North Atlantic Skyline » salthill promenade

Gulls Aloud

John Smyth — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 00:45:05 +0000

I was standing on Salthill Promenade just after sunrise, sipping a cappuccino, 2 weekends ago when I noticed a bit of a fuss at the water’s edge, just below where I was standing. A family of herring gulls were on the shore, and the juvenile [the mottled brown one in the picture above] was making a lot of noise. One of the parents had just caught a starfish and junior was hoping to get some. When the bird was younger, its parents would have fed it by regurgitating recently caught food and the bird had learned that pecking at a parent’s beak might produce a meal. Not any more.

The juvenile harried, wheedled and screeched, trying to get a bite at the starfish in the other gull’s mouth but didn’t get a sniff of it (it would have got an even more aggressive response if it had approached a gull that it wasn’t related to). It had to watch while the parent swallowed the starfish whole, which required quite a bit of gulping and more than a few mouthfuls of seawater to digest what must have been a prickly meal.

The Final Frontier

John Smyth — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 23:39:50 +0000

Ok, so it’s not the captain’s chair from Star Trek’s Enterprise, but if you want to explore the Galaxy, a fold-up chair on the beach in Salthill isn’t a bad way to start (and a bit cheaper than the Hubble telescope). To the right is the diving board at the end of Salthill Prom, and just above the chair is the outline of the Milky Way, just about visible over the glare of the streetlights from the Prom.

Even Trashcans get the Blues

John Smyth — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 23:15:29 +0000

The facial expression on the trashcan [one of a series along Salthill Promenade] seems to sum up the mood on a wet and windy August day last week.

Bealtaine

John Smyth — Sat, 01 May 2010 21:23:45 +0000

While I was in Coco’s this morning for my usual cappuccino, there was a family of two parents and two small children sitting by one of the window (the coffee shop has a panoramic view of the Promenade). “Can we go now,” said the little girl, clearly bored, to her mother. “We can’t”, she replied, ” look, it’s raining”. The little girl looked out at the rain hammering against the glass and turned back to her mother , her eyes widening,”Is it raining for ever?”.

Though it might seem that way, there has not been that much rain this year, but when it comes, it does so in style. There was huge flooding at the end of last year, and even yesterday, Spring left the stage literally with a bang, as a huge thunderstorm, accompanied by massive hail showers swept the country. This morning, as I was standing on the prom, black clouds rolled in and heavy rain swept along the prom, drenching the optimists who had set off walking or cycling in the sunshine earlier. And, within the hour, the clouds had rolled off again, and it was the sort of sunshine that we’d hoped for