We often talk about our troubled relationship with the natural environment as if it were a modern problem. But there is abundant and increasing evidence that human effects on our landscapes have had problematic consequences for a very long time.
Lorcán O Toole of the Golden Eagle Trust, which is having serious troubles of its own, embraces this long perspective. He thinks widely and deeply about matters ecological, and suggests that solutions from the past may hold lessons for present crises.
So, while discussing why the eagles that the trust has reintroduced to Co Donegal failed to fledge a single chick last year, O Toole throws a legend that may date back to the Bronze Age into the mix.
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Midhir, the hero of the story The Wooing of Étaín, was challenged to plant a great forest in Breifni (Cavan, Leitrim and parts of Sligo). "I think this story suggests that even then people were aware that they had gone too far in deforesting the land, and that they needed to start replanting," says O Toole.
He concludes that the management of our landscapes has always had to accommodate changes and conflicting interests, and that our notion of an ideal landscape condition is often distorted by seeing it through a short time frame.
“Today we seem to think our uplands are at their best, their wildest, when they are denuded of trees,” he says. “But if we take a longer view we realise that they used to be a mosaic of open country and pockets of native woodland.”
Although some of our vast stretches of upland blanket bog were created by climate change in the past, he holds that many of them were the product of human clearances. “It’s possible that we may have been mismanaging our uplands for centuries. We are simply not sure today what healthy uplands should look like.”
What has this to do with his main concern: securing the success of the reintroduction of golden eagles?
In November O Toole bluntly posted on the trust's Facebook page that the breeding productivity of the eagles was "not enough" to ensure their survival in Ireland.
The problem, he wrote, was not direct human activity. Neither persecution nor accidental poisoning has been a key issue since the first of 50 young eagles was released in Glenveagh National Park in 2001. "In general the people of Donegal have embraced golden eagles," says O Toole.
Changing climate is probably a key issue: exceptionally wet springs are causing higher than expected fledgling mortality. But O Toole believes that the primary problem is the poor ecological condition of the Donegal uplands. This habitat is simply not producing enough prey for eagles to feed their chicks adequately.
This analysis is surprising. Surveys before reintroduction concluded that these uplands could definitely support eagles, to the satisfaction of national and international conservation authorities.
“In hindsight we may have got it wrong,” says O Toole. But if that’s the case “the same failure applies to everything in this habitat.The Golden Eagle Trust rather naively felt that the amount of designated upland [conservation] sites and the size of the national park could lead only to the long-term enhancement of these habitats and further expand the live-prey availability in these sites. However, we did not sufficiently factor in deteriorating prey populations and worsening habitat.”
More victims than villains
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has blamed “uncontrolled burning, turf extraction and overgrazing” by farmers for this deterioration. But O Toole sees sees hill farmers as much more victims than villains in a complex uplands tragedy. He stresses the lack of connection between the international promotion of Ireland’s “green” environment and the degraded ecological condition of many of our most cherished landscapes.
He believes that there is an urgent need for extensive research into upland management that takes into account the needs – and effects – of all legitimate interest groups: hill farmers, wind farmers, foresters and recreational users, as well as conservationists. There is, he points out, far more State and university funding for research into the agricultural and biological productivity of our lowlands.
The National Parks and Wildlife Service and the uplands council movement do their best, "but far more resources are needed", says O Toole, who mentions the cutting-edge uplands management research and practice in Scotland, Wales and, especially, Norway. There is nothing comparable in Ireland.
Pending such research, he says, the amount of prey for golden eagles could be augmented by increased culling of another top predator: the fox. He has observed the Donegal eagles hunting most in areas where farmers keep fox populations low.
He argues that, because Irish wolves have been exterminated, fox numbers are much too high for the good of the overall ecosystem. Foxes reduce the populations of vital eagle prey, such as red grouse and hare, to levels that will not sustain eagles.
A fox cull will not be popular with everyone, O Toole concedes. But as hardly anyone supports the reintroduction of wolves, he says, we have a responsibility to control foxes just as conservationists, in the absence of big grazers, cut native hazel to foster wild-flower diversity.
He also advocates restoring native forest in the uplands, through spontaneous regeneration and through hand-planting. The latter could provide incomes for hard-pressed farmers. Again, this idea may seem surprising, because eagles favour open landscapes. But O Toole says that native woodlands, limited to smallish pockets by harsh conditions, would also foster additional prey for eagles.
O Toole says that the Welsh Pontbren farmer’s project, which indicates that broad-leaved native-tree woodland absorbs water run-off 60 times more effectively than pasture, reveals another benefit of such reforestation; it could be a very significant tool against flooding.
But he is sceptical about current proposals for more upland plantations of alien conifers, accompanied by promises to sequester carbon and help us meet the Paris COP21 targets. O Toole believes that the aggressive cultivation methods involved in such plantations increase net emissions.
He is mildly optimistic that growing public concern about climate, carbon and flooding will soon drive research towards much better upland management, benefiting the human and ecological communities that depend on healthy hill and mountain landscapes.
“The Taoiseach made very big promises before world leaders in Paris about our landscapes’ capacity to sequester carbon,” he says. “Now we need to measure precisely how this can best be done.”
The task of restoring our uplands, with eagles thriving above them, will require different tools from those that Midhir employed in the legendary past, but it is just as challenging, and more urgent than ever.
Lorcán O Toole develops some of these points further in the upcoming issue of Natural Renewal, published by the Golden Eagle Trust
