Writing for life

Published in the Evening Echo 21/05/2008

Watching “Wild China” on the BBC tonight was amazing. I never knew, for example, that wild Asian elephants still survive in the forests of central China, or that gibbons – which I thought confined to South East Asia – still roam the canopy in some of China’s forests. The sheer diversity of life unfolding on the screen was staggering – plants, insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals.

But like so many of the world’s wild places, the amazing biodiversity of these Chinese forests is under threat. Much of China’s virgin rainforest has been felled to make way for rubber plantations – rubber that’s helping to fuel the inexorable rise of one of the world’s fastest growing economies. The economic imperative, as so often seems to happen, overrides the environmental one: short term gain taking precedence over long-term vision.

Much closer to home, we’d spent much of the day looking at biodiversity on a much smaller, but equally fascinating scale in one of Ireland’s wild places. Ireland’s National Biodiversity Week is running from 18 to 25 May this year, scheduled to coincide with the United Nations International Day for Biodiversity on 22 May.

“Biodiversity Week is Ireland’s contribution to a global celebration of biodiversity which aims to increase awareness of the importance of biodiversity and promote action to tackle the loss of many of our species,” said Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, John Gormley, TD, as he unveiled the nationwide programme of events last week. “This is the second year that my Department has supported Biodiversity Week and already it has developed to the extent that we now have over 200 events taking place throughout the country.” And I have to say it’s a laudable effort in a country where we have plenty to redress when it comes to our environmental credentials.

Keen to get involved, and to expose the children to more of the wonders of Irish nature, we headed out to a Biodiversity Day event at the Irish Natural Forestry Foundation’s headquarters in Manch Estate, Balineen.

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Published in the Evening Echo, 14/05/2008

A non-too-bright thrush has chosen to build this year’s nest in the bush outside our kitchen window. What’s wrong with that, you might ask… well, there’s nothing wrong with the bush per se, it’s just where it’s situated.

The bush is pretty big bush, with lush, dense foliage that offers plenty of cover and shelter. It’s also high enough to mean the nest is pretty safe from ground-dwelling predators. All in all it’s a pretty good nesting site – apart from the fact that it’s just outside the back door, which puts it on the children’s flight-path as they head from the house, to garden and back again. With the weather improving, they’re doing a lot of coming and going… and peace and quiet around that particular bush is going to be in short supply.

I spotted the nest a few weeks ago. Standing at the kitchen sink one morning I noticed the parents flying to and fro. A quick look when they were out of sight revealed the nest wedged firmly between the boughs of the bush at about my shoulder height. Chancing a quick peek inside I counted three perfectly formed, beautifully speckled eggs nestled in the moss-lined cup. Having confirmed the nest was in use I beat a hasty retreat to allow mum to return to tend her clutch.

Ever since I was a little boy I’ve felt a rush of excitement at finding a birds nest in spring. There’s something wonderful about being so close to the genesis of new life that’s both fascinating and inspirational. Seeing the parents come and go, hearing the chicks clamouring for food, and witnessing their incredible journey as they grow and eventually fledge.

I guess when you think about it it’s like the whole parenting palaver distilled into a few short months: finding a partner, setting up home and bringing youngsters into the world, followed by a frantic and exhausting struggle to provide for them until the day they finally fly the nest. In one way I guess the birds have it sussed… they have the whole process done and dusted in short order, and then take the rest of the year off. We, on the other hand, sentence ourselves to the best part of twenty years of hard labour.

The girls were thrilled when they arrived home from school and I showed them my discovery. I lifted them up and showed them the nest very briefly, explaining that we had to be careful not to disturb the mother to make sure she didn’t abandon the nest. They were so excited… and that filled me with a deep sense of satisfaction.

There are those who would argue that letting the children see the nest is wrong – that nature should be left well alone. In the interests of environmental conservation, they argue, we should shield nature from people, isolate it, protect it. I couldn’t disagree more.

By letting children experience and understand nature first hand, you’re doing far more good than harm. You see, when you shield nature from children, you’re also shielding children from nature, and that’s a mistake.

Books and classrooms are all very well, but the relationship between children and nature needs to be hands on: kids need to experience nature first hand to foster and encourage their inherent fascination with the natural world. Fail to do that, and they disengage; disengaged children grow to become disengaged adults… and we’re all painfully aware of the environmental damage they can cause.

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Published in the WOW! supplement of the Evening Echo 13/02/2008

“Look dad, a Robin,” called one of the twins as we stood waiting for the school bus.

The object of her scrutiny was perched on the branch of a nearby ash tree. Head cocked on one side the little bird was watching us as intently as we were watching it. Suddenly it fluttered to the ground just a few feet away, pecked at a few crumbs, then hopped back up to its perch, where it continued its vigil.

Of all the birds that visit the garden (and there are a lot of them at this time of year) the girls have developed something of a special bond with the Robins. With their bright red breast, distinctive plump shape, upright stance and a tendency to sudden, jerky movements, these were the first bird they learned to identify, and will always be one of their favourites.

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Published in the WOW! supplement of the Evening Echo 12/09/2007

Original title: If you go down to the woods today….

The phone rang on Sunday afternoon.

As is her habit at present, the four-year-old ran and answered it before anyone else could get there, and promptly started chatting away. Whoever was on the other end got to hear all about that morning’s activities in one endless sentence. It was riveting stuff.

With her lungs finally empty the little one stopped to draw breath, and I stepped in to intercept before she could resume her tirade. On the other end of the line I could hear someone chuckling.

It was friends of ours. They were heading out to an open day at the Manch Estate – the Irish Natural Forestry Foundation’s (INFF) project to demonstrate sustainable forestry in action – and were ringing to invite us along.

I quickly weighed up my options. With a lot of work on at the moment I had planned to spend the afternoon in the home-office catching up with a few things. Never one to miss an opportunity to put off work, I jumped at the chance to spend some time out in the fresh air.

Manch is a 137 hectare estate about 40 miles west of Cork, just beyond the village of Ballineen on the main Bandon to Dunmanway road. On the first Sunday of every month from March to November the Manch project opens its gates to the general public. There’s a guided walk at 2pm, taking in a different part of the estate each month, and educational activities for children throughout the day.

As we drove the brooding skies that had been threatening rain all morning started to break up. We pulled into the car park at Manch just as the sun broke through. It was glorious weather for a walk in the woods.

By the time we arrived we’d missed the guided walk – but went off for our own ramble through the woods instead. The kids were in their element running along the criss-crossing woodland tracks, stopping now and again to look at a toadstool, a spider, a beetle or a butterfly.

One of the first things you notice when you step into a mixed broadleaf woodland like this is how alive it all is. It’s a stark contrast with the dark, oppressive, lifeless sensation you experience when you step under the sterile canopy of a Sitka spruce plantation – the mainstay of Irish forestry.

Here, where dappled shadows danced beneath the trees, there was an abundance of life. From the dragonflies wheeling in spectacular fashion around the woodland margins, to the myriad species of fungi clustered in the deeper shadow, and the chorus of birdsong from the lush green canopy overhead: this was a thriving woodland ecosystem. More to the point it demonstrated what can be achieved when man chooses to work in harmony with nature, rather than striving against her. Everybody (and everything) wins.

When we arrived back at the visitor and education centre we browsed through the information on sustainable sylviculture, while the kids enjoyed colouring leaves, making woodland wildlife masks and other activities with the project’s education officer. Watching the children playing under the trees, seeing them connect with nature and engaging in woodland related activities, I couldn’t help feeling a sense of hope for the future.

More information

You can find out more about the INFF, the Manch Project, their open days and their Primary, Secondary and Adult education courses by visiting the INFF website or by calling them on 023 22823.

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Teaching children to appreciate wildlife, to understand nature and how all living things are connected, is, I think, an important part of their education. We always try to nurture the girls’ fascination with nature, and to encourage wildlife into the garden as much as we can. We feed the birds, put up nesting boxes, go on nature walks, regularly look through nature books and watch wildlife documentaries together on the telly.

As you might expect, wildlife is very welcome in and around our house… most of the time. This summer we’ve had quite a few impromptu wild visitors. Several birds have flown in through open doors or windows, and we’ve had the occasional bat and even the odd mouse in the house. I simply catch them, let the children have a closer look, and set them free a safe distance from the house. The same goes for spiders and most of the creepy crawlies that inadvertently make their way indoors.

Very occasionally though, a species ventures inside that is altogether less welcome. Luckily, with two pet ferrets at home rodents tend to give our place a wide birth. But houseflies are another story. At this time of year they seem to multiply at an alarming rate. No matter how fast we kill them there always seems to be a small cloud of them wheeling around the kitchen and living room light-fittings.

Our campaign against these irritating insects has included sticky fly-paper, electronic zappers, even noxious chemical sprays – but no matter what we seem to throw at them, within a couple of days they’re back in numbers, whizzing around the place and generally driving everyone insane.

The pitched battle with the flies is an ongoing annual campaign – one  I’m not sure we’ll ever win, but that we persist with nonetheless. Last week though an altogether more sinister six-legged visitor ventured into the house.

My wife was brushing one of the twins’ hair when she spotted something small and grey crawling along close to her scalp. She freaked out and called me. Sure enough, we had an infestation of Pediculus humanus capitis – head lice – and the school year hasn’t even started yet!

A head louse and eggs

Bane of parents everywhere, the head louse is a flat, wingless insects about 2mm to 4mm long, usually black, grey or dark brown that lives on the human scalp or in the hair near the scalp. These tenacious little parasites attach themselves to the base of the hair, and lay a large number of eggs that can be seen as tiny white/brown ovals glued firmly to the hair close to the scalp.

Although we all know that head lice are common – experts estimate that they affect one in every ten children at any given time – it’s still a bit repulsive to feel that you might have something crawling around on your scalp. So out came the motley assortment of treatments from the bathroom cabinet and onto the hair they went.
 
Head lice have apparently become resistant to many of the proprietary treatments available over the counter, but I suspect they’ve never been hit by anything like the cocktail we threw at them. It was enough to knock the stuffing out of the most hardened of six-legged nasties.

After what seemed like hours of scrubbing, rinsing and painstaking combing we finally gave the entire family the all clear. The infestation was over almost before it had begun. The itching at the base of my scalp initiated by their discovery would, I suspected, take a bit longer to subside.

Technorati Tags: head lice, parenting, evening echo column, wildlife

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Curious how bad things can have beneficial side effects.

The raging civil war in Indonesia’s Aceh province on the island of Sumatra, for example, could hardly be considered a good thing; yet for the beleaguered Sumatran orang-utan it’s proving to be a blessing. The war has prevented logging and palm oil operations from exploiting the fragile Leuser Ecosystem that spans the Aceh and North Sumatra provinces, providing the dwindling orang-utan population with a safe haven, for the time being at least.

If the civil war hadn’t happened and they all operated and clear the forest, we’ll be dealing with a few hundred orangutans now, and if they clear these extra bits of forests here in the near future, then the same thing will happen again. All the orangutan will die. They don’t sort of like pack their bags and move somewhere else. They stay and die,

Ian Singleton, scientific director of the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme, told Reuters in North Sumatra’s provincial capital, Medan.

You can read the full article on the ENN site.

I went trekking in Gunung Leuseur back in 1998, and had the privilege of experiencing this amazing ecosystem first hand. We even encountered wild orang-utans, which was amazing. In 2003 I wrote an article for Wild Ireland magazine on the plight of the orang-utan. At the time experts were predicting that orang-utan populations could disappear entirely within a decade. Four years on, and the great red ape is still clinging to a precarious existence, but with palm oil and logging concerns ravaging the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra, just how much longer can they hold on?

An orang-utan swinging through its rainforest home in Gunung Leuser National Park, Sumatra

For more on the plight of the orang-utan take a look at these sites:

• Orangutan Foundation International
• Orangutan Foundation UK
• Orangutan Conservancy
• Orangutan on Wikepedia

And here’s a link with details of Gunung Leuser National Park in North Sumatra.

You can read a species profiles for the Sumatran orang-utan and the Bornean orang-utan on Arkive.org.

Three things you can do today to help the orangutan:

• Check labelling and stop buying products that contain palm oil — typically found in many foodstuffs and cosmetics
• Make sure the paper you use at home and at work originates from a properly certified, sustainable source
• When you choose timber products, make sure that the timber comes from properly certified, sustainably managed forestry

Technorati Tags: orangutan, orang-utan, Sumatra, Aceh, conservation, environment

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I don’t trust weathermen.

I’m sure they’re lovely people – but I feel you have to be a bit wary of anyone who makes a living out of the phrase “patchy sunshine with scattered showers”. A mainstay of the weatherman’s (or woman’s) “haven’t-got-a-clue” arsenal, the phrase covers a multitude of sins, and is routinely trotted out when attempting to predict our notoriously unpredictable climate. It’s normally used a lot in the summer, and means that no matter what happens the weatherman can turn around and say “I told you so”.

This year though the phrase is proving less effective than usual – generally because the “patchy sunshine” hasn’t materialised.

July started off with rain, then we had a period of rain, followed by… you guessed it, even more rain. When the occasional glimmer of sunshine did break through it was at best fleeting, and the brooding clouds soon regrouped to continue the deluge.

Everyone agrees that this summer has been a complete washout. Everyone, that is, except the RTE weathermen. According to a weather report I saw recently, the south west of the country experienced “normal” levels of rainfall in July.

Waving at his interactive map, the grinning (and clearly insane) weatherman, pointed out that while the east of the country had indeed experienced a massive 250% to 300% of its average monthly rainfall in July, here in the south west we’d recorded a mere 100%. In other words, nothing out of the ordinary.

Like I said: you can’t trust weathermen.

All of this bad weather is making the school holidays drag on a bit. Normally we’re heading off for picnics, days out at the beach, long country walks, or the girls are playing outside from dawn ’til dusk. Not this year. This year it’s very much a case of stay inside and wrap up warm.

Having the three girls cooped up inside for days on end can be a recipe for disaster. There’s only so much art you can do before somebody uses someone else’s marker, or refuses to share the pencil sharpener. Tempers become frayed, bickering escalates into name calling, which turns into fighting and then all hell breaks loose. DVDs can give you a bit of breathing space, but they’re not without their problems either. You still have to negotiate the tricky and potentially explosive topic of whose turn it is to pick the film.

The bottom line is that when the weather robs you of the great outdoors option, keeping the kids entertained and keeping the peace for any length of time is practically impossible.

In Britain they’ve discovered a new syndrome related to all this bad weather. Dubbed “Symptoms of Winter in Summer Syndrome”, or SWISS for short, apparently the symptoms last for up to a month and include things like colds, vomiting, diarrhoea, sore throats, inexplicable tiredness, fevers and general aches and pains. Some experts attribute the condition to links between the unseasonally bad weather and mild depression – which can suppress the immune system, resulting in a catalogue of minor ailments.

I think we all have a mild case of SWISS at the moment. The twins and my wife have been under the weather, if you’ll pardon the pun, the little one’s been even more cranky than usual, and I haven’t been in the best of form for a week or so. What we need is a bit of sunshine and some fresh air – and that’s exactly what the weathermen are promising for the next week or so. For once, I really hope they’re right!

Technorati Tags: Irish weather, summer holidays, rain, weathermen

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Animal rights activists in Austria are trying to get a chimpanzee called Hiasl legally declared a person in a case that could set a global legal precedent for granting rights to apes.

In an article called Activists Want Chimp Declared a ‘Person’ on environmental news website ENN.com, Eberhart Theuer, a lawyer leading the legal challenge on behalf of the Association Against Animal Factories said: “Our main argument is that Hiasl is a person and has basic legal rights.”

While the underlying aim is laudable the struggle to assign the essentially human label of “person” to a chimp strikes me as bizarre. By all means fight for “apes rights” under the law — get chimpanzees entitlements in their own right, but don’t try and assign human status to them.

To be honest, given our track record, I doubt any self-respecting ape would want to be labelled human, given the choice!

Technorati Tags: chimpanzee, animal rights, wildlife, environment

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Honey bee colonies around the world are suffering from huge mortalities — and it could have major implications for human food supplies, US Scientists warn.

Apparently about 1/3 of the human diet comes from insect pollinated plants, and honey bees pollinate approximately 80% of those. As honey bee populations dwindle we could be looking at massive crop failure. Animal fodder crops will also fail — hitting the human food chain with a double whammy.

According to a US congressional study honey bees add an estimated $15 billion a year to the country’s food supply chain.

This worrying phenomenon seems to be a global issue — and it’s happening here in Ireland too. I know several bee keepers locally who have inexplicably lost hives this season. The workers simply disappear, leaving a queen and young that quickly perish. There’s a growing sense of menace amongst local apiarists that things are only going to get worse.

I haven’t seen honey bees around the garden this year yet either — although there are several hives relatively nearby. It’s an ominous sign… and the scientists don’t know yet what the cause is.

We often don’t realise quite how dependent we are on insects. If ants were to die out, for example, entire ecosystems would crumble and life on earth would go into meltdown. The result would make the effects of global warming seem trivial.

It’s about time we started looking at the bigger picture. We depend on myriad subtle interactions between countless species to survive. For all our sakes, lets start taking care of the world around us not because of the impending threat of climate change — but because we appreciate that we need a healthy, diverse and balanced environment in order to thrive.

Technorati Tags: honey bees, Ireland, environment, wildlife

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Saw my first swallow of 2007 on April 13th….

We were sitting outside having lunch (making the most of the unseasonally warm spell we’re enjoying in West Cork) when the bird swooped low over the lawn, circled once overhead and promptly disappeared. I haven’t seen another since… though I’m sure they won’t be far behind this trailblazer.

In celebration I’ve changed the header image of this site to a photograph of young swallows at the nest. This is the last brood reared in our old out-house before we converted it into my office. The following year the swallows moved into an old barn on the farm next door — so no harm done.

They say one swallow does not a summer make… but with the weather we’ve been having in West Cork for the last few weeks, I’m not so sure!

Technorati Tags: swallow, hirundo rustica, barn swallow, irish wildlife, nature

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