A striking publication - visually and in content - comes from John McLoughlin of Coillte: Celebrating Irish Forests. Short, pungent and photographically and in design first class. You may be aware that in 1900, just one per cent of this island was forested. Today we are at eight per cent and moving upward all the time. And changing, too, for farmers now have seen the advantage of the grants available, and something like seventy per cent of all new afforestation comes from them. The present afforestation percentage of eight per cent is hoped to rise to seventeen in - ahem - the year 2035.
You may not have heard of "the great Scottish American naturalist John Muir," but he said: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. As a forest grows, it changes the habitat for the good." In one coniferous forest in the south west of Ireland, forty species of birds were recorded. And then there is the insect and animal life. People are becoming more conscious of all this and, according to John, there were 7.7 million visits made to Irish forests in 1996, or, as he puts it, two out of every five families visited at least one forest. And then the foreign visitors. One third of them are reckoned to have done the same.
Mistakes have been made in the past, including thousands of hectares of a variety of lodgepole pine on poor peatland and mineral soils. They grew very poorly - the wrong tree in the wrong place. The book is a combined production of An Taisce and Coillte. Among the lovely pictures is a red squirrel: they thrive in conifer woods; and there is a fine shot of a woodcock in cover, with the big watchful eye. More woodland means more extensive breeding range for this bird. How many hen harriers are there in Ireland? It's our rarest bird of prey, says the text, and prefers to nest in deep heather. But the decline in heather means that it has now taken to recently-established plantations. There is a droll photo of two awkward young.
Forestry has come down from the mountains and we have more diversity of trees and owners. Text mainly by Frank Convery, photographs mostly by Neil Warner. A delight. £5 from any Coillte office.