The ospreys dallied a few weeks longer this year.
They’re usually gone by the third week in September. But then, 2025 was a banner year.
One day I counted nine of them, diving, fishing, then transporting the catch back to the chicks who eagerly await their diet of live sushi. I’d never seen more than four fishing together. Nine was almost overwhelming.
With their departure, a familiar sense of foreboding has returned. It will be April before I see them again. I’ve experienced that same feeling every year since the pandemic began.
Of course I shake it off as autumn, that season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, melds into early winter. If you make a living from the arts you have need of a robust optimism.
It’s no business for the weak of heart. It runs in the family. My granny lived with my paternal grandfather on a hundred acres of farmland almost within sight of the spires of Wexford town.
She had married well but was from sailor stock and always retained a large part of her townie nature, replete with superstitions and nautical lore.
She loved birds too. Her favorites were swallows, and she was comforted by the mud nests they built in the eaves of her tall house.
However, when September drew to a close, so too did her sense of foreboding grow, as swallows from near and far gathered on the telegraph wires that snaked down her avenue towards the road.
My grandfather, a somewhat somber man, had learned over the years to remain silent while his wife fretted about the imminent departure of the swallows.
She watched through her large kitchen window as October days ached by and Wexford’s biting east winds grew stronger. And then one day, at the sound of a great whoosh, she would run outside as her spring and summer companions departed.
My grandfather would barely look up from his Independent or Financial Times.
A swallow that is perhaps thinking about flying south again.
Still, he would sigh with relief – the gathering tension would halt now and dissipate over the following weeks, until her only mention of swallows would be, “I wonder will they return early next year.”
Isn’t it odd how natures are passed on from generation to generation no matter how far away from the original clan you’ve strayed?
I sometimes stop in surprise as I see one of my own sons throw a look across the room, the very image of a long dead uncle that he has never even met. And so it goes with the ospreys. Like my granny I wonder if they’ll return early.
They’ve been known to stray up north from Florida or Mexico soon after St. Patrick’s Day. Is it age, or the purposeful instability caused by the current president, that deepens the palpable sense of foreboding that seems to have settled on the land?
I have little respect for his policies or general carryon, but I have to admit that the Trump/Miller/Vought strategy of” flooding the zone” has been highly effective.
Even for a political junky like myself who reads the Times and Journal every day, I can’t keep up, and in fact now often leave newspapers unopened and favorite news shows unwatched.
It’s too much, the brain can’t take it all in. I meet people every day who are retreating into their shells. This president who must dominate every news cycle is winning.
Or is he? I chanced to watch about five minutes of his recent speech to the United Nations. It was staggering in its assumptions and conclusions.
“Green energy is a scam, renewable energy is not strong enough to fire up the plants that you need to make your country great; oil, gas and beautiful clean coal are the answer.”
As for the transformation of the planet we see all around us: “Climate change itself is the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world!”
Thank you, Mr. President, more speeches like that, sir! With elections coming next year, we need such rants to rouse us from our benign somnolence. However, we’ve gone far beyond a battle between two bickering political parties.
We have an urgent, even existential, need for a return to some form of national sanity before the ospreys return in 2026.
