Kieran Buckley leans over the steering wheel of his Ford pickup truck as he drives the rural roads of Laois. A ranger with the National Parks and Wildlife Service, Buckley has spent 20 years investigating wildlife crimes.
As we head to the site of what a judge described as “an act of grave criminality”, he sets the scene. He goes all the way back to the Inclosure Act of 1773, which instructed landowners to install permanent boundaries between their land.
“What happened then was that the woodlands were all cut down and the birds that lived in the woodlands all retreated to the hedgerows,” he says.
“Once the woodlands have been cut down, they had nowhere to go but the hedgerows.”
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Buckley describes hedgerows a “essentially a refuge habitat” – hundreds of miles of strips of trees and bushes without which the birds would have nowhere to live.
Without hedgerows, the countryside would be “as biodiverse now as the surface of the moon”, he says.
Hedgerows are what brings Buckley and The Irish Times to the tiny village of Ballickmoyler, on one of several stops on a daylong tour of wildlife crime scenes across Leinster, where he squints through the noon sun at a swathe of investigation files laid out on the bonnet of his truck.
Just up the road, a farmer named Brian O’Reilly two years ago grubbed out “just shy of a mile” of hedgerow, Buckley says, and 54 mature hardwood trees, including oak, ash and sycamore.
To calculate the scale of the damage for his investigation, Buckley says he and his colleague Sarah Stapleton had to crawl on the ground for hours searching for nests and the remains of birds.
They found about 12 nests over two to three hours.
“We reckon there was double that again in the hedgerow given the sheer extent of the destruction of the hedges,” he says.
Pictures from the investigation file show trees pulled from the ground and piles of cleared earth and churned-up hedgerow. Close-up images show destroyed nests, many with eggs still in them.
O’Reilly, of Clonagh, Hollywood, Co Laois was convicted on five counts and fined €6,000, a conviction that was later upheld on appeal.
The case typifies of the National Parks and Wildlife Service. It has racked up more than 100 convictions since 2020 and has been trying to ramp up its activities in the last few years. Last year, it sent 42 investigation files to the Chief State Solicitor’s Office, up from 30 in 2022.
The agency has grown, almost doubling in size across all grades, with the number of rangers expanded from 60 to 90 with a goal of 120 rangers in the coming years.
Investigations can sometimes result in a happy ending.
Standing in the People’s Park in Portlaoise, Buckley tells the story of the man convicted of trapping finches using rat glue, a wooden board and bird seed. The finches flew down, ate the seed and became stuck.
The act shocked the judge in the case, especially when Buckley vividly demonstrated the seriousness of the crime by bringing in one of the boards to the court, complete with a decomposing bird glued to it.
But there was a silver lining; they saved about 25 birds and released them back into the wild.
“Extraordinarily, they were actually singing to one another. I think it was early spring and they had paired in captivity,” he says.
He recounts another case, a few hours later on the banks of the Grand Canal in Ardclough, north Kildare, where we stand at the spot where in 2020 he came across two men with two buckets of freshwater crayfish. They used chicken drumsticks to draw the crayfish before scooping them with a child’s fishing net.
“I seized the crayfish and left them back alive, so instead of 384 dead crayfish, you have 384 live crayfish. How do I know there were 384? I counted them myself, and I have the scars to prove it,” he jokes, holding out a photo of hundreds of crayfish laid out on a high-vis jacket.
Yet, for all the happy outcomes, the challenge remains great.
The NPWS has more rangers than it did, but even with the targeted 120, that will be a small number compared with the scale of wildlife crime in Ireland.
Some have called for a specialised Wildlife Crime Unit with enhanced powers of investigation and prosecution. A public consultation is planned on Ireland’s wildlife legislation which could beef up both the agency’s powers and the penalties for wildlife crimes.
Buckley demonstrates the need for these powers at an inauspicious brown field in rural Laois. Here, he tells the story of a farmer recently convicted for stringing up two buzzards – most likely a breeding pair – on stakes hammered into the earth. One had its wings stretched out wide in a kind of crucifixion position.
In her summation, giving the man a three-month suspended sentence, the judge said that it was “an example of a disgusting lack of respect in an outrageous act of wildlife crime”.
There’s worse to contend with, Buckley says. Travelling on to a site in Cherrywood in south Dublin, we visit a rapidly expanding suburb of new-build houses and apartment blocks at the foot of the Dublin mountains. The housing estate has begun encroaching on to the woodland areas around it.
On this site in 2015, Buckley says, acting on a tip-off from a member of the public, he stumbled upon three men sitting in a small clearing. They were digging out a badger sett.
“We came in and they were here, sitting down and having a fag. One of them digging, two of them smoking,” he says.
They had shovels, an electronic device for hunting animals and a Patterdale terrier, which, according to Buckley, is a breed favoured by badger baiters.
He describes badger baiting as being like “something from a snuff film”.
“They will open a hole, dig down into the sett and let in some big dog like a bull mastiff or something. They’ll let him in to grab the badger and pull it out and then let two or three more dogs in to kill it, shred it,” he says.
The men were convicted in 2015 and given suspended sentences after pleading guilty to two charges under the Wildlife Act, admitting they had wilfully interfered with a badger’s breeding place.
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They were ultimately cleared of the specific offence of hunting a badger, however, having claimed they had instead been chasing a fox, which is not a protected species.
The badger sett has long since been abandoned.
The risk posed by humans to badgers has only increased since then, according to Buckley’s colleague Sean Meehan, who accompanies us.
“You only have to look at west Dublin and see the amount of development and landscape change; badgers are definitely getting squeezed,” Meehan says.
Badger baiting continues. Earlier this year an investigation was opened in Limerick into suspected holes dug by badger baiters. Meehan will, in the coming days, go out with gardaí to investigate another suspected case in Dublin, he says.
“We have been told that individuals have been regularly seen with spades and dogs,” he says of a location.
For Buckley, while there have been substantial improvements in the awareness and prosecution of wildlife crimes in recent years, the challenges remain significant.
“The courts and judiciary are taking these Wildlife Act cases much more seriously than they did when I started,” he says, as we travel to another site.
“The whole issue of biodiversity has really come to the fore now and they’re conscious of it now.”
But he’s aware that to better tackle the problem, the NPWS needs more people, more powers, and more potential for punishments, both to prosecute the crimes they can catch, and to deter the ones they cannot.
“We really need to protect what we have got left,” he says. “Because we’re living at a time when nature is under huge pressure.”
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