More foxes in Foxrock than all of Thallabawn

ANOTHER LIFE:A FOX LEFT its mark on one of my freshly dug vegetable beds the other night, stitching its track across the frosty soil. It reminded me how long it has been since I actually saw one of these animals. At latest estimate, there could be some 90,000 foxes in Ireland, but there are undoubtedly more roaming Foxrock, Dublin's garden suburb, than survive on the sheep-farming hillsides around Thallabawn.

How do I feel about hunting, of foxes or anything else? As a wimp who sold his new shotgun because the bang was so shockingly loud, I was clearly never cut out for that side of country life. The first fox I ever saw close up was writhing in an ancient gin-trap and I was left to hit it hard. Another fox killed all our hens one night and hid them up the hill.

There will be lampers abroad in the next few weeks, as lambing approaches, mimicking the vixen’s mating invitation with a squeal of polystyrene rubbed across a windscreen, sweeping the hillside with the spotlight and not always remembering that it’s illegal to fire a gun from the roadside window of a 4x4.

A farmer friend in Sligo once lost more than 100 lambs, all taken from twins, and such experience has to be set against the sometimes glib, green view of foxes as natural cullers of a “doomed surplus” of weak and sickly lambs, or mere scavengers of afterbirth.

So where does that leave me and fox hunting, with horses, dogs and hallooing? “Any man who is utterly unconcerned with [foxhunting],” said Lord Dunsany, “lives a little apart from the rest of us.”

And so do I, both geographically and culturally. But as an ex-Brit, I found the prolonged and vehement polarisation of English society over the banning of fox-hunting with dogs an ugly and wounding affair with a largely futile outcome. The death of a fox in a hostile countryside is rarely anything but grisly, and if farmers are prepared to put up with the heavy brigade charging across their ditches and fences (some, it should be said, are not), I am not passionately disposed to object.

As a naturalist, I try not to confuse issues of cruelty with those of conservation. While discovering that a move from city to country does not automatically make one a hunter, my concern with the death or persecution of wildlife springs mostly from ecology – whether shooting, for example, threatens the number of woodcock or grouse, or simply substitutes one kind of death for another, quite natural, mortality. I believe the shooters who say they love nature. They tend to know a great deal more than I do about some parts of it, and often help to preserve habitats that benefit wildlife as a whole. Anglers, too, are generally a force for conservation, except when they infest our waterways with invasive alien species.

None of this means I personally approve of hare coursing, even of the recent, muzzled kind, or that I think the proposed banning of the Ward Union stag hunt would be any kind of assault upon “country sports”, traditions or the rural way of life. This is where animals of no competition with human interest, or economic value as food, are terrified for entertainment in a highly contrived event (the red deer is one owned by the hunt, carted to the start, released for the chase on horseback, with dogs, and eventually recaptured to run again another day).

For almost a century, from 1854, the Ward Hunt had the freedom of farmland northwest of Dublin. Most of Meath was under grass. The hunt fielded, at times, much more than 100 riders, many of them British and Irish army officers (indeed, by Eric Craigie’s account in his An Irish Sporting Life, some officers on leave early in the second World War leaped so recklessly at Meath’s high, double-ditched fences that horses were killed and the livery stables refused to hire out more).

In post-war Ireland, the advance of tillage, barbed wire, stud farms, commuter housing and schools has steadily circumscribed the running of the deer in, as Craigie wrote, “country given to stag hunting”.

An end to the hunt in its present form, and the arbitrary inclusion of hunt kennels in new legislation on dog breeding, both proposed by Minister John Gormley, is the focus of a protest campaign that has gathered in 16 organisations ranging from the Hunting Association of Ireland to the Irish Hawking Club.

RISE! (Rural Ireland Says Enough!), an offshoot of Countryside Alliance Ireland and supported by the IFA, says the new proposals “represent part of a wider, fundamentalist Green agenda being foisted on people”.

With such a goad to rural paranoia, they’ll probably go a long way.

Recently I noticed a group of about six house sparrows taking a dust bath under rosemary bush in my garden. What is the purpose of this?

E Candon, Milltown, Dublin, 6

Dust is used as a cleaning agent by birds, and animals whose feathers or fur are protected from water by a thin layer of natural oil. It is an effective cleaner in situations where water is useless. The dust absorbs excess oil and lifts away dirt and parasites.

During the cold spell I have discovered that Leitrim birds love boiled potatoes. I slice them small and place them on the top of a long stone wall. It is a joy to watch robins, blackbirds, thrushes, chaffinches etc, gather every morning ready for their meal. I might treat them to some boxty soon.

Keith Nolan, Carrick-on-Shannon, Co Leitrim

Recently a pair of choughs have been spending the night in my empty barn. They have been doing a lot of displaying behaviour, so I hope they are thinking of nesting there. The noise in the empty hay barn when they arrive is just fantastic.

John Petch, Kilbrittain, Co Cork

In mid-February there have been several sightings of American eider duck in Donegal at Glassagh Bay, Fanad.

John McAteer, Milford, Co Donegal.

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