Positive about nature? It's hard to know what to make of that

ANOTHER LIFESO MUCH WRITTEN about the natural world is now a story of innocence lost, of imminent extinction or imperilment, that the lyrical voice of unabashed faith can sound a little off-key. What are we to make of books by two scientific authors, one of whom wants the world's children to offer some of their pocket money to create their own global nature reserve, the other who holds that young children, counting fairies in with the natural life of trees, have an "innate understanding" of the life and worth of forests?

Both writers, as it happens, have shared their lives with Canada but keep strong links to Ireland. Patrick McCusker, with degrees in forestry and biology and many years among Canada’s trees, is a lecturer in biodiversity to postgraduates at University College Dublin. Diana Beresford-Kroeger spent her childhood below the Caha Mountains of Co Cork but now, highly qualified as a molecular biologist and botanist, propagates rare trees and medicinal plants in a huge garden outside Ottawa.

Both books comprise bite-sized, often poetic essays or anecdotes about the natural world, offering larger, inspirational messages. In Planet Dancing (Open Gate Press, £7.99), McCusker makes defiantly unlikely proposals in which not only the whole world’s children but also big businessmen and religious leaders are invited to create great wilderness reserves. But I do like his idea of giving children “nature names” to bond them with some special encounter with the wild.

For someone so apparently way out in her feeling for Celtic spirituality (“the new John Moriarty”, as one interviewer for this paper surmised), Beresford-Kroeger has impressive scientific connections: Harvard’s celebrated Prof E O Wilson, it seems, looks over all her books. The latest, The Global Forest (Particular Books, £10.50), describing “40 ways trees can save us”, is a fascinating weave of imagination and science.

In one essay, she suggests that trees, growing in such different ways, may make individual sounds by which they communicate “like a colony of bees”, and that the cry of a tree being cut down can be perceived as upsetting by children or other sensitive beings. Most other essays, however, about the chemical relationships between trees and the rest of nature, and their benefits for human food, medicine and clean air, are impeccably enlightening. If this is visionary eccentricity, it is well worth attention.

Among the summer’s crop of new Irish books are several others adding to this island’s natural history and sense of place. Most ambitious is Lough Swilly: A Living Landscape (Four Courts Press, €49.50), gorgeously illustrated, and edited by Andrew Cooper, professor of coastal studies at the University of Ulster.

Co Donegal’s most beautiful sea lough is a magnet for basking sharks, seabirds and whooper swans, but also for fish-farmers, yachtsmen and powerboaters. With a merciful check to bungalow blight, there is now time for the community to work out what it wants. In his coda to this expert compendium of Swilly’s natural and human history, Cooper sizes up the conflict between those, including the Government, who would hand the lough’s priorities to aquaculture, and those who would “save” it through wider, integrated management.

Lough Hyne, the remarkable saltwater lake near Skibbereen, in west Co Cork, is one of the most internationally studied marine habitats in the world. Irish scientists have contributed very many of the 465 papers based on observations and experiments there, and their decades of annual visits have spun a rich local web of connections. Terri Kearney of Skibbereen Heritage Centre has produced a striking album and visual history, Lough Hyne: The Marine Researchers – in Pictures (€18 from skibbheritage.com), that reaches back to 1885 and the bearded Victorian pioneers of Irish marine biology.

Two more recent publications spring from pride in a place. Cullenagh, a townland near Portlaoise, is named for its forested mountain but is otherwise remarkable for the spirited community scattered among fields and hedgerows.

Fighting off an unwelcome quarry at the height of the Celtic Tiger years, it decided to document the human and natural history of its 25sq km.

The Heritage Council sponsored studies by the archaeologist Franc Myles and the ecologist Fiona McGowan, whose field explorations now inform Cullenagh: Digging and Ditching an Authentic Land (€20, plus postage, from Paula Byrne at pbyrne82@gmail.com). From rich remains of martial, monastic and industrial history to habitats of otter, kingfisher and pine marten, it shows that nowhere on this well-worn little island is meaningless or worth spoiling.

Least in size and costing nothing, a little booklet for the golf bag is nonetheless delightful as a tribute to place and nature. Lahinch Ecolinks is written and illustrated by Gordon D’Arcy, the Co Galway naturalist and painter, and published by Lahinch Golf Club. The sacrifice of so many Irish dune systems to the sport is regrettable, but this club’s obvious respect for such distinctive ecology (50 kinds of wildflower in the rough) has prompted some of this wildlife artist’s most appealing work.

Eye on nature

In early August I saw chrysalis cases attached to marram grass in sand dunes in Co Donegal. They were bright yellow, slug-shaped and about 2cm in length.

Mary Herbert, Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh

The chrysalis is that of either the five- or six-spot burnet moth. The caterpillars feed on birdsfoot trefoil and then migrate to a grass stem to form the chrysalis.

In Connemara I saw what my wild-flower book identified as a Babington’s leek. The book states that it is rare in Ireland.

Killian O’Donnell, Cashel, Co Galway

Babington’s leek has a distribution on the Aran Islands, the coast around Galway Bay, the Clare coast, the northwest and northeast Irish coasts, Wexford, and east Waterford.

Outside our house near Ballina, which is surrounded by a pine shelter belt, for a few weeks I heard strange, squeaking bird calls at night.

Hugh Melvin, Ballina, Co Mayo

From the video you sent, they were the calls of young long-eared owls.

At 1.30 on a bright afternoon I noticed a bat flying in a loop above a space defined by riverside trees and a hill slope. Why would a bat be active in daylight?

Sean O’Mahony, Ballydehob, Co Cork

Scarcity of food for its young.

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