Finding solace in animals, plants and land

ANOTHER LIFE:IN THE DUBLIN newsroom of the Daily Expressat the end of the 19th century, Charles Moffat was quite a curiosity. His colleagues relished what they saw as his bird-like demeanour: one said he would not have been surprised "if Moffat flew in and lighted on the gas bracket". Moffat was a naturalist – a real one, adding to the knowledge of nature by watching and listening in the fields and woods.

Robert Lloyd Praeger thought him “the most brilliant naturalist – in the Gilbert White sense – that Ireland has ever produced”. Watching birds, bats, bumblebees or badgers, his incredible patience produced one new insight after another – for example, that (as we now all “know”) the main reason for birds to sing is the cock’s claim to territory.

A century on, there are still committed amateur naturalists in the Moffat mould. But few can have his sense of discovery – so much is already known. Commercial exploitation of nature and the many real worries about its future have spawned a great army of professional biologists and botanists, but few can fairly be called naturalists, free to show love for nature as a whole.

Their vast output of research is held to the rigidly passive language of scientific papers. They appear, as one Irish ecologist has put it, “a colourless multitude, devoid of any value or feeling . . . The model on offer is the model of the feelingless universe”.

That was Dr Cilian Roden, who is an expert on aquatic plants, whether waterweeds of brackish lagoons like those here on the shore at Thallabawn, or the plant plankton of the open ocean. His work includes securing the aquaculture of the Connemara bays and lecturing on natural heritage to Galway and Mayo students. He swings between day-to-day scientific problems and teaching a proper sense of outrage at the “trashing” of nature (his word) by humanity.

A good feeling for the man and his values comes with The Naturalist's View, a little gem of a publication from the Connemara Environmental Education and Cultural Centre in Letterfrack, Co Galway. This has been led now for 25 years by schoolteacher Leo Hallissey, and the booklet began as a talk by Dr Roden in commemoration of Dr Tomás Burke, who died in 2006. This charismatic "T", as he was known, was the region's aquaculture development officer for Bord Iascaigh Mhara (Bim) and he notably enthused the Letterfrack primary school into setting up its own oyster farm.

Away from his nurturing of Connemara’s fledgling shellfish industry, Tomás Burke used his own time to study the zooplankton of little lakes along the coast and on the islands – even in pools on the near-inaccessible High Island off Cleggan. He “had to know”, as Cilian Roden writes, “about small, unnoticed creatures that live out their lives utterly unobserved by people, and that are indifferent to human affairs”. Such needs are what move naturalists, whether working scientists or not.

"Animals, plants and landscape give them an emotional sheet anchor," Roden goes on, "and they are happier and more contented people because of it." For science, Tomás Burke wrote papers with conventionally affectless titles – "The distribution of the cladoceran Holopedium gibberumand associated zooplanktonic species in acid-sensitive lakes" – and so on. For himself, such work, in remote and beautiful places and often wild weather, brought vital contact with the world beyond the human.

With it, however, as Dr Roden says, can come dismal awareness of the crisis facing nature: “Too many visits to once wonderful habitats now destroyed, too many samples clogged with slimy green algae, too many records with the attached comment ‘now thought to be extinct’.”

He quotes the great pioneer conservationist, Aldo Leopold: “To be an ecologist is to live in a world of wounds”. One of the worst of wounds, as Dr Roden has made us aware, was extinction of Ireland’s vast beds of native oysters and other shellfish that once built reefs to shelter fish and filtered the water of our coastal ecosystems. “Ripping out shellfish beds for short-term profit,” he writes, “has established near-permanent algal blooms in some of the most beautiful bays in Ireland.”

With Tomás Burke, he tried to refine new solutions – growing more seaweed in shellfish bays, for example, to mop up polluting farm fertiliser that feeds the dangerous “red tides” of harmful algae.

Such candid testament has made The Naturalist's Viewwell worth publishing. What also turned it into a collectors' item, with funding from Bim and others, are the design and print quality and illustrations of the dazzling world of plankton, both through Cilian Roden's microscope and in haunting etchings from his wife Sabine, scientist and print-maker.

The booklet has become hard to get, but Galwegians should still find some, at €10, in Kenny’s and Charlie Byrne’s bookshops.

EYE ON NATURE

We had a visit last week from five young jays who gave a colourful display, flitting from tree to tree. And a similar brief visit from two brown owls, which coincided with an upsurge in the rabbit population. Would an owl be capable of taking a baby rabbit? Our resident fox now sports a snow white tip to his tail. Two coal tits have drilled a hole each in the mossy sides of our hanging baskets and use them for their nightly refuge.

T McDaid, Sandyford, Dublin

An owl will take a rat so it could also take a small, baby rabbit.

During the winter, for several weeks, a flock of about 15 redwing thrushes congregated in our garden. We fed them well during the winter snow and they grew sleek and fat, establishing a status quo with the resident birds. One pair remained, nesting in a high leylandei, and this week a single glossy fledgling is learning to forage in the shrubbery with its parents.

Marion McDonald, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin

Does a washed up jellyfish equal a dead jellyfish, or can they survive till the next tide?

Colin Rogan, Rathgar, Dublin

A washed up jellyfish is dead, but some will retain ability to sting.

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