Mammalian conference 'would have pleased Darwin'

ANOTHER LIFE:OUR NEW garden gates have vertical bars so narrowly spaced that even the smallest wandering lamb can't squeeze through – a feature of some merit in sheep-country. Unfortunately, as I saw the other morning, the gaps won't let a hare through, either.

It tried a good many of them, over and over, with long pauses to sit and think about the way things change. There was always a gap between farm gate and pillar. There are actually notches worn in the field banks where generations of hares have followed the same routes, up and down the hill and across the roads. As our visitor ducked away towards the damp shadows under the bridge, I was sorry; maybe I could bend a bar or two.

One good result of “The Crash” is a halt to new walls, gates, carpets of concrete, and the gift of another few years for working out how to leave room for nature. Last weekend in Waterford there was the very first all-Ireland mammal conference, bringing big names from Britain to add to the focus on our furry, spiny and blubbery wildlife.

“I think Darwin would have been pleased,” said Trinity’s Dr Ruth Carden, chair of the organisers, and there was, indeed, something grandly all-embracing in the spread of current research, north and south, from hedgehogs and greater white-toothed shrews to three sorts of deer and several enormous whales. It stretched back past wolves and brown bears to mammals of the Ice Age, and written research round the walls added new studies in progress: how bats cross roads, where Ireland’s badgers came from, what harbour seals choose to eat.

For good news, one could look to the generally good status of most of our 26 terrestrial wild mammals and the national awakening to the astonishing cetacean life off our shores. But there were also the "widespread threats" listed in the new Red Data Bookfrom the National Parks and Wildlife Service – "unsympathetic woodland management, poor water quality, road-kill and persecution" that menace species such as otters, red squirrels and bats and put pressure on pine martens, badgers and stoats.

There was much talk about badgers and their travails with TB.

All the new road building brings up concern that badgers disturbed from their sets are more prone to pass on the disease to each other and to cattle. Research along the N11 in Co Wicklow – due for upgrading next year – will test how far this is true.

There’s a startling change in the estimate of the number of badgers in Ireland. Surveys in the 1990s suggested an all-Ireland figure of 250,000 animals. The new field trials of a badger TB vaccine (at last!) mean that closer figures are needed for the future. A team led by Dr Paddy Sleeman of NUI Cork has used data from the big official clearance programme in four dairy cattle areas. Extrapolation now yields a total of 84,000 badgers in the Republic and perhaps 100,000 or fewer on the island. The clearance removed 1,099 badgers over five years from a total of 1,000 sq km, and what farmers have done to badgers hasn’t been counted. So nothing especially sinister can be read into this revision – just the possible scale of the task of giving thousands of badgers their jabs.

They’re still not short of friends, and among the staunchest over the years have been members of the Dublin-based Irish Wildlife Trust (IWT), formed as the Irish Wildlife Federation 30 years ago. Indeed, a campaign to alleviate the plight of the badger gave the IWT its highest profile.

But busy as the IWT has been with education and conservation projects, habitat and species surveys, it has rarely achieved the attention that its brief should command, or the kind of popular charisma that has made BirdWatch Ireland, for example, a familiar presence right across the island.

A new energy, however, is growing under the leadership of Pádraic Fogarty, the young ecologist who took over the chair last year.

Perhaps its most evident result is the glossy professionalism of the Trust's relaunched quarterly magazine, Irish Wildlife, with its arresting cover photograph of a jewel-eyed shanny, a fish in Connemara's underwater world (see it at www.iwt.ie). Not since the brave and all-too-brief commercial existence of the monthly, Wild Ireland, earlier this decade, has there been such a publication with such colourful appeal, especially to the young.

New IWT branches in Clare and Sligo signal the drive for country membership, and in Dublin the work of “The Grubby Gang” offers volunteers a morale-boosting mid-week outing to dirty one’s hands for nature. It has been doing conservation work along the Tolka, where Fingal County Council has given over management of the “Ashdown wetlands meadow” as a nature reserve to the Trust, and other projects are in view at www.grubbygang.blogspot.com.

EYE ON NATURE

While fishing at Seapoint in Galway recently, I was astonished to see a mink come from the breakwater rocks and take a mackerel from my bucket of fish two feet away from me. It showed no fear and came back and took another, but the third time I kicked the bucket and it reluctantly left empty-handed.

Tony Conneely, Ballyglunin, Co Galway

My dad saw a white bird with a black beak and long legs and wings in a stream near our house. We think it was an avocet.

Verity Limond (aged 8), Churchtown Road, Dublin, 14

It was a little egret.

On a quiet evening, I walked to the local church grounds to sit on a bench and look up at the stars. After some time, I was greeted by a fox, who parked him/herself by my feet for a good 10 minutes, allowing me to admire its beauty up close, under the moonlight.

Russell Davies, Mount Merrion, Co Dublin

By 2003, quail (Coturnix coturnix) had become very scarce in their regular haunts around Athy, with no new birds for eight years. Then young birds were seen in four of the years 2004-2009. Successful breeding had resumed.

Jim and Howard Fox, Athy, Co Kildare

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. Email: viney@anu.ie. Include a postal address.