October 03, 2004
The Occasional Meadow
A hard rain’s going to fall - Turlough forms in Craughwell, east of Galway city.
The rain has been falling almost constantly for the last fortnight. This weekend, there was lightning, hailstones, winds and lots and lots of rain. The hoped-for Indian summer hasn’t appeared, and we are being hurried, with indecent haste, headlong towards Winter. The evenings have shortened dramatically, (not helped by the rain clouds) and the trees have begun to light up with autumn colour, the leaves glowing in their death throes. The only saving grace has been the temperature - for all the wintery gloom, it’s still quite warm which means that the grass is still growing strongly, and the flowers that haven’t been hammered into the ground from rain or hail are still flowering in defiance of the receding year.
The turloughs are beginning to fill. What once were meadows are beginning to disappear, as puddles become floods and eventually grow to small lakes. The water, as it expands from the centre, will evict the meadow wildlife, and an entirely new set of tenants will take up residence for the winter. Migrating birds, from frostier climes, will spend their winters nesting and feeding on these temporary lakes, often protected by the small islands that form from hillocks surrounded by the flood waters. It is a wonderous sight to stand at the edge of a turlough in the twilight of a winter’s day, the sky splattered with fire-tinged clouds and the sky filled with clouds of birds; the whoosh of flocks suddenly taking flight and swooping across the water with the perfect synchronisation that only millions of years of evolution can bestow, and the cacophony of thousands of birds whooping, crying, calling and crowing, all having their say before bedtime. In spring, the birds will heed their instincts and begin to migrate back to their summer feeding grounds. They leave behind receding waters. Though some turloughs remain as small lakes all year round, others will disappear completely. Summer meadows appear, to be gratefully colonised by flora and fauna alike.
Photo taken of dry turlough in early August.
These occasional meadows are of interest to the human colonisers too. Where the expanse of the turlough encompasses more than one farm, the land that appears in the summer must be shared. In the case of the turlough pictured, the meadow is commonage and administered by a committee of interested farmers.
Same view of turlough, Saturday.
Posted by Monasette at October 3, 2004 11:24 PM