Islands' abandonment complete as the economy ebbs

ANOTHER LIFE:THE SEA PINKS along our garden path are not the right sort at all. Armeria hybrids – I should have known – have turned out all Chelsea Flower Show, waving multicoloured pom-poms on two-foot stems. Pretty enough, but not sea pinks, trembling on wind-dwarfed cushions at the cliff's edge.

One lies there, looking down, swapping gazes with one of the island’s grey seals, riding slow swells in the cove below. The shadows echo with watery sighs and gurgles: the Atlantic, for once, sleeping like a baby.

June was our month for islands – once, as newly-weds, cast away for two cosy weeks in a tent in the middle of Clew Bay. Today that idyll is a dot in the kitchen window, still uninhabited, still pristine. I wonder about the long-term fate of the small, wild islands of the west.

Climate change will hurl even worse winter storms at their seaward cliffs and suck at the sandy inlets on the lee shore. But calmer, warmer summers could tempt more adventurous visitors, as the Irish take to the sea with even greater enthusiasm. On once-populated islands, ruined houses have been restored as summer homes and there is talk of tourist “potential” and public toilets. Some islands, too, have been small enough for purchase by a single wealthy owner; Charles Haughey, building on Kerry’s Inishvickillane, set the tone.

All that was before the economy’s ebb tide. And at many other islands, hard to mount except at some half-sheltered cleft in the rocks, abandonment seems complete. Only tumbled field walls, a ripple of lazy-beds, a ruin shrouded in lichen, speak of extraordinary, unimaginable lives. Other islands lack even these remnants, but, as winter grazing for a few huddled sheep, belong to distant commonage.

Such islands can seem truly and magically wild, reclaimed by nature for seals and birds. But, as a Dublin solicitor has advised: “Even in the remotest spots on the remotest islands, you are on private property. . . there is always a landowner.” In Oileán (2004) his remarkable guide – even to the trickier tides and currents – David Walsh had his fellow canoeists first in mind. But, as he confessed: “It is in the nature of this guide that most places dealt with are so remote that checking ownership would be impossible.”

Only about 10 per cent of Irish offshore islands are inhabited all year round, and the land titles to many of the rest may lie with emigrant heirs. As refuges for wildlife, the remoter outposts are probably secure, so long as explorers in ribs and canoes watch where they put their feet and light their fires, and take their litter home. And the National Parks and Wildlife Service has included a good few uninhabited islands among its Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) and Special Protection Areas (SPAs) for birds.

Half the human romance of islands has to do with them as exotic geographic entities, as separate and special little worlds. The ecology of islands is a branch of science all its own. In Islands, a recent book in Collins’s fine New Naturalist series, replete with great photographs from around Irish and British coasts, geneticist Prof RJ (“Sam”) Berry delves into the mysteries of the “founder” species of islands and their sometimes eccentric evolution of form or colour.

But the SACs and SPAs awarded under Europe’s Habitats Directive protect islands not as ecosystems but for habitats and species they contain and support. Thus the Blaskets are selected for their vegetated sea cliffs, their bits of dry heath, their marine caves and reefs, and for the grey seals and porpoises that swim around them.

Tory Island has a lagoon (a “priority habitat” under Annex 1 of the directive), along with perennial vegetation of stony banks, the craggy cliffs and special marine life on its reefs. In west Cork, Roaringwater Bay and its islands (Cape Clear Island, Sherkin and lesser isles) are an SAC for a whole, collective roster of rich habitats with special seaweeds, land plants and birds.

Cape Clear is, indeed, one of the best-studied of Irish islands, with bonuses of passing whales and drop-in rarities of migrant birds. A good sense of both its diversity and distinctiveness is offered in the summer school, “Island Ecology”, organised by biologists Dr Geoff Oliver and Dr Paddy Sleeman for the Comharchumann Chléire. Now in its ninth year, it runs from July 6th to 10th and costs €200. Details at oilean-chleire.ie.

EYE ON NATURE

A pair of blue tits nested in a nest-box in our garden. The young were also fed by a male great tit. The entrance was to small for him to enter but he could stick his head in with food.John Murphy, Finglas, Dublin 11

Very strange, but we have had a somewhat similar experience. A pair of blue tits nested as usual in our nest-box and started feeding the nestlings. One day a blue tit arrived with food in its beak and perched on top of the box, then flew away. From then on great tits were doing the feeding. We are equally puzzled.

I watched a male blackbird in my garden calling to a fledgling, and both calls were audible. Then the blackbird continued calling but was inaudible while its stance was as before – head up, beak open, wings slightly outstretched, tail cocked. The fledgling continued calling.Brian McLoughlin, IFSC, Dublin 1

The male blackbird, which continues to feed fledglings after the female has gone to start a new brood, was telling it with a slightly aggressive stance to go and fend for itself.

While walking on the beach at Clonea, Co Waterford, at high tide, to my delight, I saw a flock of 22 choughs among the flotsam.Paddy Sleeman, Cork

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. E-mail: viney@anu.ie.