Another Life: The casual omnicompetence of the computer can quite take one's breath away: images of nature fly through cyberspace like leaves in an autumn wind, writes Michael Viney.
Such swift transmission and assembly can seem almost an affront to the sheer effort involved in the field to secure this photograph or that, producing pictorial compendia that would have knocked out the eye (perhaps even the heart) from the pioneering naturalists of the past.
Complete Irish Wildlife (Collins, £14.99) offers more than 1,000 colour photographs, plus brief descriptions, of the mammals, birds, fish, insects, plants, fungi, seashore crustaceans and invertebrates "likely to be found by the keen amateur naturalist" on this island. Its inclusivity is awesome.
With an Irish top and tail (a brisk introduction to the island's natural history by Derek Mooney, guided by Richard Collins, and a brief list of Irish addresses at the back), the book is one in a series of "complete" regional photoguides written and assembled by Dr Paul Sterry, an industrious British biologist-turned-wildlife-photographer who runs a highly successful pictorial nature library. He has taken most of the pictures in the book - not necessarily in Ireland - and has done his best to research the actual distribution or occurrence of species.
How much does it matter that the otter on the jacket was actually photographed in the Shetlands by Hugh Miles, or that the gorgeous, sky-pointing bittern on page 36 is unlikely to come the way of the keenest Irish amateur naturalist (though one did drop dead out of the sky in Dalkey a couple of winters ago)? The book requires a little caution, yet is actually a bit behind events on fresh encounters with whales and dragonflies. The overall richness of representation, especially of the island's flora and fungi (even ferns, liverworts and lichens) more than makes up for an occasional sense of a distant hand at work.
Eamon de Buitléar's otters have always been very Irish, and sometimes waited for, crouched in a hide, for days at a time. The patience and frequent frustration of wildlife-filming (and of dealing with the accountants in RTÉ) form part of his lively autobiography, A Life in the Wild (Gill & Macmillan, €24.99). His feeling for nature, shaped in a childhood on the banks of the River Dargle in Co Wicklow, took him on through owning a pet shop to his 1960s collaboration with Gerrit van Gelderen in Amuigh Faoin Spéir, the series that awakened a generation of young people to an interest in wildlife. As his filming expertise grew, to a standard well appreciated by the BBC's Natural History Unit, his parallel work for traditional Irish music and the language helped somehow to authenticate nature as a proper national concern.
"Television wildlife, for all its joys," says Damien Enright, "cannot compare with the reality", but well-crafted words can come close to catching the human uplift. In his weekly nature column in the Irish Examiner, Enright celebrates the extraordinary variety and richness of the wild habitats of west Cork. A Place Near Heaven (Gill & Macmillan, €16.99) gathers his writing into a month-by-month chronicle, mostly of sheer delight. "These autumn evenings, over Courtmacsherry bridge, the air rings with the cries of rooks, strident and clashing in the dying light. From the trees overhead they foray forth in packs over the water, clouds and curtains of rooks, cawing, crying, swirling, filling the sky. . ."
Love and technology are sublimely wed in an interactive CD-ROM from Burrenbeo in Co Clare at the heart of Ireland's flagship landscape. Burrenbeo: Images of the Fertile Rock (€18, or €16 via the website www.burrenbeo.com) fills the screen with the glowing light of limestone, its wildflowers, monuments and farming life: a divine contemplation with which to start the day.
There's a flora catalogue of 200 plants and the full text of Brendan Dunford's book for Teagasc, Farming and the Burren. With his partner Ann O'Connor, Dunford has created an outstanding interpretive centre and a tool to lure the Burren's young into loving their world of grey stone.
And lastly, some poetry of farming life in another place and time. Born and bred in Mantua, south of the Alps, the man now known as Virgil became the greatest of Latin writers, seeking parables of peace and satisfaction in the daily life of the land. The Georgics of Virgil, composed about 36-29 BC, have long charmed Peter Fallon, and his translation of the four books - about crops, trees, livestock and bees - is now a Poetry Book Society recommendation (Gallery Press, €20 hardback; €13.90 paperback). It's fascinating, earthy stuff, and swings even better than Kavanagh.