly, but they can restrict their food supply, and by removing plant cover from the surface of the soil can make it more liable to dry out. Fungicides and insecticides can be even less innocuous. They vary in the effects they have on worms, but it is consoling to know that it is their repeated use over a long time that is really damaging, and not their occasional spraying.

To account for the almost total extinction of worms from gardens and garden centres in the north of Ireland we need to ask different questions. Have worms, perhaps been wiped out by a mystery ailment? Not much is known about the diseases from which these animals suffer, or the parasites which infect them, but although they play host to a variety of organisms, there is no evidence of a catastrophic epidemic.

There are, of course, animals and birds which feed on worms. Shrews, badgers and foxes include them in their diet, as do blackbirds, thrushes, starlings and magpies. Centipedes and ground beetles eat them too. Worms have co-existed with all of these for thousands, if not millions, of years and I very much doubt if any gardener or farmer considers any of these as a suspect. Sea gulls are also partial to worms. I have seen large flocks miraculously appear on fields over twenty miles inland, that have just been ploughed, but I can’t say I saw any recently. A gardener digging, if lucky, will be accompanied by a single robin.

Lurking in dark, damp places under flower pots, plastic sheets or logs is another predator, one that was first spotted in this country in 1963, after it arrived hidden in the roots of roses and in daffodil bulbs that we imported from New Zealand. It too is a worm, but of the flat variety, related to flukes and tapeworms and even more closely to the small black creatures that can be seen gliding up the glass of a jam jar in water fished out of a ditch. This New Zealand flatworm, Arthurdendyus triangulata, whose photograph and description are found on more than one website, feeds voraciously on earthworms but has been known to survive without food for over a year. So far no attempts to eradicate it have proved successful and it has spread to Scotland, the north of England and even the Faroe Islands. In Ireland it is widespread north of a line that stretches from Donegal Bay to Carlingford Lough. What limits its spread to other areas is the temperature of the soil. Soil temperatures above 23℃ are lethal to it. In its country of origin it is only found in South Island. The soils of North Island are too warm for it.

Today I walked past a grassy place and noticed an abundance of Lady’s smock where previously it was very rare. Lady’s smock is an attractive flower and provides food for Orange-tip butterflies, but it is a plant that thrives in marsh. It is unwise to jump to conclusions, but I can’t help wondering whether the absence of worms and their burrows is having an affect on the drainage and aeration of this soil. Darwin had a great appreciation of the part these animals, play in maintaining soil fertility. Although they are small, he noted, they ‘possess great muscular power.’ He wasn’t the person who first estimated the number of earthworms in soil, but he did measure the rate at which they added vegetable mould to its surface. His figures are just as astounding. ‘In many parts of England,’ he wrote, ‘a weight of more than ten tons of dry earth annually passes through their bodies and is brought to the surface on each acre of land.’ I saw an earthworm a couple of months ago. It was visible for a few seconds; a red, ringed anterior end withdrawing into a burrow which had become exposed after I shifted a log. Quickly I replaced the log. Earthworms are very precious in this part of the country.