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- Herausgeber: The O'Brien Press
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Glow-in-the-dark owls, eggs boiling in Icelandic hot pools, the gangster tactics of the devil's coach-horse beetle … Éanna Ní Lamhna has seen them all! Éanna explores the wonders of our wild world, from a safari in Tanzania to the cloud forests of Costa Rica, from rat-hunting in Canada to whale watching in New Zealand. She draws on her experience as a diver to tell of face-to-face encounters with fascinating fan worms, elusive sea hares and a murderous crab, and rings the alarm bells on the environmental challenges facing us. Éanna also recounts with cheerful relish the pitfalls and delights of being a broadcaster and a scientist. Sure why would anyone want to be anything else?
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Praise for Our Wild World
‘Splendid … wonderful book … written both with imagination and feeling … it’s practical at one end, a blueprint for living, and at the other end it is a theory of the world.’
RTÉ Radio’s Mooney Goes Wild
‘I loved this book … It should be required reading in schools and colleges. [Éanna] has done a fascinating and excellent job of encapsulating and explaining very complex situations and processes and cycles in a very accessible way … a manual to how the world runs.’
Niall Hatch, Birdwatch Ireland
‘An appealing and insightful take on the natural world … a combination of scientific acumen and robust communication skills are what have made Ní Lamhna one of the most loved educators in the country. Our Wild World lays out some of the basic ecological and environmental principles that might have passed us by, while clearing up a raft of myths, everything from migration and bacteria to global warming and biodiversity. What makes Our Wild World particularly special is that she strikes a tone that speaks to anyone aged nine to ninety.’
Sunday Independent
‘[Éanna] talks as fast as she does straight and can convey a lot in short time … It’s science made simple … for anyone from about 12 upwards who has even a passing interest in the twin crises of biodiversity loss and climate breakdown but is beaten back by jargon. Experts would also benefit from a read … Ní Lamhna doesn’t do jargon. She whittles down Darwin’s theory of evolution to the following explanation: “Nature doesn’t tolerate eejits.”’
Irish Independent
For my children: Maebh, Christopher and James.
Contents
Introduction
I first wrote Wild and Wonderful in 2004 to describe the wild and wonderful world, both here in Ireland and indeed overseas, that I was familiar with. Since then, the world has changed and in many ways not for the better – although there are still lots of wild and wonderful places. In this new edition, while I have kept some of my favourite descriptions of the places I had seen – mostly in the last century – I have explored many new places both at home and abroad since and I am including lots of new tales about these. I realise how fortunate I am to have seen those faraway places. Such travelling cannot be undertaken lightly now, since we have become aware of the impact long-distance air travel has on the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.
Lockdown due to the pandemic, which began in 2020, forced us all to spend much more time within a very small radius of our homes. This had the interesting effect of making people much more aware of the wild and wonderful world that was all around them if they would but choose to notice and observe. So, interspersed with tales of the distant places I visited in the last twenty years is an account of the wonderful place where I spent the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 and of what I noticed there. The impact for the better that people can have on their surroundings is apparent in the increased awareness of places for nature, wildflower meadows, the plight of pollinators, etc. It is within our power to keep and improve this wild and wonderful world of ours.
1
Putting it out there – Caoga Bliain ag Caint
Do the plain people of Ireland know more about wildlife than they did in 1974? Just wondering.
I have been writing and teaching and talking about wildlife all my life – for more years than I care to remember – but for, I suppose, almost fifty years. Most of the time it is to an audience of Irish people, and by this stage I must have left the mark of my teeth on three generations – as the schoolteacher and writer Bryan MacMahon once described the work of a lifelong primary schoolteacher. But has it had any effect? Surely Irish people now must know more about wildlife, its importance and the effect humans are having on it than they did when I was starting out in the 1970s? I wonder.
Learning about wildlife and the environment was not considered important at all before the 1970s. It wasn’t taught in primary schools. There was no subject called Biology on the secondary school syllabus. There were no wonderful wildlife documentaries on television. In fact, televisions themselves – especially coloured ones – were few and far between. What wildlife species occurred in Ireland anyway and what was their distribution and abundance?
Data on the wildlife species that occurred in Ireland and where in the country each had been recorded were officially kept in the Biological Records Centre in Huntingdon in England, where all such records for the British Isles were stored. While the British Isles was the geographical description of the two main islands off the northwest coast of Europe, it certainly wasn’t a term generally accepted by Irish people. Publications such as Atlas of the British Flora, which appeared in 1962 and in a second edition in 1976 and which naturally included Ireland as a matter of course, attracted Irish records from only a small group of academics and specialists.
Another major deterrent to the sending in of Irish records was the grid referencing required to pinpoint where the record was taken. If you look at any Ordnance Survey map of either Great Britain or Ireland today, you will see that each is covered by a grid based on kilometre squares. This was devised for Great Britain in the 1940s and was used for those early plant records that appeared finally in the 1962 Atlas – the culmination of ten years of recording where all these plants occurred. Such a grid was not on Irish maps in the 1950s so in 1955 David Webb, Professor of Botany in Trinity College Dublin, took it upon himself to extend this British grid across the Irish Sea and rule a set of large-scale Irish maps with a continuation of the grid. The account he wrote in the Proceedings of the Botanical Society of the British Isles of how he did this, was described in that 1962 Atlas in the following terms: ‘Professor Webb solved [the problem] elegantly and published the skeleton of his agony in the Proceedings of the BSBI.’
His ‘solution’ was no such thing. There was in existence at that time, although not yet on the maps, an Irish grid system of kilometre squares. He could have drawn that one on the maps instead. The British grid was at a different angle to the Irish one and there was no correlation at all between the grid reference of a place using these extended British co-ordinates and the Irish ones that appeared on maps from the early 1960s. So even if you could identify an Irish plant and even if you were willing to send your good Irish record to a records centre in England (which would refer to it as a British record), using this made-up grid at the wrong angle and only available on maps given out to those in the know was really a step too far for many.
The bird people managed things a lot better. Birds were always recorded by the British Trust for Ornithology in Britain and the Irish Wildbird Conservancy in Ireland. The publication of the Flora Atlas in 1962 encouraged them to work towards a bird atlas and the project began in 1966. They had enough wit to use the correct grid for both jurisdictions and sensibly called the atlas – which was finally published in 1976 – The Atlas of Breeding Birds in Britain and Ireland.
The Irish Biological Records Centre was set up in 1973 in An Foras Forbartha – a semi-state body established in 1964 to advise the Department of Local Government on planning issues, water resources, roads and buildings. Today, some, but not all, of these areas are part of the remit of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The Irish Biological Records Centre was established to produce distribution maps of plants and animals in Ireland so that these could be taken into consideration in the planning process. Wishful thinking as things turned out! The British Records Centre sent over all its Irish records and Mary Crichton was given the job of getting it going. I replaced her in 1974 and worked there as sole researcher until An Foras Forbartha was abolished in 1988. It was my first job, straight out of college, and I was full of enthusiasm. Mammals were the first group worked on and Mary had produced a preliminary Irish atlas that first year, based mainly on the records she had received from the British Records Centre.
A second edition of the Atlas of the British Flora (complete with all the Irish maps on the old bockety grid drawn up by Professor Webb in 1955) was published in 1976 and I was appalled. I wrote in the newsletter of the Irish Biological Records Centre that a chance to correct the drawbacks of the first edition had been squandered and essentially that calling it an ‘Atlas of the British Flora’ and ignoring the proper Irish grid was inexcusable. For my pains, I was called a neurotic Irish nationalist by the good Professor Webb. But I was right. The vast number of Irish plant records for more than a thousand species, recorded and published on an ad hoc grid, were of no practical use to the Irish Biological Records Centre.
The birds were doing fine – they were being recorded properly – so I turned my attention to producing distribution maps of Irish mammals and Irish butterflies. How hard could it be to get people to send in records, even with just the address, as it were, of where the creature was spotted? I could add the grid reference myself.
But it turned out, in fact, to be very hard. In those pre-social media days of the 1970s, people had hardly heard of An Foras Forbartha, never mind the Irish Biological Records Centre. People generally knew very little about our mammals and even less about our butterflies. Well, everyone could identify a hedgehog or a badger and indeed roadkill records of these species formed a major part of the information I received. Who could identify a flying bat? Impossible still today without sophisticated bat detectors that can separate our nine resident species on the basis of the frequencies and pitch of their calls. Although one doughty recorder was not deterred from trying and actually sent in a live bat in a small Anadin tablet box to the absolute horror of the secretarial staff, who in those dim, distant days opened the official mail we all received.
We have stoats here but not weasels, two species of mice but only one species of vole with a limited distribution, no moles, no dormice. Water rats don’t exist,* lizards and newts belong to two completely different groups and grey squirrels were spreading down along the eastern half of Ireland displacing the red. I needed to be sure which squirrel was being recorded. There was scope for confusion between rabbits and hares, mink and otter, and grey seals and common seals.
I took to educating would-be recorders myself. Every year from 1974 until 1988 when the whole place was abolished (because, as Taoiseach Charles Haughey said, we were all living beyond our means and had to tighten our belts), I organised and ran summer courses for primary school teachers, who subsequently sent in records with their school pupils from around the country. Provisional atlases of butterflies, dragonflies and woodlice appeared too, but in truth they were distribution atlases of where the recorders lived and worked, rather than publications with meaningful ecological information.
And in 1988, when the whole place sank without trace, I brought all the cards and computer printouts of the fourteen years of records to the offices of the then Forest and Wildlife Service in Bray. They were part of nobody’s brief there and so they were left to languish, untouched. No one was interested in Irish Biological Records and it was to be almost twenty years until the National Biodiversity Centre was established in 2007 by the Heritage Council.
I took to more formal teaching after that.
Teaching can be wonderful. I should know. I come from a line of teachers on both sides so I know what a life-absorbing vocation it is. Full time, all day every day, it must be one of the most demanding occupations ever. You are totally committed when you stand up in front of that class. You have to initiate proceedings, keep the show going. If your attention flags or you show boredom even for a minute the whole thing collapses. Because the truth is that, in the main, pupils don’t want to be taught. They might like being at school all right, but they’d rather occupy themselves any other way in class than listening to a lesson. The feedback is instant. If the lesson is not hitting the spot they are bored and they show it. It is very hard to hit the spot for five hours a day with a class of up to thirty individuals of varying motivation and interest. In an office job you could have a break, a cup of coffee or take a phone call – not in class you can’t. Teachers deserve a high spot in heaven.
My teaching experiences are different because at school level I come as a one-off to the class – a novelty, someone that was invited. The teacher is present. The pupils are allegedly on their best behaviour. I may be talking to primary or post-primary pupils and my only requirement is to be interesting enough to hold their attention. If not, mind you, feedback is swift and merciless. Unlike grown-up audiences, which, if bored, switch off and look out the window, pupils who are not enjoying their lessons make it known. They lean back on their chairs and sometimes fall off them, which livens up proceedings considerably. They plait the hair of the girl in front of them. They reflect the sunlight onto your face with the front of their watches. They speak to each other – what they have to say is considerably more relevant than what they have to listen to – and indeed, if they are a particularly obnoxious group, they join together to mock the accent of the teacher and find double meanings in everything that is said. But at least I never have to mark copies or correct exam papers at primary or secondary level so I can continue with the self-delusion that if it was all right on the day, then what I said made an indelible impression and they have really understood and learnt.
My third-level teaching experiences are somewhat different. Here I am actually a lecturer – not a teacher – the title somehow implies that the task merely means passing on information to rapt, enthusiastic young adults who have actually chosen further education after their Leaving Cert and have specifically selected the area in which you lecture. Yes, well, maybe so, but the be-riveting-and-keep-my-attention rule applies here too. So you are and you do, and you get through a whole year on the topic with a class still turning up at the end of the year, with even the occasional one asking relevant questions.
And then come the exams. You have to set a paper on the subject you have taught and under time pressure in three hours they return what I can only assume is their best attempt to pass, based on what you have taught them. Could this be all they really know about the subject, after all your hard work and Oscar-winning lecturing performances? It’s depressing.
I lectured in biogeography in one third-level establishment. This is a subject that covers what species of plants and animals live, where in the world and why. Why are there kangaroos in Australia, llamas in South America and deer in Europe, all grass-eating herbivores, yet so different? The subject involves descriptions of conditions in rainforests and in deserts and explanations for what species we have or don’t have in Ireland. So, the exam questions reflect what I have covered. One year I asked the students to describe deserts and the plants and animals that lived there. (Despite the fact that I wrote and spelled the word in the question on the exam paper, I got long accounts of desserts rather than deserts.)
Plants and animals in deserts have to cope with great heat and a lack of water. Could my students perhaps tell me about some of these? Well, you will be delighted to know that camels are really well adapted to desert life. One student told me that they can lose 400 per cent of their body weight through dehydration before any permanent damage happens to them. I tried to imagine such a camel. Another said that a camel can lose 25 per cent of its body weight before it becomes dangerous.
I had explained during the year that some animals in deserts have extremely large ears. This is so that they can dissipate extra body heat through the large surface area and reduce their temperature quickly. We actually use the same phenomenon to heat our houses. We have things with a large surface area giving off heat in our rooms. We call these radiators; they are filled with hot water and they lose heat rapidly through their surfaces and warm our rooms. (Got that?) Well, logically enough, the ears on the desert animals are also called radiator ears because they function in the same way, and foxes, hares and hedgehogs in deserts in different parts of the world have them in order to survive. That’s not how some of my students understood it, though. One wrote that radiator ears contract and expand during hot daily temperatures – a case of now you see them, now you don’t? Another informed me that the animals can store water in their ears because they are radiators. A third said that they reflected the sun – like car mirrors, I suppose.
Their knowledge of desert plants was not much better. According to a couple of my students who had actually been physically present during the lectures, plants in deserts grow downwards instead of upwards. The creosote plant sends out seeds via its roots. Cacti are spineless. Desert plants excrete salt, but this often clogs up the sellers (sic). Some plants have adapted to desert conditions by having smaller leaves while others survive by disappearing altogether. How could they possibly think I told them that?
Some years, the exam question might be about rainforests – describe them and talk about the threats to them. Did you know that the rainforest has a fourteen-month year and that the trees there take millions of years to grow? I didn’t. The trees there have no seeds and will soon be distinct (sic). Rubber trees were very popular once and were cut down and used before plastic was invented, according to one student. Another said that the rubber tree has often been cut down (it must spring back again after each cutting so that it can be re-cut). There is a teak-flavoured mahogany tree there too, apparently. One plant called Bunka banks (whatever that might be) is a ‘scented angiosperm’ that drinks the sap of other trees. (Actually, most plants are angiosperms; it simply means that they have flowers and fruit.) The sun shines twenty-four hours a day there. Many of the animals are ‘docturnal’. And on threats to the rainforest – once a tree is cut down it won’t grow. Well, well. When trees are cut down the climate usually sores (sic). There is an increase in ground freezing birds, whatever they might be.
Surely their knowledge of Irish wildlife must be better than this? Some of the answers would not convince you that it is. For example, another type of vegetation found in Ireland is the flora and fauna. The trees in Ireland are very young – they are only 10,000 years old. Hedgerows are boarders (sic) for fields. Corncrakes have become scarce here because they are too long for the Sahara Desert! When forest clearances occurred in Ireland the eagles began to eat the grass and the small baby animals. Soils in Ireland exist in three states: solid, liquid and gas. Many soils in Ireland are broken into smaller soils. Many species became extinct when our forests were cut down, but some were able to stick threw (sic) it.
It’s terrible reading this. What impression did they go away with? What would they tell the young people of Ireland if I passed them and they went on to become teachers themselves? But at least I didn’t have to read what was written for one of my colleagues. He was lecturing about habitations – why cities are where they are, such as on trade routes, river mouths, etc. But nowadays, he explained to his class, cities can actually be imposed on places that have no natural attraction for them. Some cities in the American desert have been entirely artificially created. All food and water is brought in by road and processed there. Why, they even have their own Coca Cola plant. This came back on the exam script as: ‘It is possible nowadays to have a city anywhere. They have such a city in America where everything is supplied, and the Coca Cola grows on trees.’
After the fall of An Foras Forbartha, I continued to try to make wildlife interesting for Irish people in general. The radio wildlife programme Mooney Goes Wild began in 1995 and broadcast to a general audience under the able presentation of Derek Mooney. I have been on that programme since the very beginning and, depending on the time of day and the day of the week that it is aired, it has had audiences of 250,000 listeners. Surely Irish people must know lots and lots about Irish wildlife now.
Well, they do and they don’t. While mobile phone pictures have done away with the necessity of sending in actual specimens – either dead or alive – trying to identify stuff on Google seems to be now the first port of call. This can result in exceedingly bizarre identifications. What, for example, made someone assume that the sparrowhawk he saw in his garden in Dublin was a Northern Hawk Owl – a non-migratory bird that lives in the northern boreal forests of Alaska, Newfoundland and other parts of Canada? Or that a common Irish moth was one only found in Patagonia in South America?
But people are vastly more interested in wildlife than they were forty years ago. It is much easier now to send in a record of your discovery, complete with photograph and GPS co-ordinates, to the National Biodiversity Centre. And their Irish distribution maps are a reflection of the actual distribution of the species depicted, with the spread or decline accurately represented. Many of the questions I receive for the ‘Eye on Nature’ column in The Irish Times every week come from a very observant public who know lots and want to know more.
But every year on the Mooney Goes Wild programme, we still have to explain what good wasps are for, or why spiders are really important, or that squirrels don’t hibernate, or that Irish schools have a derogation from EU law to bring in frogspawn and study frogs in schools. At least environmental studies is actually on the primary school curriculum and Biology has been a Leaving Cert subject for forty years now, so that’s something.
* Despite what you might think from reading The Wind in the Willows. No more than we become water-humans when we go swimming, rats do not become a species called a water rat when they go swimming. All rats can swim! The wrongly named creature in The Wind in the Willows is a water vole – a species of vole that doesn’t occur in Ireland.
2
A (Covid) Year in Kilrush
And the very same year I learned to play the flute
At the beginning of October 2020 I took up residence with my husband in the town of Kilrush in County Clare. Covid-19 had been raging in Ireland since March of that year. There were no vaccines developed yet and the way chosen to combat its spread was to restrict the movement of individuals to a certain radius around their home. Initially, it was just two kilometres – a restriction that lasted from March until June. It subsequently varied from a five-kilometre radius to staying within one’s county as the various variants emerged and still there was no vaccine. (And, to be fair, how could there be? Up to this, it took at least eighteen months to engineer and mass produce a safe vaccine for a new disease.) We decided that a five-kilometre restriction was infinitely more bearable in a rural town in the west of Ireland than in a teeming metropolis of over a million people, so we upped sticks and left.
Why Kilrush? My son had taken up residence there, had bought a house with his fiancée and was hoping that the wedding arrangements for the end of 2020 would not be scuppered by Covid as was happening in so many cases. They kindly found a flat for us (so that we wouldn’t move in with them, I am sure!) and by October we were installed above a shop on the main street of Kilrush. It was some change for me. I had only ever lived in a small rural parish in County Louth until leaving to go to college, and since then had lived in the big smoke, in a city of over a million residents. It was forty years since I had lived in a flat, or an apartment as they are now called. I was greatly looking forward to it all. Indeed, I did some reading about the town of Kilrush so that I might know what to expect.
Kilrush is a town on the northern bank of the Shannon Estuary in west Clare, with a population of 2,719 people, according to the 2016 census. It is a market town with a very long history, the first market being recorded in a grant of permission issued in 1628 to an already established town. Its name – Cill Ruis (the church of the woods) – hints at its origin: apparently it developed around a church built by the monks of Scattery Island fifteen hundred years earlier.
Its position on the banks of the Shannon meant that it was the port through which the produce of west Clare was traded, particularly during the nineteenth century when merchants such as the Glynns, the Pattersons and local landlords, the Vandeleurs, plied their trade. Its importance as a trading town ensured that it would be a terminus of the west Clare railway (as also was Kilkee – the line split in two at Moyasta junction). The railway finally opened in 1892. It was planned, as all the west of Ireland railways constructed at this time were, to aid in the recovery of the west after the famine.
The potato famine of 1845 to 1849 had a huge impact on the town of Kilrush. Its population in 1841 was 6,178. It had risen to 10,292 by 1851, reflecting the influx into the town’s workhouses of the starving population of the hinterland. But every census since shows a declining population right up to the 2011 census when 2,539 souls were recorded as being present in the town that night. The First World War took a great toll on the male population as those who worked in the mills or farmed as tenants went off to war. Out of a total population of 3,666 at the time, 414 men enlisted. By the end of the war seventy-one had died, seventy-eight were wounded, another seventy-three were discharged as being unable to ever fight again and 145 were still under a commitment to be recalled in the event of a further war. The impact of its history is writ large on the town and we had every opportunity to scrutinise it in great detail as we had lockdown after lockdown and it wasn’t until 10 May 2021 that inter-county travel was finally allowed.
Living in a nice large well-equipped flat on the first floor overlooking the main street was great, and a far cry from the last flat I was in: a dank basement in Dublin 2 where I spent three years before we mortgaged our souls for a house in the late 1970s. It faced south and the sun shone in in the morning, lighting up our breakfast table and putting us in a good mood for the day. Kilrush is the classic fifteen-minute town: all the things you need are within a fifteen-minute journey on foot. Acquiring the daily newspaper and bread and milk for breakfast took no time at all. The weather was kind that October and, although we couldn’t steel ourselves to go swimming in the sea, being softies down from Dublin (we were well into the daily swim by the following October), five kilometres of interesting walks beckoned in every direction once we stepped out the front door.
