Keeping tabs on the progress of Ireland's wild geese

ANOTHER LIFE:AT THE LAST satellite fix, Cormac was still high in the sky over the middle of Scoresby Sound, and Aodh had flown further north, back for another summer on the cliffs at Kong Oscar Fiord. So two, at least, of David Cabot's barnacle geese, fitted with transmitters on Mayo's Inishkea islands, had reported safe arrival in East Greenland.

I picture the ganders now, motionless as sentries on their separate ledges, their spouses settled a few feet away, warming the eggs into life. I remember the watch we kept, and the entries on our record cards: Head Up, Extreme Head Up, Head on Back (asleep), Gone (to feed). A new entry every five minutes, through days and nights of endless sunlight.

We kept it up, in turn, until the eggs hatched and the chicks had taken their fateful, whirring jumps to the scree far below.

Even a couple of decades on, with satellite telemetry the latest tool, this kind of field observation supplies the raw data of ornithology. How much it mattered to record what the geese were doing (or not doing) at the nest was impossible to know: it was new information about their lives.

David Cabot has been ringing and studying the barnacles, on the Inishkeas, in Scotland, and in Greenland, for almost half a century. His winter monitoring of the 2,500 Inishkea geese, dramatically tested in January storms, deserves a book of its own. But it also made him an obvious choice to write Wildfowl, a major new work for the New Naturalist Library series (Collins, £50 hardback).

The barnacles take their place among 56 species of swans, geese and ducks recorded in Ireland and Britain, including the introductions and domesticated species. Wildfowl have generally done well in the past few decades, and a sizeable legion of Ireland’s birders, amateur and professional, recently completed a long-term survey of numbers and habitats.

The book’s superb photographs and paintings show the striking variety of birds which all have webbed feet on rear-mounted legs and heads with flat, broad bills.

There are plenty of field guides to help sort one bird from another. Wildfowl opens engagingly with their role in myth and human history, then settles into the science of evolution and ecology: the great adaptations of anatomy and lifestyle, of location and migration, mostly to avoid competition for food.

A couple of autumns ago, for example, Dr Cabot watched more than 6,500 black scoter sea ducks in large, restless rafts in Dingle Bay: migrants from the Baltic, diving for mussels. The beautiful black-and-white Arctic eider dives for mussels, too, but off the north-west coast. On our lakes, some kinds of ducks dabble for surface food, while others dive for it, or seize fish in serrated bills.

All the geese and swans are herbivores, grazing or up-ending for plants. As numbers of many wildfowl increase, and their traditional winter feeding habitats are encroached upon, both geese and swans have turned to nearby, high-protein farm crops, sometimes to the point of becoming pests. At the Wexford Slobs, intensively managed grassland has been vital to survival of the Greenland white-fronted goose, once the wild winter goose of undisturbed bogs. Our brent geese, normally feeding at the coast, have turned increasingly to the managed grass of parks and playing fields, especially in the south and east. The book has a photograph of brents grazing a Dublin rugby pitch, which could create its own problems, given the rapid rate of goose excretion.

Though Cabot does not explore it, rising sea levels of climate change could rapidly invade many of the coastal margins, salt-marshes and estuarial mud-banks that have provided the traditional haunts of wildfowl. In problems of conservation management, both today and tomorrow, his book will be essential reading.

BOOKS ABOUTIreland's orchids just keep getting better. Last autumn, Brendan Sayers of the National Botanic Gardens and artist Susan Sex produced a field guide to the island's species that is both exceptionally practical and very beautiful. Now, as our orchids spring up in their summer glory, comes a second splendid book about them, with outstanding photographs rather than paintings, and a text of equal authority and field knowledge about where to look for what.

The author is Tom Curtis, an eminent Irish botanist with a lifetime of working for conservation of our wild plants. The illustrator is Robert Thompson, whose skills in macrophotography have served several notable books on natural history published by the Ulster Museum. This one, The Orchids of Ireland, (€22.50 plus pp) should help promote the Orchid Ireland survey, part-funded by the National Parks and Wildlife Service and managed by the Ulster Museum's Dr Damien McFerran.

It is also nicely timed for a summer school on orchids that Dr John Feehan is giving at the Ferbane Community Centre in Co Offaly from June 29th to July 3rd. Details from Amanda Pedlow, Offaly Heritage Officer (APedlow@offalycoco.ie)