Counting birds, chasing poachers, guarding hedgerows — what notions might move a young student at this time, zoology or botany already booked for uni, to seek the career of conservation ranger?
With Green Party Minister Malcolm Noonan in charge and a raft of change spelled out in a review, the National Parks and Wildlife Service is keenly seeking new recruits. With Noonan’s blessing, they are mustered for a war against wildlife crime.
The title of “ranger” was coined in the 1980s, when the job was mainly about enforcing the Wildlife Act. Today’s frontline work in the countryside is enormously complex, skilled and often socially fraught, a condition unlikely to change.
Most rangers are graduates and many have postgraduate ecological degrees. Yet, as last year’s review identified, they have been “amongst the lowest paid professional/technical staff in the civil service”, with starting pay about €25,000 a year.
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Among its newly energised activities, the NPWS offers a lively online website presentation of A Week in the Life of a Conservation Ranger. It reminds a young viewer that, while the job commands an official van (which has to be looked after) and much of the work is self-starting, out of doors and often far from nine-to-five, a ranger is still a civil servant with work targets, a lot of training and “a personal learning and development plan”.
The next bit — A Jack of All Trades — offers a “typical” list of what can turn up in one week. Pressing activities can range from culling deer, frustrating hare poachers and investigating bird poisonings, to carrying out detailed environmental impact assessments. There’s also monitoring of SAC and SPA protection areas and work for ecological surveys, helping to get rid of rhododendrons and dealing with seagull “nuisance” calls.
The most personally challenging trade comes from enforcement of the Wildlife Act and the strictures of the European Union’s habitats and birds directives. This can easily end up in court, confronting a defendant with the evidence.
The new militancy of the NPWS is reflected in a mounting number of prosecutions. In 2021, 21 of them were closed, often with fines in thousands of euro. Another 19 prosecutions have been brought this year, and a further 49 are in progress.
Rangers now number more than 80 and recruitment interviews, soon to begin, will aim for 120 in the coming 18 months, a doubling since 2020.
Wildlife Act enforcement, says the NPWS in A week in the Life, “can offer a sense of accomplishment to investigating rangers as ‘cases’ are detected, investigated and brought to a conclusion in court with the ranger in ‘ownership’ of the file to the end when presenting evidence in court”.
This responsibility, with credit for the outcome, risks well-worn mistrust. One farmer, claiming “harassment” by a ranger, told a judge: “There’s no love lost between us.”
Wildlife crime goes far beyond the well-publicised destruction of hedgerows in the bird breeding season and deliberate laying of poisoned baits to kill birds of prey.
Hunting deer at night, trapping finches, illegal netting of hares for coursing, setting illegal wildfires, persecuting badgers, all present challenges of proof and interpretation of law. Rangers can call on backup from Gardaí under a “protocol” of support and on advice from district conservation rangers.
A good ranger knows his vulnerable species. In 2019, at the Grand Canal in Co Kildare, ranger Kieran Buckley came upon three men with two buckets full of white-clawed crayfish. Ireland has protected wild colonies of these aquatic and highly edible creatures, threatened elsewhere by invasive alien crayfish and disease.
Buckley returned 345 live crayfish to the canal and summoned their abductors, from Moldova, who were off to stock another lake. In court they were told to make €1,000 donations to community projects.
Damage to protected waterways, once slow to incur retribution, also finds the NPWS in more militant form. In June, a Donegal landowner was found guilty of digging drains that poured sediment into the River Eske, an important European conservation area protecting sensitive freshwater pearl mussels. He was fined a total of €16,000.
All this has seemed more than enough to warrant a specialised Wildlife Crime Unit in a reshaped NPWS, properly funded with €55 million. First announced in October 2020, and strongly welcomed by NGOs and biodiversity activists, its imminence was accepted and endorsed in the key review by Prof Jane Stout and Dr Micheal O Cinneide.
Reorganisation tends to change titles on doors, and “directorates” now have new significance. The old Science and Biodiversity Division, for example, is becoming the Scientific Advice and Research Directorate and the Wildlife Crime Unit has become Wildlife Crime Operations “to better reflect its range of functions and mode of operations”.
Of the very many trades ranger Jack has to learn, that of chief prosecution witness seems still to be high in demand.