Bigger bushfires loom with global warming

ANOTHER LIFE:DESPITE ITS Mediterranean origins, the golden blossom of furze (or whin, or gorse, depending on one's origins, all of it Ulex europaeus could once have become the national flower of Ireland if that sort of badge, appropriately framed in prickles, had ever been on the agenda. The shrub was once so enmeshed in the rural economy that a whole book was needed to describe its myriad and particular uses, from dying socks, making hurleys and hammer handles, to cleaning chimneys and heating the local baker's oven.

Even as Furze was published, in 1960, its author, Dr A T Lucas, then curator of the National Museum, acknowledged that the plant had become “little better than a troublesome weed”. And for all its welcome spring glory, it is now presenting something of a problem over much of the country, so inflammable does it become in any extra-dry start to spring, and so widely could it invade as bogs and marginal land dry out with climate change. Also, one could add, as stubborn old farmers stick to what they’ve always done, regardless, and setting fire to furze becomes a sport for young and mobile urban vandals.

As this winter ended with a run of exceptionally rainless weeks and drying easterly winds, major gorse fires erupted on hills from Donegal and Antrim to Kerry and Wicklow, some threatening houses and forests and even, at Dingle, the local hospital. According to The Kerryman on St Patrick’s Day, “Almost all of Kerry’s fire crews were called to tackle gorse fires over the past two months, leaving the emergency services stretched to capacity.” The fierce blaze of furze, fuelled by a pyrolitic oil in its foliage, leaves the bush a blackened skeleton that sprouts again from its base. On heather moorland, controlled burning in late winter releases nutrients that helps grass to grow. It is traditional to hill farming, but the spread of vulnerable conifer forestry and concern for wildlife, especially nesting birds, has made control imperative.

It is illegal to start fires in the uplands between March 1st and August 31st – a limitation now under pressure for change. Burning heather is a major practice for Wicklow’s sheep farmers, for example, and the Wicklow Uplands Council has made a case for extending controlled burning through March into April, citing particularly the longer seasons allowed in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. BirdWatch Ireland wants a halt at March 17th at latest, to protect ground-nesting birds.

Furze is not a shrub of wet and acid heather moors, but likes drier upland slopes of heath and the well-drained fringes of peatland (especially of raised bogs in the midlands). Many gorse fires, racing across hillsides, will have spread from initial heather burning. Over the last few years in the Republic, an average of some 280 hectares of upland heath have been destroyed by fire and in Northern Ireland, where burning can go on until April 15th, a rising number of malicious summer fires burn the native dwarf gorse, Ulex galli, on the lower slopes of the Mournes.

It is the big, bushy furze, lover of field-banks, that spreads so readily into drier, disused marginal land. In the midlands, it has invaded the grassland of the eskers, gravelly relicts of the last ice age.

“The problem with furze today,” the ecologist John Feehan wrote in his monumental Farming in Ireland, “it is that it has ceased to be useful. It is inconceivable that hundreds of hectares of furze would have been left to flower and grow old in the landscape of an earlier farm economy.” Climate change threatens to dry out Ireland’s peatland to the point where furze will readily take root, and gorse fires become a serious menace to forestry, rural settlements and much wildlife. Of the worrying increase in wildfires across western and northern Europe only 2 per cent or 3 per cent are caused by lightning, the rest by human carelessness or design.

A survey by Crisis Response Journal, aimed at international emergency services, made special mention of the conflagration at Glenamoy, Co Mayo, in May, 2008 – “one of the worst forest and gorse fires ever to hit the region”, destroying more than €1 million worth of trees. It was ranked with major forest fires in Norway, Sweden and Germany. Many of these began on abandoned land, where traditional burning by farmers had ceased, and brush, including gorse, had built up.

Meanwhile, not far from Glenamoy as the raven flies, the fires of March included a huge blaze on Bartra Island in Killala Bay, where tinder-dry marram grass, normally green, swept fire along the dunes, end to end – a spectacle, as night fell, that drew crowds to watch from the strands of Killala and Enniscrone.

Eye on Nature

I saw a huge flock of geese on a playing field at Clonshaugh Lane in Coolock, on the outskirts of north Dublin. They were black and grey with some white. Also, a bird that I think is a redpoll comes to my garden but stays away from the other redpolls that feed there.

Anne Conmey, Ratoath, Co Meath

The geese in your photo were Brent geese that winter here from the Arctic. The other redpoll is a female.

I believe that a bird-bath is an underestimated part of a birdwatchers’ equipment. Mine is approximately 12” in diameter and holds about 2” of water. When full it is used by blackbirds, collared doves, magpies and robins. Smaller birds prefer to bathe after the blackbirds, etc, have thrown out half the water. It sits on a bird table about 5’ high in an open space to deter cats.

Brian Devine, Newbridge, Co Kildare

We have had several letters about birds pecking at windows. This happens mainly during the breeding season when males think that their reflection is an interloper into their territory. Break the reflection by hanging cutouts of hawks in the window (available from Birdwatch Ireland) or using non-reflective peel-and-paste decals on the glass to help the birds focus on it.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. E-mail: viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address