A FEW weeks ago I wrote about sparrow hawks and kestrels and I mentioned that the number of kestrels in this country was declining and I hadn’t seen one for several years.
A READER in Fermoy emailed me about the birds in her garden.
THE conservation of nature depends on us knowing where the species are, the number of individuals and whether this number is increasing or decreasing.
WE’RE getting to the time of year when book tokens are in circulation, so I’m going to mention a few recently published books with an outdoors theme that I have enjoyed.
AT the end of the last Ice Age, animals and plants crept northwards to colonise the messy moraines left behind when the ice melted.
I HEARD an unmistakable sound — a wild trumpeting filling the sky.
PHILLIP O’Sullivan Beare wrote a book about Ireland while he was exiled in Spain following the Battle of Kinsale.
SOME years ago I was walking in a wood with my brother when we came across a badger caught in a snare.
IN 2007, the government finally gave way to international pressure and banned drift net fishing for salmon in Irish coastal waters.
RECENTLY in this column I wrote about the anomaly of having legal shooting seasons for bird species that are of conservation concern.
THERE are many species of oak tree in the world and quite a few of them can be found growing in Ireland — I have half a dozen in my own small collection.
MORE THAN 99% of documented living species are now extinct. Extinction is a natural and inevitable process that is compensated for by ‘speciation’, the development of new species.
I HAVE spent several days this autumn travelling on the Grand Canal in my boat.
FOR several weeks my boat was marooned by an engine breakdown on the Royal Canal a few kilometres east of Mullingar.
WHEN you have a reputation for knowing about wildlife, you get emergency calls.
ON one of those days last week when the sun shone for a while I was sitting in a plastic chair in the vegetable garden with a basket of broad beans that I was shelling for the freezer.
I can’t walk past a horse chestnut tree without stopping to examine it.
A COUPLE of weeks ago I wrote about Monkey Puzzle trees, mentioning that the man responsible for introducing them to these islands was Archibald Menzies, a Scottish medical doctor and botanist.
THERE’S a town in eastern France called Vittel and every year around the beginning of May it holds a festival called the Foire aux Grenouilles.
ENCOUNTERS with butterflies are among the highlights of an Irish summer.
IF you live in the midlands, as I do, a trip to the seaside is exciting.
THE Eurasian otter has a huge range that takes in most of Europe, much of Asia and parts of Africa.
THE Eurasian otter has a huge range that takes in most of Europe, much of Asia and parts of Africa.
THE Royal Canal has recently been re-opened, after more than half a century of dereliction, for through travel from the Liffey to the north Shannon.
A COUPLE of weeks ago I wrote on this page about great spotted woodpeckers and how they’re re-colonising Ireland.
A LARGE and evil-looking tom cat, probably of no fixed abode, has had the house under constant observation.
THE first bog fires round here started last Monday.
A DELIGHTFUL sight in the Irish countryside, seen rarely enough these days, is that of a hare bounding along ears up at great speed, especially after being surprised by human, or canine, presence.
I came across a newt the other day in a shallow garden pond.
ONE of the great pleasures of a warm and sunny spring is seeing butterflies on the wing.
RED-NECKED phalarope sounds like a piece of abuse you might hurl at an intruder.
THERE is a noticeable change in the behaviour of the birds in my garden.
A COUPLE of weeks ago I wrote about daffodils on this page and complained I was finding it difficult to establish whether the wild daffodil was a native Irish species.
I HAVE been spending quite a lot of time around the canal recently, getting my boat organised for the new season.
A FEW weeks ago I wrote an article for this page about unusual garden birds and mentioned a photograph sent in by a reader of a snipe feeding on a suburban front lawn.
RECENTLY every morning round here has started with a white frost, but strong sunshine has melted it all by about 11am and tempted me out to look for signs of growth in the garden and to pass judgement on plants that may or may not have been killed by the harsh winter.
THE countryside is rather quiet at present. Most things seem to be still and dormant, waiting for the spring. But below the surface in our rivers, lakes and canals there is plenty of movement and drama.
IN a bed beside the front yard is a shrub I’m rather fond of.
READERS of this newspaper are very erudite people.
A COUPLE of weeks ago I found myself, rather unexpectedly, visiting Sardinia for the first time.
THERE is a local wood, a Coillte forest park, where I often take my dog for a walk.
TEAMS have been out recently laying jute carpets on the bed of several stretches of canal close to where I live.
GARDENS are important to wildlife and, in my opinion at least, wildlife is important to gardens.
THERE is a log fire in the grate in the kitchen and some strange form of paralysis seems to have immobilised me in the fireside chair.
YOU’VE probably got your Christmas tree by now, and I hope it’s a real tree grown in Ireland and not a plastic, made-in-China, job.
FIELDFARES and redwings are often lumped together.
SNOW in towns is pretty awful stuff. It instantly turns brown and mushy, penetrating townie footwear and spraying up from the wheels of cars.
MY BOAT is now back at its winter moorings at the junction of the Main Line and Barrow Line of the Grand Canal in Lowtown.
THE nights have been cold around here.
OF all the large animals that have become extinct in Ireland the most fascinating is the wolf.
A FEW days ago I happened to be driving along a small road in the limestone uplands of north Cavan, close to the Fermanagh border.
NEXT Monday is November 1 and it will be a noisy day in the countryside.
THE Smooth-hound shark may be in danger of being wiped out here.
I’VE been seeing quite a few hedgehogs recently and on several occasions when I’ve let my dog out at night there has been an uproar of barking as he discovers one and dares it to unroll and fight like a man.
THERE was a bit of autumn sunshine and I had some free time so I decided to go fishing.
THE British Trust for Ornithology, normally called the BTO, publishes a Garden Bird Feeding Survey and it makes for interesting reading.
THE other day I set off for a business lunch in a pub in a country town.
RECENTLY I noticed that the fish in my small pond had starting acting oddly.
I CAME back from a short holiday to find the pond on the patio in need of attention.
I GOT a phone call from an excited friend of mine the other day.
THE other day I had to take out my hedge trimmer and mount an assault on some trees and shrubs growing around the patio on the west side of the house.
LAST Monday I wrote about the birds in my garden and on Tuesday I got a number of emails from readers full of interesting information, particularly about the family life of the house sparrow.
IN RECENT weeks my bird feeders have been dominated by juvenile birds, either being fed by their parents or learning the skills needed to extract the seeds and nuts themselves.
I WAS in Lanesborough in Co Longford the other day and, as I walked across the bridge that connects it to Ballyleague in Co Roscommon, I stopped and looked over the parapet.
IRISH scientists started to argue about how and when various species of animals and plants got to our island back when Queen Victoria was on the throne.
A COUPLE of weeks ago in this column I warned of the dangers of an invasion of harlequin ladybirds and speculated it was probably only a matter of time before it happened.
IN the part of the midlands where I live we had a late spring with low soil temperatures persisting for several weeks longer than normal.
LAST Monday I mentioned that I thought cuckoos were more plentiful this year than they have been in recent years and asked if any readers had noticed the same thing.
I WENT for a walk in a wood the other day with a friend of mine.
WHEN I heard that BirdWatch Ireland was starting a survey of kestrel numbers in Ireland one thing immediately struck me.
I SPENT the bank holiday weekend on my boat on the Grand Canal.
MAY is the month that begins in spring and ends in summer.
I WAS supposed to go to Spain for a short break that was a birthday present for my wife.
I WAS in west Clare about ten days ago and, because it was April and the sun was shining, I decided to go and look for vernal gentians in the Burren.
OLIVER RACKHAM is the acknowledged guru of woodland ecology and all things to do with trees.
IT’S always a pleasure when an unusual bird turns up in your garden.
THE nearest village to my house is a small place but it does boast something that is becoming rather scarce in rural Ireland – an old-fashioned working farm with an entrance half way down the street.
I HAD a close encounter with a fox the other day.
THE cold weather came back last week but I was a bit better prepared for it this time.
IF YOU feed the birds in your garden you should be keeping a close eye on them because at this time of year unusual species can turn up.
LAST week I was in England, visiting friends in a rural part of Devon.
I HAD to cut down another tree that had got too big for its boots the other day.
THERE is a series of chores that I perform every morning, with the enthusiastic assistance of my dog.
I HAVE always been fascinated by the large animals that roamed the world during and just after the last Ice Age.
MISTLETOE is as closely associated with Christmas as holly and the Christmas tree.
THE robin is the bird most associated with the Christmas season and, I suppose, if you had to pick a mammal you’d have to go for the reindeer.
LIKE many people with an interest in wildlife, I keep track of the birds in my garden.
THIS is a fairly quiet time of year for most forms of gardening activity but the exception is the management of trees.
I WAS working down at the bottom of the garden the other day, converting a fallen tree into logs for the fire. It was one of those pet November days, hardly a breath of wind, and enough sun to make me take my jacket off.
I HAD an odd and rather unpleasant experience the other day.
I WAS travelling in my boat on the Grand Canal recently, enjoying the wonderful autumn colours of the trees and shrubs growing along the bank.
THERE is still quite a bit of tillage farming around where I live, mostly winter cereals.
I RECEIVED an email the other day from a lady who was appalled because she’d just spotted a large rat sitting on the peanut feeder she puts out for the birds in her garden and nibbling at the contents.
USUALLY when I work at the computer I close the curtains on the big window beside me so that I can see the monitor more clearly.
LAST week on this page I mentioned that on a trip to Kerry I had found a plant called the large-flowered butterwort and that it was carnivorous.
I LIVE in a beautiful part of rural Co Kildare and I love the landscape and the wildlife that surrounds me. But now and again I get a hankering for something different. And I have to admit that Kildare is slightly lacking in high mountains and dramatic seascapes.
I HAVE always been fascinated by fungi and because a reasonably mild, wet autumn provides the best conditions for finding them, I’m gearing myself up to go foraging.
THE other day I heard somebody observing that some deciduous trees were starting to change colour and drop their leaves early this year and suggesting that this was a sign that we were in for a bad winter.
SOME years ago there was a story in my local paper about a goat farm where most of the goats had been savagely attacked and killed during the night.
A FEW days ago I was conducting river walks along the banks of the Barrow as part of the Carlow Floral Festival.
I AM fascinated by the way garden ponds are colonised by wild aquatic plants and animals.
IN the past couple of months there have been some developments in the story of the attempt by greater spotted woodpeckers to re-colonise this country after an absence of several hundred years.
THE other morning I went for a walk along the bank of the Grand Canal in a rural part of Co Kildare. The amount and variety of wildflowers was striking.
THE sight and sound of swifts in the sky, scything through the air and screaming, is an icon of summer.
The modern theory is that you should continue feeding wild birds throughout the year and not stop during the breeding season, which was the earlier advice.
I was woken early the other morning by the sound of starlings.
A FEW weeks ago a pair of blackbirds built a nest in the hedge outside my conservatory.
THERE’S always something magical about that week in the middle of May when the hawthorn starts to blossom.
INTERESTING news from across the water – it looks as though Britain is about to gain a new species of mammal.
ON APRIL 23 Fisheries Officers on a routine patrol of Lough Derg on the Shannon came across a party of French anglers fishing for pike from boats.
WHAT makes deciduous trees and other perennial plants start to grow in the spring?
EXCITING news from a neighbour — he phoned to describe an unusual bird on his peanut feeder.
THE soil is beginning to warm up and it tempted me out to prepare a bed in the vegetable garden for sowing scallion seed.
Whatever the old Celtic calendar said about spring starting on St Brigid’s Day, most country people know better.
THE activity on and around my bird table is beginning to die down.
I HAVE a dog. He’s a playful, good-natured mutt of dubious ancestry, probably involving a liaison between a pointer and a spaniel. He does have one vice: a deep hatred of postmen. I met our postman the other day and apologised for the dog’s unwelcoming reception every time he made a delivery.
MANY of the wild mammals that live in our countryside are nocturnal and even species that are active in daylight, such as squirrels and deer, are extremely shy.
LAST week I was in England, visiting friends in a rural part of Devon.
IN the past amateur naturalists have contributed a huge amount to our knowledge of flora and fauna.
THERE’S no shortage of reasons for planting trees, though perhaps the most compelling one is the satisfaction from watching one of these great plants flourish and grow.
THEY say the best place to hide a book is in a library.
THE robin is the commonest bird recorded in Irish gardens, according to BirdWatch Ireland’s garden bird survey.
AS WE peer anxiously over the horizon into 2009, one of the few certainties seems to be that we will be in a recession.
THE story of biodiversity in our countryside is often a depressing one. Corncrakes, for example, did not do well in 2008. We have to confront the fact that, despite massive efforts, they may be close to extinction as an Irish breeding species.
THE beak of a bird is a wonderful thing. I was thinking this the other day when I was doing some waterside bird-watching.
I got an email the other day, from a reader who carried out interesting experiments with his bird table.
THE list of wild mammals in Ireland has grown by an astonishing amount over the past 100 years. Some of the new additions have here all along but they were animals we never noticed and includes several species of bat.
I HAD an unusual visitor to the bird table the other day — a grey wagtail. This has to qualify as the bird with the most inappropriate English name.
A DECIDUOUS tree is really a tree that has learned to hibernate, going through profound metabolic changes in order to survive the winter.
QUIS enim, verbi gratia, lupos cervos, et sylvaticos porcos, et vulpes,taxones, et lepusculos, et sesquivolos in Hiberniam deveheret?
I’M starting with a request — well, really it’s a heartfelt plea. I put an email address at the end of my column.
WHEN we bought our country cottage and its bit of land, many years ago now, even the most creative of estate agents would have found it hard to find flattering words to describe it. “With potential” might have been the best they could manage.
THE latest news from the bird table is that the goldfinches are back. In accordance with the latest theories, I kept on feeding the birds all through the summer.
‘God in His wisdom
Made the fly
And then forgot
To tell us why.’
I was sitting in my car waiting to collect my son and, as often happens, he was late. The car was parked beside a mature rowan tree drooping with scarlet berries and suddenly it was invaded by a flock of noisy, squabbling birds.
I HAVE just finished reading an interesting book. It’s called Corvus — A Life With Birds, by Esther Woolfson. It’s about the tame birds that have lived in her house for most of her life.
IN general I’m not nervous of insects and I’m usually the person designated to remove the spiders from the bath.
ONE night, many summers ago, my children went through one of those rites of passage that I think happen to most children. They were going to spend their first night camping out alone — two brothers aged seven and eight.
FOR centuries, many of the owners of estates and large gardens in this country were compulsive and competitive collectors of exotic trees. Many of these collections still survive. I have a passionate interest in trees and for somebody like me, visiting one of these collections for the first time is an exciting event.
THE other day I visited Oak Park Forest Park by Carlow town for the first time and was very impressed.
FOR years, I’ve watched swallows flying over water and dipping the ends of their beaks into the surface. I assumed they were getting a drink on the wing.
ONE of my favourite summer wildflowers is purple loosestrife. It’s a plant that loves wet places, as I do myself, growing on the banks of rivers, lakes and canals.
THE weekend before last I was in Lanesborough for the annual Lough Ree environmental summer school. I had the pleasant job of guiding boatloads of people on the lake and the river and showing off their beauty.
THE rapid decline in house sparrow numbers in Britain and some other European countries has prompted concern and a flurry of research projects.
Dick Warner flies flag for Burren Birds of Prey Centre
THERE had been a shower earlier in the evening but the sky cleared before sunset and I decided to take the dog for a walk along the lane. The trees were still dripping so I put on a hat and we set off.
BECAUSE of the increasing emphasis on the importance of bio-diversity in our countryside, a lot of attention is paid to species that are endangered.
OUR boat had been wandering around the Shannon for the past year or so and was beginning to look a bit shabby.
IT’S been a good year for cuckoos, for me, at least. In the last six weeks or so I’ve heard calling males in three different counties in three different provinces.
JUST occasionally something happens which gives me this nasty smug feeling that I’m a visionary who’s ahead of his time.
THE weather has been kind over the past few weeks. No frost to blacken the new leaves of the potatoes which are now above ground — though it has been touch-and-go on a couple of nights. And there’s been plenty of sunshine during the day, with little in the way of rain and wind.
I’VE been living on the same small patch of rural Ireland for more than 25 years and for all that time I’ve been carefully keeping tabs on the wildlife around me.
MOST people interested in wildlife are more familiar with birds than with animals. This is because most of our bird species are active during the day and sleep at night, while our wild mammals tend to be wholly or partially nocturnal.
THE weather was colder than normal for much of April. I was preparing beds in my vegetable garden in the chilly midlands and when my hands were in contact with the soil for about 20 minutes they went numb. I didn’t need a thermometer to tell me that it was too soon to start sowing things.
THE other day, a friend of mine pointed to some hazel catkins and asked “what are those?” I’m surprised at how few tree species most people can identify.
A RETIRED couple who are regular readers of this page have sent me a long email about the pleasure and satisfaction they get from feeding the birds in their garden.
I WAS away for a few days and when I came back there was a message on my answering machine. It was from a man I didn’t know who lived in the local village. He wanted advice on how to rear two baby hares.
ON a recent visit to the west I was given a copy of a remarkable book called The Living Farmland — A Guide To Farming With Nature In Clare.
I SPENT the Easter weekend travelling the Grand Canal. We brought our boat from Shannon Harbour, which is near Banagher in west Offaly, to Lowtown, near Robertstown in Kildare.
A FEW weeks ago a reader emailed me with a query about the life-cycle of eels.
OVER the past weeks, I have been writing a lot about feeding wild birds. This is your fault, because, every time these articles appear, I get a stack of emails from readers who are obviously interested in the subject.
LOOKING out of the window in the direction of the bog I can see a couple of small birch woods.
SOME weeks ago, I wrote an article about how I had built myself a new bird table after several years of being without one.
FOR much of last week there was high pressure over the midlands. In the mornings there was white frost everywhere and often a cold fog. In the afternoons there was strong sun, blue sky and little breeze.
BUSINESS took me to Dublin the other day, but it wasn’t very hectic business so I ended up with some spare time to watch brent geese grazing on the pitches of the GAA Club in Sandymount.
LAST week on this page Damien Enright described the magnificent trees on the neglected estate at Kincragie, near where he lives in Co Cork.
ONCE I had a bird table but it was involved in a fatal accident with a runaway lawnmower. I didn’t bother replacing it because I keep poultry and whenever I feed the hens and ducks flocks of wild birds descend and pinch their rations.
ONE of the mysteries of Irish natural history has finally been solved and the solution is rather an elegant one. We now know how and when bank voles got to Ireland.
I SPEND a lot of my time sitting in front of a computer beside a window that has a splendid view.
IVY is an extraordinary plant. I was in a mixed-species wood the other day and I started to notice how selective it is about the species of tree it chooses to climb. In this wood its favourite was ash and its least favourite was holly.
I HAVE always been interested in how people lived and what they ate in prehistoric times, particularly in the middle and early stone ages before farming.
I WONDER what the prospects are for Irish wildlife in 2008? I remember in 2007 a news story saying 171 Irish plant species were threatened with extinction because of climate change.
I LIKE Christmas, I’ve always liked it. But one thing I don’t like is the annual whinge from those people who say we’ve lost the true spirit of Christmas and that it has become submerged in commercialism, consumerism, materialism and whatever ‘ism’ you’re having yourself.
WE drove round a corner and the road was covered in rooks. They took to the air and the car was surrounded by large black birds. Miraculously they all managed to avoid us but the number of rook corpses you see on road verges shows that they aren’t always so lucky.
THERE’S no doubt that the very best time of year to plant trees in this country is the second half of November.
THE other day I was being quizzed by a classroom of 10-year-olds and finding it quite hard going.
I CALLED round to visit Kevin, who owns land near the edge of the bog.
I’VE JUST finished reading rather a good book which would make an excellent Christmas present for someone with an interest in wildlife and the environment. It’s called Saving Planet Earth by Tony Juniper and it’s published by Collins with the permission of the BBC.
I SPOTTED it from quite some distance away and walked over to have a look.
I LOVE the autumn and in the part of the countryside I live this is a particularly fine one. The Indian Summer is lingering on even into November, which will help to shorten the winter.
A BREEZY DAY with showers of rain is bringing clouds of leaves down off the trees. It’s the essence of autumn, my favourite season.
TEN days ago a public meeting was held in a hotel in Galway to discuss the threat posed to Lough Corrib by the invasion of an alien pond weed called Lagarosiphon major.
THE big larch tree in the garden has been on my hit list for some time. Its roots were invading the vegetable plot and it was in the way of a new run and pond for ducks that I’m building. The other day I finally felled it.
THE other day I was driving slowly along a small country road when something caught my eye. There were large, bright yellow flowers growing in the verge that looked unfamiliar.
THE OTHER night I was checking the patio lights to see what species of moths had been drawn to them.
Dick Warner on the curious social lives of foxes.
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