David Cabot's monumental new natural history of Ireland closes a gap in Irish writing that has been apparent since Praeger's anti-climactic Natural History of Ireland (1950). We already have a number of distinguished books, such as Mitchell and Ryan's Reading the Irish Landscape, which give us an account of the Irish landscape as a form of history, where biology gets embedded in time. In Cabot's synthesis, geology and biology are given a different distribution among the spaces or habitats that make up the island of Ireland.
The historical dimension is not ignored here: there is a fascinating opening chapter on the history of nature study in Ireland since the days of the first clerics who inquired about the beasts and fowls around them, and the second chapter deals with the biological history of the island in the manner that we associate with the late Frank Mitchell. Then the scientist comes into his own as he takes us through the main habitat types, from the mountains and uplands to the lagoons and salt-marshes fringing the sea.
Cabot brings nearly 40 years of the biologist's quiet enthusiasm to bear on his account of each habitat type. He tells us in his introduction that it was in 1959, having just come off the Fishguard to Rosslare ferry, that he first encountered the peculiarities of the Irish fauna in the form of a hooded crow. An American whose parents had subsequently moved to England, he was unfamiliar with these crows. "It was the beginning," he writes, "of an enduring fascination for the country I went on to adopt as my home. In other words, I fell in love with Ireland under the unlikely sign of the crow, stayed on, married her, and never ceased to be enraptured."
Putting a summary of knowledge about Irish habitats between one set of covers is no easy task: the sheer volume of information being generated by university departments, state agencies, and keen individual workers might easily have put off a weaker spirit. Cabot's first vocation is as an ornithologist whose work on the barnacle geese of the Inishkea islands off the Mayo coast is relatively well known. Reading the book makes it clear that he has spent many weeks and months being jolted about the western seas, doing research into seal and seabird populations, and probably as much time on short winter days counting wildfowl at Ireland's prime sites, such as Rahasane turlough in Galway, or on the Shannon and Little Brosna callows. His mastery of Irish botanical lore is just as impressive as his knowledge of the birds, and he is also at ease as he describes the weathering processes that take us from the underlying rocks to the life-forms they support.
Anyone looking for confirmation of the received image of the Irish landscape will find plenty to savour in Cabot's account of the great bogs of the midlands and west, the native oak woodlands, and the Burren and turlough areas of Clare and Galway. "The Burren," he declares, "is, without a doubt, Ireland's premier natural history jewel." Other habitats also emerge to lay claim to our attention, such as the callows of the Shannon and Little Brosna basins, where the corncrake has its last stronghold in Ireland and where tens of thousands of wildfowl congregate each winter, despite decades of political promises to drain the Shannon. And although they have been seriously eroded by farming practice and tourism, the machair and sand dune systems along the west coast also rank as key elements of our natural heritage because of their associated flora and their scarce breeding wader populations.
In his chapter on lakes and rivers, Cabot reminds us that "The Celts believed that a vast lake lay under the surface of the earth which offered a safe route to the afterlife but was also a place where knowledge was kept. In the big imaginary lake were salmon growing fat and wise, snapping up hazel nuts as they fell into the water from overshadowing trees." The same value-system gives us holy wells and springs, all issuing from that great original lake under the earth. This, I believe, is the nearest we can get to an explanatory myth for our island which takes into account the predominance of water in our experience. Our Atlantic relationship with water has possibly been obscured by Christian scripture and by a more recent trend towards package holidays in the sun.
There is as much variety here as there is in the landscape itself, to the extent that the great range of information marshalled by the author inevitably places strains at times on the continuity of the style. There are occasional fault lines as the text slips from botany to historical lore, or from science to anecdote, without transition. If this is not a book that many will read from cover to cover, but instead will peruse or consult as their needs dictate, it offers many different points of entry, and you can start off by looking at the beautiful photos, many of them the author's own. Whatever approach its readers take, Cabot's superb account of Irish natural history is set to become a standard point of reference for many years to come.
Sean Lysaght lectures at GMIT, Castlebar. His biography of Robert Lloyd Praeger was published recently by Four Courts Press.