We present an extract from the new updated edition of Wild Dublin by Éanna Ní Lamhna, with photographs by Anthony Woods and illustrations by David Daly.
In her much-loved style, wildlife expert Éanna Ní Lamhna looks to the skies, parks, gardens, wetlands, rivers, canals and coastline to showcase Dublin's biodiversity.
Ireland, because of its geographical location as an island on the north-west of Europe, has quite a small biodiversity of plant and animals relative to larger mainland European countries, and indeed, relative to its larger neighbouring island too. What is amazing is the number and variety of plants and animals that occur within the confines of Dublin City. There is an official Irish List of all the wild plant and animal species in Ireland. This list is being continually updated as their distribution changes and the task of doing this lies with the National Biodiversity Data Centre in Waterford. Take our mammals for example; we have a total list of thirty-three land mammals in Ireland. Of these, a remarkable twenty-seven species occur in Dublin City. At least another five species of sea mammal can be seen in and around Dublin Bay.
Birds, of course, are not constrained by vehicles or motorways. There is a total of 475 species of bird on the Irish List. This includes birds that only ever occurred here once or were blown off course during migration and were given the dubious pleasure of visiting our island; of this total 255 bird species have been recorded as occurring in the Dublin City area. This may seem an amazing number, but many passage migrants and vagrants blown off course are spotted along the Dublin coastline by enthusiastic birdwatchers. Some of these may only have been recorded once. The other three vertebrate groups of animals are reptiles, amphibians and fish. Ireland boasts only one native species of reptile, the lizard, and it counts Dublin City as a place to live – to the amazement of householders who encounter one in their gardens. We have three amphibian species on the Irish List – of these the frogs and the newts are recorded as part of the Dublin fauna. The Natterjack toad is the only Irish amphibian not recorded in Dublin, as it is a Lusitanian species that occurs only on the Dingle peninsula in Ireland, and then in Spain and Portugal.
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Listen: Éanna Ní Lamhna talks to Today with Claire Byrne
Two canals (the Royal and the Grand) and three large rivers (the Liffey, the Dodder and the Tolka) as well as a number of smaller rivers flow through Dublin City. The water quality varies in all these rivers with the Owendoher having the best and the three streams in the area of Merrion and Blackrock being the worst. Overall, a wide variety of freshwater fish occur. Native fish such as salmon, trout, eel, stickleback, minnow, stone loach and lampreys all occur (see checklist in Appendix). Rudd, perch, roach, pike, tench, carp and bream have been introduced and are fished for most enthusiastically by city dwellers, who often return them alive.
Dublin lies in the driest part of Ireland and the urban infrastructure, with its concrete brick and stone, raises the temperature to give an urban microclimate, which is somewhat warmer than surrounding non-built-up areas.
This all has an impact on plant life. Over 1,300 plant species have been recorded for the whole of County Dublin (Flora of County Dublin, 1998) and of these 358 species were recorded as occurring between the Royal and Grand Canals during a survey carried out in 1984 (Flora of Inner Dublin). Leaving grassy areas unmown during the month of May contributes to increased biodiversity in these areas. There have been many post-Covid initiatives to improve local areas for biodiversity as Dubliners became much more familiar with their immediate surroundings as a result of the several lockdowns in 2020 and 2021.
Dublin also has a fine collection of mature trees. Long-established buildings have excellent examples of mature trees in their grounds, and indeed some of these remain when the original big house is no longer apparent. The fine stand of yew and arbutus in the small front gardens of houses on Grosvenor Road is older than the houses in whose gardens they now grow. They are a souvenir of a time when trees were valued, and indeed when developers were careful to leave them intact during building operations. The Box elder in a garden in Leeson Park road in Ranelagh is the second-greatest-girthed tree of its kind in the country, while the biggest Silver maple in Ireland is found in the People’s Garden in the Phoenix Park. As might be expected, there are fine specimens of trees in the Botanic Gardens, in the grounds of Trinity College and on the grounds of a former hotel in Ballsbridge which was once part of Trinity College’s Botanic gardens.
What is amazing is the number and variety of plants and animals that occur within the confines of Dublin City.
There is a wide variety of habitats in the city area where wildlife can thrive quite happily. Private gardens, parks and graveyards all harbour a multitude of species. There is an amazing 19.6 kilometres of intact hedgerows still left in Dublin City which contain all the typical wild hedgerow plants as well as oak, holly, hazel and crab apple in the tree layer. The coastline has mud flats, saltmarshes, sand dunes and rocky sections. The rivers, canals and various ponds are home to wetland wildlife. There are thousands of different invertebrate species, between marine creepy-crawlies and land-living mini-beasts; of our thirty-five butterfly species twenty eight have been recorded in Dublin City. Twenty species of dragonfly (out of a total of thirty-three species found in Ireland) have been recorded here. Of the twenty-eight woodlouse species occurring naturally in the wild in Ireland, no fewer than nineteen different species have been discovered lurking in various habitats in Dublin City. There are countless records of bees, wasps, moths, beetles and mayflies, with the evidence, in many cases, on show in the Natural History Museum on Merrion Street. So if it is wildlife you are after, you are in the right place – Dublin City, Wild Dublin!
Wild Dublin is published by The O'Brien Press
