Another Life:Victorian naturalists shot birds and animals and pinned butterflies, moths and beetles in rows under glass.
Victorian nature-lovers looted rare ferns from the hills and pressed flowers in books: collection was everything and nature often suffered in the process. The camera has changed all that: the exceptional still photograph is the prize of today's new hunter-gatherer naturalists, and sheer beauty its first visual quality.
The year's nature books offer three outstanding examples, all in large format. One title - The Butterflies and Moths of Northern Ireland - hardly promises a bestseller. But while it is packed with straightforward information about some 460 species and their distribution (which will earn it a later column here), the text by the Ulster Museum's Brian Nelson is matched by often incredibly lovely pictures by Robert Thompson, Ireland's world-class insect photographer. The exquisite camouflage of many moths in woodland makes one wonder how he managed to find them at all. The book is available from www.blackstaffpress.com for €35 with €12.33 postage (it's heavy).
The same sort of skill, perseverance and eye for beauty marks the work of west Cork's Mike Brown, whose Images of Irish Nature range from orchids to birds and whales, as well as some splendidly atmospheric landscapes. Interleaved are reflective essays by half-a-dozen dedicated naturalists (including my own on beachcombing), with a final how-I-did-it chapter on wildlife photography. From www.mikebrownphotography.com for €39.95.
The Fertile Rock (Collins Press, €25) revisits a much-photographed landscape, the Burren, that always manages to reward its admirers with some new magic of light and texture. Carsten Krieger is a German-born photographer, settled in Clare, who haunted the Burren in every season for more than two years. He offers a workmanlike natural history between exceptional images, notably those made with a panoramic camera and a few of the Burren in rare snow.
Today's new trust in herbal therapies can send us back to their rural, often magical, origins in a closer bond with nature. This is Niall MacCoitir's theme in Irish Wild Plants: Myths, Legends and Folklore (Collins Press, €25), a handsome hardback with watercolours by Grania Langrishe. The author's love of Irish adds a rewarding thread to his research.
Éanna Ní Lamhna has one of the most engaging voices on Irish radio and an enthusiasm for nature backed by decades of applied biology and scientific teaching. Her ebullient, straight-talking presence on RTÉ's Mooney Goes Wild has done wonders for popular interest in the natural world, and Straight Talking Wild (Town House, €14.99), her third book, is another masterpiece of racy - but trustworthy - communication.
Ireland's local nature guides are improving all the time - better produced and mapped, profusely illustrated, well- informed. Declan McGrath's Wildlife in Waterford City, a proper fistful of a book, explores the flora and fauna of every green space, quayside, railway line and old stone wall of a town generously endowed with nature. (€20, with €6 p&p from Declan McGrath, ddmcg@eircom.net or 10 The Estuary, King's Channel, Waterford). In Limerick Nature Walks, Geoff Hunt of BirdWatch Ireland offers 35 sorties into the county's splendid range of wildlife habitats (€20 at www.newcastlewestbookstore.com). Nature Guide to the Aran Islands (Lilliput Press, €15) addresses one of Ireland's most dramatic ecosystems, created by the long and deep affair between people, plants, rock and ocean. The author and photographer, biologist Con O'Rourke, knows the islands backwards.
Some local natural histories have interest far beyond their own locality. Brackloon, The Story of an Irish Oakwood (Coford, €35) is set in a fragment of old forest near Westport, Co Mayo, but offers many general insights into woodland and its wildlife. Its author, Deirdre Cunningham, is Mayo's heritage officer, and its watercolours and photographs make an unusually attractive book from the national forest research agency (www.coford.ie).
Ireland's first big book for shooters in more than 60 years is a vividly written chronicle with enough deep knowledge of wild game birds to appeal outside its immediate gun-club audience. The author of Rough Shooting in Ireland (Merlin Unwin, £20) is Douglas Butler, a Tipperary science teacher with a vigorously acerbic view of all that might frustrate his sport.
Finally, two which are not strictly "nature books" but offer much to move and delight the lover of Irish landscape and its wildlife. Connemara: Listening to the Wind (Penguin Ireland, €25.99) is a title that speaks for itself, the first of a trilogy by Tim Robinson exploring the peninsula's wild spaces as well as its human history. Michael Longley's Collected Poems (Cape, £25) gathers virtually all his published work, including the brilliant cycles of poems inspired by his family holidays in southwest Mayo. Magically evocative images of nature, including the human heart.
