Observing how the work of naturalists evolved

ANOTHER LIFE:WHAT DO YOU do, on yet another soaking day in August, with a whole bunch of disgruntled people in a beachside hotel without television? I like the inspiration of Robert Lloyd Praeger, the great naturalist and organiser of the first Clare Island Survey, in the summer of 1909. Faced by fraying tempers among the assembled specimen-collectors, he grabbed a spade, marched out across the strand in the rain and began to build a dam across a stream running through the sand (this is great fun: you should try it).

Within a short time, all his workers had joined him, their team spirit quite restored.

In Dublin this "unsettled" month, one could do a lot worse than duck into the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) Library in Dawson Street, Dublin, where a handsome exhibition commemorates Darwin, Praeger and the Clare Island Surveys. It draws on the collections of the RIA, the National Botanic Gardens and the Natural History Museum to conjure up one of the most colourful periods in Irish natural history.

It's a nice coincidence that the year which celebrates the bicentenary of Darwin's birth, and the publication of his On the Origin of Speciesin 1859, should also mark 100 years since the start of the momentous Clare Island Survey, largely funded by the RIA. Praeger was chosen to organise the visits of almost 100 scientists and then edit their reports of species they found, from seabed to mountain summit (8,488 in all). As an ecological baseline the exercise was unique and prompted the recent RIA replication in the context of climate change.

What ties the exhibition together so well is that Darwin’s work had an influence on Praeger’s setting up of the Irish island surveys – first of Lambay, on the east coast, and then, much more ambitiously, of Clare Island. Darwin’s comments on the evolution of species in isolated island populations (the famous Galapagos finches) encouraged Praeger’s hopes of showing that Ireland had a flora and fauna distinct from England’s. Other Irish researchers, too, thought that Clare Island, so far west, might show the first nudges of change in species compared with their mainland populations.

In the event, they were disappointed. The island was so close to the rest of Co Mayo, and so recently (in geological terms) joined to it by a land bridge, that nothing very exciting turned up. But the sheer number of species collected and identified was a scientific triumph. By comparison, as UCD’s Prof Martin Steer writes in the elegant exhibition booklet, “we have little real knowledge of what lives in this island of Ireland”.

Other contributors to the booklet cast some light on how Darwin’s ideas on evolution, so challenging at the time to many religious beliefs, were received among Ireland’s naturalists. Praeger, says Prof Greta Jones “had a vision of the moral lessons of nature but it could be argued that, post-Darwin, this was tinged with greater melancholy and hesitation”. Two letters from Darwin are mounted in the exhibition. He was an assiduous correspondent, and some 160 letters, mostly on botanical matters, crossed between him and naturalists with an Irish address (this from research by Trinity geneticist Miguel DeArce). What isn’t on show is a letter Darwin wrote to his friend Charles Lyell about a review of Origin of Species –­ the first in Ireland – written by Samuel Haughton, then a Trinity professor of geology and later president of the RIA.

“Did you read Haughton in Dublin Mag. Of Nat. Hist.? He is more coarsely contemptuous than even Mr Dunns [. . .] overdoes everyone else in misrepresentation. I never knew anything so unfair!” Darwin wrote. He was keen to collect opinions about his book, but Haughton was “too coarse, too horrid”.

This month sees another anniversary in Irish island natural history: the 50th birthday of the Cape Clear Bird Observatory, with “mini-festival” activities planned for the week beginning August 15th. The observatory owes its beginnings to exploratory trips to the island by young English birdwatchers lured to west Cork in the hope of seeing vagrant rarities blown across the Atlantic in early autumn gales.

These have, indeed, provided half a century of incredible records of American songbirds lodged in Cape Clear’s few trees and bushes, but what also helped to establish the observatory was its clifftop vantage-point, perfect for watching processions of seabirds, among them rare shearwaters, petrels, skuas and the rest. Over the years, some 30 “new” species have been added to the Irish bird list.

With the burgeoning of Irish birding in the 1960s a strong Anglo-Irish partnership began to grow up around the observatory, with wardens recruited from the UK and accommodation steadily improving from spartan beginnings.

Today it is part of Ireland’s vibrant birding scene, and also of its whale-watching activities (a course on August 28th to 30th will be led by Pádraig Whooley of the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group). Details of the observatory festivities can be obtained from the warden, Steve Wing (steve.ccbo@gmail.com).