Multiplication is the name of the fatal game

Never was summer more sudden than this year: the air busy with insects overnight, the beech tree bursting from bud to full leaf while my back was turned, the first fledglings tumbling from their nest and wandering, dazed, about the lawn. The sheer multiplication of cells, leaves, flowers, wings, all within a few weeks, took my breath away.

Yet the memory of bare branches and clean winds is vivid enough both to accentuate the wonder of change and to keep its illusion in check: death and decay will come around again. The natural rhythm of life-cycles, the necessary balance of numbers and nutrients over the seasons, seems even more evident on a hillside with no human beings in sight.

I have had to look up the word "misanthrope" to make sure it is not what I am. "A person who dislikes humankind and avoids human society" seems to go rather too far. But there's nothing like getting away from people en masse such as the Fota Wildlife Park.

Beside such trauma, discussion of our own population becomes almost idle chatter. Yet which of us has any clear idea what the population of Ireland could - or should - be? When has it ever been "normal" - and what do we mean by that? The 200,000 people of Neolithic Ireland were carving out a living from wilderness. The 500,000 people of pre-Norman Ireland were well into forest clearance, and those of the 1200s were herding some 1,650,000 cattle as well.

Population certainly wasn't normal in 1841, just before the Famine, when 8.2 million people, most of them living off the land around them, had reduced much of the island to a bare, hedgeless landscape, dotted with cabins at slum densities, and endless ridges of potatoes. The potato itself, a miracle of easy nourishment, had fuelled a population explosion.

But nor were the numbers thought normal in 1951, when the Republic's population, stable at around at three million (out of the island's 4.3m), was considered a problem worth a government commission of inquiry.

The density of rural population was then 33 people per square mile - comparable with Sweden, Scotland and Spain.

Looking back through an ecological lens, this wasn't such a bad time for either people or nature. Small-farm families lived in the "frugal comfort" beloved by de Valera, virtually self-sufficient in food, warmth and shelter, and practising a mixed-farm economy of huge diversity: all kinds of livestock and many kinds of crops. Indeed, by creating so many niches and habitats, it may have supported some of the richest diversity of wildlife in the island's human history.

There was, of course, heavy emigration, because, even though the small-farm productivity was amazingly high, it could not support the adult lives of six or more children per family, and a national natural increase of some 25,000 people a year. Ireland has only lately moved into the "demographic transition" in which interference in mortality becomes balanced by contraception.

Our population today, somewhere above 3.5 million (up from the low point of 2.8 million in 1961) rests on an economy that is largely

In a recent column about whales, I gave an incomplete website for the sighting scheme of the Irish Whale and Dolphin group. It should have read: http://iwdg.ucc.ie/sightingscheme.html