THE morning cloak of mist lingering among dense woodland, on the first day of September, highlighted 'meteorological' summer's end and the ponderous transition towards autumn.
This day also traditionally marks the beginning of the new school year, with all the attendant nervousness experienced by pupils, staff and parents, about to encounter change and embrace new challenges ahead.
Changes too in the natural world are evident all around as banks of colourful flowers fade, swallows gather, and while trees begin to shed the first of their leaves, arching brambles offer clusters of swelling blackberries through the hedgerows.
Also at this time, clumsy daddy long-legs flounder around in our houses, drawn in by human light, on darkening evenings. As our earth leans back and light shifts, our landscape, in the words of John Clare gradually, "wears a changing hue".
Although much of our flora prepares to wind down, birds and animals must continue the task of surviving in the months to follow. With most young now dispersed from their families, resident birds will forage, often in groups to build up their reserves for the shortening days ahead.
I was reminded of this last week after seeing a small group of long-tailed tits busily work their way through the garden. While normally appearing in larger flocks of 20 or more in winter, this party of five were still a welcome sight as they flitted through the thinning canopies of birch, ash and cherry, searching for small spiders and grubs.
The high-pitched calls announced their nearness, before the small, rounded bodies and distinctive long 'lollipop' tails became visible dancing through the branches before bouncing on to the next tree. A common and widespread breeding species in woodland thickets and hedges throughout Ireland, Aegithalus caudatus has a black and white head, with short beak, pinkish breast, dark wings and long tail edged with white.
In his poem Emmonsail's Heath, a place not far from the village where John Clare was born, the poet writes of the birds as "coy bumbarrels" which "hang on little twigs and start again". The bird has numerous local dialect names in England and Scotland with 'bumbarrel' and others such as 'bush oven', 'feather poke' and 'pudding bag', all thought to come from its intricate dome-shaped nest of wool, moss and lichens.
Although the bird is commonly grouped in bird guides with members of the tit family, great, coal and blue, long-tailed tits are in fact from a different grouping, 'bush-tits' which inhabit environments across much of Europe and Asia.
David Cabot, in his book Irish Birds (2004), notes that Meantán earrfhada - which translates directly as long-tailed tit - will 'assist' with the nest of a relative if its own has been lost through predation or some other reason.
This small group of birds soon moved swiftly on from my trees and in the weeks ahead they will be joined by more of their own kind, swelling the gathering considerably. Long-tailed tits, like many other small species, can suffer high mortality in very cold weather and to counter this they often roost tightly together to keep warm.
Just hours before finishing this piece, I came across more evidence autumn is nudging ever closer when encountering a woolly bear caterpillar trundling across a country lane with its dense coat of long chestnut-coloured hairs.
Frequently seen now traversing roads and open ground in search of somewhere safe to pupate, these caterpillars will spin a cocoon in low-lying vegetation before finally emerging as attractive garden tiger moths.
As the nights draw in, it feels as Shelley says, we're in the "breath of Autumn's being".
