Conor W. O'Brien's introduces his new book The Living and The Dead - Tales of Loss and Rebirth from Irish Nature, celebrating the extensive efforts being undertaken to revitalise lost species across Ireland.
I've been fascinated by extinct creatures for as long as I can remember. I grew up on a diet of dinosaurs and other prehistoric megafauna. This is why I first became enamoured with the mighty Irish elk standing guard at the entrance to the National History Museum. What made these creatures even more compelling was that here were prehistoric giants from our own island, who once roamed the primordial plains of Limerick or whose great antlers cast many-tined shadows across the mountains of Wicklow or Dublin. This was no dodo from far-off Mauritius, or thylacine from the eucalypt forest of Tasmania. Here was an extinct icon all of our own.
The giant deer, of course, were lost to distant antiquity. It has been thousands of years since they roamed the Irish landscape – or, indeed, anywhere else. But what other creatures have come and gone since then?
Our ancestors bequeathed us an Ireland shorn of some of its most charismatic creatures. Now a father, I would like to see my daughter inherit a more biodiverse Ireland than the one I was born into.
You can’t choose the times you live in. And I am sad to say that we live in an age of extinction. Since about ad 1500, the rate of human damage wrought on Planet Earth has driven more than 700 vertebrate species to their doom. Among them are 181 birds, 171 amphibians and 113 mammals. For invertebrates, the picture is even more grim; up to half a million species of insect are thought to have gone extinct in just the last 150 years. Most of these vanished with few, if any, to mourn their loss. In a world where we are only beginning to understand the vital role insects play at the base of so many food webs – including our own – we might yet come to rue their ongoing demise.
Ireland hasn’t been spared the tidal wave of extinction that has followed in the wake of human progress, and we are still counting the damage. Fortunately, only one of the species in this book – a magnificent flightless seabird known as the great auk – is lost entirely to the world. But creatures once abundant here are now altogether absent. There are no corn buntings to be heard on our farms, nor capercaillies in our forests. Pádraic Fogarty, author of the landmark book Whittled Away on Ireland’s (depressing) environmental history, estimates that over 100 species have become extinct here since the arrival of man. Some are irrefutably gone: outside of captivity, you are not going to find a wolf in Ireland now, no matter how hard you look. Others have been absent for so long, or are now so incredibly rare, that they can be practically discounted as a going concern in Ireland.
This book looks at seven such creatures, from the Lilliputian to the leviathan. In the various chapters, I will be chasing ghosts, travelling from the mountains of Leinster to the rugged coast of Mayo to walk in the footsteps of creatures long gone. It will take me around the country, to places I’ve known my whole life and others I’ve never visited before. Even in a country as small as Ireland, there is always somewhere to see and a story to unwind. I’ll be hoping to go beyond the glass cabinets of the museum to find, if not the beasts and birds themselves, then the places they once called home, how they have changed, and how those changes led to their decline. In so doing, I will unravel the tragic stories of their extinction.
Just to prove that all is not lost, part two of this book takes us on a tour of the living. In it, we meet some species once lost that have returned and recolonised Ireland – either under their own steam or with the help of man through reintroductions. Others, like the pine marten and the grey partridge, previously on the verge of extinction, have been saved either through a cessation of human hostility or an incredible conservation effort. Once, we destroyed the habitats our lost creatures needed. Now, we’re creating and preserving refuges for our endangered wildlife: abandoned buildings for bats, ponds for the natterjack toad. All of them have benefited from the work of dedicated groups and individuals across Ireland to stem the tide of extinction and conserve the wildlife we still have. It is to their stories we must turn for hope for a future in which man and nature can coexist and, with a little compromise, even flourish together.
Our ancestors bequeathed us an Ireland shorn of some of its most charismatic creatures. Now a father, I would like to see my daughter inherit a more biodiverse Ireland than the one I was born into. Yet amid all the ecological gloom, we have some incredible successes to look to. In 1999 Gordon D’Arcy’s book Ireland’s Lost Birds chronicled eleven species that had vanished from Ireland over the centuries. In the quarter century since then, eight of these have started breeding in Ireland again (although sadly we have lost another, the corn bunting, while more are under threat). When I was a child, the return of the white-tailed eagle or great spotted woodpecker would have looked like distant pipe dreams. Both have since come true.
The Living and The Dead - Tales of Loss and Rebirth from Irish Nature is published by Merrion Press
