ANOTHER LIFE:Celebrating Co Mayo's great diversity of wildlife and habitats in a new book, the question arose again and again: how long can their fragile ecosystems survive?
THE BUTTERFLIES were grounded from one day to the next, and rain-hammered fuchsia bells make bloody puddles on the road. A clearance over the islands has shaded to a chilly, opalescent greeny-blue. The summer people have gone, their wine bottles crashing into bins, and we are left to face an unknown winter, bravely, or, in Paul Durcan’s ringing Mayo line, “backside to the wind”.
I love the autumn in my borrowed county, as the sun eases down. It was September when we came in 1977, with half an acre of potatoes to be lifted, and those easy, rhythmic days taught me about silence on the hillside, broken only by the wincing thoughts of ravens, the corner-boy cries of choughs.
The years since then have led me through a landscape whose silence builds a distance from cities, even in the surf roar of storms. There was that crazy interlude when silence was denied almost everywhere in the rasp of monster machines, the jolting of lorries and low-loaders. And the silence we have now aches with the absence of the young. But Mayo’s wide spaces still echo to the fetch of a great ocean, the thousands of wind miles (kilometres won’t do) reaching away to infinity.
A big selling point of the new Ballycroy National Park, in the north of the county, is that Robert Lloyd Praeger, in The Way That I Went, found its mountains and bog "the very loneliest place in this country". But these landscapes' "inspiriting" effect – his word again – is their gift to an increasingly fretful Europe. It is what the summer people dip in and out of, to soothe the inflammation of their souls.
There is something of tundra in the Mayo north of Achill. It tempts the odd snowy owl to a winter break on the Mullet Peninsula, or a ghost-white gyrfalcon to the Inishkea Islands. They may simply be following the barnacle geese, commuting between summers in Greenland and winters on the islands’ fields.
From the operatic cliffs of north Mayo to my own guardian mountain, Mweelrea, at the mouth of Killary Harbour, the coast is scalloped by Atlantic energy, free-to-air or trapped in surging waves, and it is sorted into habitats – islands, sand dunes, salt marsh, the rolling lawns of machair – each an ecosystem enfolding microworlds of animals and plants. Inland a farmland plain surrounds drumlins, turloughs and limestone lakes, rising westwards to the scarp of glaciated mountains.
Peatland flows over them, down and onwards, halted only at the brink of the ocean. Great tracts are under conifers, but here and there, as on the slopes above Clew Bay, ancient oak woods are dressed with lichens that breathe perhaps the planet’s cleanest air.
This great diversity of habitats, each with its different natural community, is sketched in by Wild Mayo, the slim but rather beautiful book that I have written for Mayo County Council. It joins a growing shelf of books that celebrate Ireland’s natural world at every level, from the whole island to the very local. Increasingly they are prompted by county heritage officers, such as Mayo’s Deirdre Cunningham, with support from the Heritage Council.
Celebrating nature, yes – but not without an urgency. Our sense of species under threat and the fragility of ecosystems is the great change in attitudes to nature since Praeger wandered Ireland. One can rarely exclaim “isn’t that lovely!” without wondering, in the next moment, what’s waiting to wipe it out.
In Mayo, as all through the hill-farming west, the damage from sheep overgrazing is only beginning to yield to better control of fewer ewes per acre. On the uplands of north-west Mayo, in and around the Ballycroy national park, loss of heather helped to reduce the native red grouse by some two-thirds in 20 years. Only now is it starting to thicken again here and there, and the grouse to increase accordingly from something like 200 pairs. For the twite, too, the small, brown, seed-eating finch that once bred across Ireland, stretches of low heather are essential for nesting. Mayo now holds perhaps half the Irish population, many of them retreating to the remote northern sea cliffs of the county.
A couple of exceptionally noisy corncrakes distinguished this summer’s roster of calling males: 65 were reported to Tim Gordon’s western Corncrake Hotline by the end of May. The late growth of grass drew too many of them into early-fertilised silage meadows, but inside-out mowing should have saved most of the chicks for the flight back to Africa.
My chronicling of Mayo’s diversity of habitats has been haunted by what climate change could do. Already the “soft day” of western tradition is overtaken by pulses of torrential showers. Up at Pollatomish, and on the Killary scarp of the Sheeffrys, the scars on the mountainsides warn of many great landslides to come.
The alternating drought and deluge modelled by Ireland’s climate scientists could scour out the spawning beds of salmon and trout and sweep away the freshwater-pearl mussels of Ireland’s last clean rivers. Our peatlands, where they do not crack and slide, will dry out and change their vegetation, the gorse and bracken of the lowlands sweeping up to crowd out St Patrick’s cabbage and the rarer alpine plants of the summits. And the storms of a risen sea could bite away the dunes and overwhelm the salt marsh. Could . . . will.
Let’s guard the best of what we have and enjoy it while we may.
Wild Mayo
costs €15 (plus €2 pp) from Deirdre Cunningham, Heritage Officer, Mayo County Council, Castlebar, or from local bookshops. E-mail dcunningham@mayococo or call 094-9047684
Eye on nature
A fisherman showed me a crab, which I identified as a sponge crab, Dromia Personata.
Larry O Connor, Schull, Co Cork
It was, indeed, a sponge crab. This crab has not been reported so far on our coasts, but it is found in the English Channel and in southwest Wales, not a million miles away. It is more common farther south along Atlantic coasts
How is a mushroom fungus able to burst through tarmacadam, a feat that must require a force of many kilogrammes?
Tom Lee, Sandycove, Co Dublin
The mycelium of the fungus produces an acid that dissolves tiny passages through the concrete and then fruits on top.
On the Mallow-Fermoy road at about 11pm we saw a snake-like creature several metres in front of us. It stood out in the headlights and moved in a circular motion as it crossed the road, which slopes at a slight angle towards the Blackwater River.
Breffni Lennon, Mallow, Co Cork
It was an eel moving across land to the river.
Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, or viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address
