October brings a spectacular season

The other evening, as I walked along the shore, I was fascinated by the iridescent green marking on the wing of a duck sleeping head-under-wing on a sandbank. Hi-vis? Yes! It shone like sunlight through Moldavite (more of this below) or sunlight on an emerald set in old gold. It was, of course, simply the sun catching the speculum wing feathers of a teal, but nothing I have seen, man- or nature-made, can be compared with its intensity. It was unique and striking, a beacon two hundred yards away from where I stood.

The Icelanders are back in the thousands, the long-legged, elegant Black-tailed Godwits, with their slim, pink, black-tipped bills and black tails so distinctive when seen in flight. Their cousins are also here, Bar-tailed Godwits, back from the Scandinavian and Russian tundra where they bred in summer. In addition, we have the flotillas of widgeon, the drakes with russet-red heads and pink foreheads; they summered in Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia. I hope they had a summer as good as ours.

The Indian summer continues. On Sunday October 12, as we drove through the Cork gaeltacht at Ballingeary, we saw cattle standing knee high in the river, cooling off. Cooling off in October? Nearby, the holly trees were laden with berries; holly berries, haws and reddening leaves lit up the ditches, and along the bay, blue sea asters were in bloom with their attendant clientele of shining hoverflies, and shiny, metallic-green bottle flies, beautiful if not welcome indoors. They were enjoying, so to speak, “the last flowers of summer”.

On the TV weather maps, I saw rain clouds over central Europe last week, and the Sumava forests in Czech would have been quite different than when we visited. In bright sunshine, we went to the town of Krumlov, and there, amongst the crenellated palaces and ancient streets, visited the Moldavite Museum.

If, when you visit Czech, you see a man or woman with a headlight digging in a field at midnight, do not assume that they are burying their grandmother or the family jewels. In fact, they may be digging for ‘jewels’, in the form of moldavite, a unique gemstone, 99% of which is found in Bohemia.

The ‘flower-burst’ pieces of this olive-green/bottle-green translucent glass are (as defined above) spectacular, although large scale displays are rare. These were formed 14.5 million years ago when an asteroid one kilometre in size crashed into the Earth at a speed 70,000 km/h. Shards of rock and meteorite, melted by the impact, were flung skyward and cooled before falling to earth in this new material, moldavite. Most scattered around the river Vltava (Moldau in German) near my son’s home. Where water has carried the shards from the original — and richer — ‘strewnfields’, the moldavite is found in alluvial deposits.

Prized for cut gemstones in late 19th century, it has enjoyed recent demand from New Age acolytes who believe it to have come directly from the cosmos, ‘the gemstone born from the stars’, and to have healing properties. Inherently a limited phenomenon, mining moldavite without a licence is illegal. The last remaining legal mine in the Czech Republic will shortly close; there will be almost no gemstone quality moldavite left in the ground. Hence the outlaw midnight diggers, tunneling to a depth of some 3m to 6m where ancient alluvial deposits lie.

I must admit that on our way back from Krumlov, we pulled over on a country road and, all together, with grandchildren enthusiastically in tow, set off across a ploughed field in the glorious evening sunlight, eyes focused on the brown earth hoping for the glint of a gemstone.

We had no luck, of course, but were satisfied with the souvenir slivers we’d bought at the museum. Who knows, they may raise our cosmic consciousness, not a bad thing, I’m sure. “Beam me up, Scotty!” as the slogan goes.