Nature needs no help in quashing its killers

AS the sun sneaked up behind Mweelrea the other morning it set fire to a cloud resting on the snowy summit, turning it to blazing, candyfloss.

In this brilliant amber glow, the 18 ravens spaced out along the fence, each motionless on its separate post, were gold-rimmed and iconic, like birds in an Egyptian frieze. Hard to think that, a century ago, ravens were so persecuted by game-keepers they were actually much rarer in Ireland than peregrine falcons. What had gathered 18 together was made plain by tufts of white sheep's wool scattered among the rushes. Five grey crows and a couple of magpies were squabbling over something half-hidden, the ravens having, presumably, taken their fill and left them to it.

Hoodies, magpies and ravens used to be prominent on the gamekeeper's gallows. But "vermin" is a word not much in fashion now outside the pages of shooting magazines, and even there the term "predator" is asserting its correctness. There are shades of antipathy in these matters, broadly - not always - in line with what the Wildlife Act allows you to kill. Many shooters would like to kill stoats; many pigeon-racers would like to kill peregrine falcons and some along our east coast regularly poison them or steal their eggs.

Pigeon racing is big business across Europe, and winning birds are worth a lot of money. Dutch scientists, asked to look into the fate of perhaps a million pigeons a year that never reach their lofts, found that the birds are weakened by stressful conditions in the lorries that transport them to the start of the race: they expire in their crates, or die in their efforts to get

In Britain, the agitation of pigeon racers, certain that peregrines and sparrowhawks are routinely slaughtering their birds, has encouraged the government to set up a working group to look at the arguments for reducing the numbers of birds of prey. Other voices in favour are those of gamekeepers employed by big. landowners and shooting syndicates, good, Tory supporters all.

It is remarkable how quick we are to decide there are "too many" of any wild creature which kills to eat, especially if it has the nerve to do so right in front of us. But the numbers of birds of prey are regulated, in the first place, by the amount of prey available - never the other way round., Half the songbirds that are born are going to die, young, whether by predation in midsummer or starving or freezing to death in mid-winter; the swoop of a sparrowhawk just changes the cause of death, along with the day and the hour.

Like the sparrowhawks, Ireland's peregrines have recovered dramatically from the population crash caused by organo-chlorines in the 1960s and their numbers. .are now at the highest level on record: some 365 pairs in the whole island. Protection has helped to reduce mortality, so the governing factor now, besides availability of prey, is the spacing of breeding territories and suitable places to nest.

In the west of Ireland, favourite sites are on precipitous coastal cliffs and offshore islands. Here, the population seems to be stable even though there are many vacant sites which have been occupied in the past. In the east of Ireland, there is a rather different picture - peregrines spreading their range by nesting in quarries with high, inaccessible ledges.

Many of these are busy, noisy places, with blasting and gravel-production in progress, but the falcons find them safer than disused quarries, where nests are regularly robbed. Quarry workers tend to be proud and protective of their peregrines.

Of course the falcons kill pigeons, from the rock doves of coastal cliffs to the feral pigeons of city streets. They have even adapted to nesting on high urban ledges, to be closer to their prey. But since some 2.5 million new rings are issued annually for racing pigeons in Britain and Ireland, the falcons' toll is obviously trivial and in no way justifies the serial killing of peregrines along Ireland's east coast.

It ought not, in any case, to be beyond the wit of the pigeon clubs to make their homing birds simply unattractive or confusing to predators. Some racers in Britain are painting large, coloured roundels on their pigeons' wings, like the warning "eyes" of peacock butterflies - apparently to great effect.

Most of the persistent persecution of birds of prey in these islands is still associated with the keepers of Scottish grouse moors, where scores of breeding hen harriers and buzzards are shot or poisoned each summer, quite against the law. If and when the hills of Ireland are allowed to grow heather again, and grouse numbers are built up for shooting, we can expect a similar overkill of these conspicuous raptors.

IRELAND'S ravens, also, had better make the most of their revival, for they can easily come to seem "too many" where game-shooting interests are concerned. They are as likely as grey crows to eat grouse eggs and chicks, yet ravens are protected by the Wildlife Act" while the hoodies are not. Ravens were one of the species singled out at the Irish Red Grouse Conference for reduction from "unnaturally high numbers" if our moors were ever to recover both heather and gamebirds.

Deciding what is "natural" is the problem. There has been nothing natural about hills grossly overstocked with sheep, and littered with corpses to be cleaned up by the Corvidae. But, as with peregrines, raven numbers are regulated not just by food supply. but by the spacing of territories and suitable nest sites.

Nature rarely needs help to keep its own species in balance - even when we crowd the hills with sheep and the air with racing pigeons.