It is somewhat unusual that two of our city’s most remarkable focal points for wildlife are man-made constructions. The Phoenix Park’s walls were erected first in the 17th century when it was established as the Duke of Ormonde’s hunting park, while Bull Island began forming 200 years ago following the construction of the North Bull Wall, an inadvertent side-effect of a plan to fix a silting problem at Dublin Bay. Aside from those sites, a plethora of species, from lizards to bats to foxes and even whales congregate in the green spaces and waterways that a county as uniquely situated and as heavily populated as Dublin allows.
And yet, given all that, the city’s wildlife can all become a bit hidden in plain sight. With that in mind, Totally Dublin sought out some of the faces of urban wildlife in the city to give us the low-down on who we share the city with, and a common theme emerges: balance. Every organisation we spoke to aims at finding a harmony between conservation and monitoring of the existing wildlife populations and patterns, and making what they do accessible to the public both in terms of getting them involved in the research, or allowing them to get the best out of the city’s common spaces.
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Pat Corrigan, Island Manager for North Bull Island
Pat Corrigan, with 30 years working on Bull Island, has probably spent more time there than any else ever has. “You know what the best thing is? I haven’t seen it all yet.” Once described by eminent Trinity College biology professor David Jeffrey as “an open air laboratory”, Bull Island’s unusual genesis has given it a unique biological profile. “You can follow the ecological succession of the island from day one right up to the present date over the last 200 hundred years.”
Corrigan’s work for Dublin City Council is based from the Bull Island Interpretive Centre, which hosts everything from primary schools to PhD research students, and he recommends it as the first port of call to any visitors. “The job here changes from season to season. Conservation would always be foremost in the job, then education.”
The island was designated as a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1981, a status which was expanded to cover the whole of Dublin Bay in 2015, which means that although it’s a unique habitat, “we don’t lock it up behind gates, that people are involved and have a say in what happens in the bay… and it’s a tricky one, because we have to realise that it is a very important amenity area for the people of Dublin – but at the same time, as regards the ecology of the area, we can’t replace it.”
“When I started here 30 years ago, it was pretty much no man’s land, and through a lot of effort put in by Dublin City Council over the years, it’s now recognised and appreciated as being the most protected ecosystem in the whole of Ireland. The island hosts half of all flora recorded in the greater Dublin area, and a third of the flora nationwide. Come October we’ll have the grey seals pupping at the northern tip, we’ll also have all the migratory birds coming – over 3,000 brent geese down from arctic Canada, and about 30,000 wading birds, and a lot of wild fowl, ducks and so on.” In recent years Corrigan has noticed a change. “There’s a lot more respect for the fragility of the island here. And that happens through education.”
Read more about Bull Island here
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Dr. Tina Aughney, Monitoring Co-ordinator at Bat Conservation Ireland
“The only way that we can eavesdrop on their nocturnal lifestyle is to have a bat detector”
Bat Conservation Ireland has existed since 2004 and Tina Aughney has been has been there right since the start. “I’ve been working with bats for nearly 15 years now. Bat Conservation Ireland has existed since 2004, but I was doing some work with Dublin Bat Group prior to that. My background is in environmental science, so I would have gotten into bats as a result of Galway Bat Group while I was in university.” Aughney was first bitten by the bat bug in university after she “attended a really, really good bat-talk by Dr. Kate McAney in the Zoology Society, so I joined the Bat Group and have been hooked ever since.”
Considering that we so rarely see or hear them, it is surprising to learn that there are bats pretty much everywhere. “Anywhere there’s a river, a canal, a lake, woodlands, hedgerows… You won’t get them foraging up and down O’Connell Street, but they’ll be on the Liffey, heading up towards the Strawberry Beds. Once there’s a dark riverine or canal corridor, with some hedgerows and treelines, bats will feed along there.”
Despite their apparent omnipresence, observing them remains tricky. “Their sonar system is made up of high-pitched ultrasonic noises that they use for hunting but we can’t hear them, so the only way that we can eavesdrop on their nocturnal lifestyle is to have a bat detector which picks up these ultrasonic noises and converts them into noise that we can hear.”
Due to European legislation, all nine species of bat found across the island are protected, meaning that while they might not be endangered here, the government is mandated to monitor them, which is where Bat Conservation Ireland come in. Aughney and BCI are currently undertaking Batlas 2020, which sees upwards of 600 volunteers heading out armed with bat-detectors with the aim of surveying 80% of the island.
www.batconservationireland.org
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Ricky Whelan, Ornithologist and Project Officer at BirdWatch Ireland
“You could see anything from seabirds such as gannets or great northern divers, to wading birds like oystercatchers, bar-tailed godwits.”
After qualifying with a degree in Zoology from NUI Galway, Ricky Whelan cut his teeth in the bird world working with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in UK. “Up until then I was a bit of a generalist, I was into plants and mammals and birds, but once I started working on the bird reserves, I really got my teeth into that and learned my trade that way. Then a few years ago, we moved back to Ireland and I took up a post as project officer with the Dublin Bay Birds Project.” This particular project is funded by Dublin Port Company who are required to monitor the area as part of their developments and involves monthly surveys of all the winged visitors. The other project close to Whelan’s heart is the Swifts Conservation Project, helping to house these birds which spend their first three years out of the nest on the wing soaring above weather systems, and then oscillate between the disparate homes of the Congo Basin and Ireland. They suddenly makes the planet seem a bit smaller.
For Ricky, Dublin is a wonderland for birdwatching, highlighting Bull Island (particularly in winter), Herbert Park around the Dodder, Phoenix Park, Sandymount Strand and Ireland’s Eye (particularly in summer) as his hotspots that are all easily accessible by public transport.
“On any given day in Dublin Bay, for example, you could see anything from seabirds such as gannets or great northern divers, to wading birds like oystercatchers, bar-tailed godwits, kno. There’s short-eared owls in the winter, peregrine falcons breeding on the Poolbeg chimneys, kestrels all the time. Then your normal garden songbirds: goldfinches, grey tits, swallows, sand martins, or foraging seabirds that have just arrived from Africa like common terns, all the way through to really common stuff like blackbirds. It’s a really diverse place. Every year Dublin birdwatchers organise in January a bird race to see how many bird species they can get in a day and they can get up to 120 species in Dublin County.”
“Once you’ve a pair of binoculars you can crack on. You can get a pair of binoculars for €50 and have them for your entire life.”
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Clowie Russell, Marine Mammal Ecologist at Irish Whale and Dolphin Group
“If you’re out in the bay on a fine day with calm conditions, you may be lucky enough to spot a harbour porpoise.”
“I’m a huge animal lover and have been fascinated by marine life for as long as I can remember.” After studying in NUI Galway and GMIT, Clowie began volunteering with the Shannon Dolphin and Wildlife Foundation before beginning her work with the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group (IWDG) monitoring marine mammals – particularly harbour and grey seals and harbour porpoises – as part of the ongoing Alexandra Basin Redevelopment work at Dublin Port.
The seals’ haul-out site on Bull Island is probably the better known and more visible place for marine mammals in the city, but the waters between the Rockabill (the tiny lighthouse bearing island group off the coast from Skerries) and Dalkey Island is a designated Special Area of Conservation for the harbour porpoise, however Russell notes that – sadly – “there is no Fungi or Dusty of Dublin. The interactions are different here. If you’re out in the bay on a fine day with calm conditions, you may be lucky enough to spot a harbour porpoise but these animals are quite shy and will avoid boats. Harbour porpoises are more timid than their dolphin cousins and can be quite difficult to spot with their small triangular dorsal fin as they come up to the surface only to breathe rather than socialise or play. Howth Head is a great vantage point to spot porpoises especially from June through to the autumn and winter months on a calm day.” Russell adds, “Dublin Bay is frequently visited by bottlenose dolphins that might remain in the area for a few days. These dolphins are part of the inshore population which is highly mobile, so the same individuals have been recorded off the southwest, west and northwest coasts of Ireland and in Northern Ireland.”
Each year, however, IWDG runs a Whale Watch Day (this year taking place on Saturday 26th August) keeping an eye out for cetaceans of all sorts all around the country’s coastline. These guided tours are free to the public and, in Dublin, are usually based from the best vantage points on Howth and Killiney Head. The IWDG also encourages its members to take part in surveys on their research vessel, the Celtic Mist.
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Terry Moore, Deer Keeper and Park Ranger at The Phoenix Park
“It’s the same annual cycle that’s been repeated for generations”
Having initially worked as a park constable in St. Stephen’s Green, Terry Moore came to the Phoenix Park over a decade ago, and his job as a Park Ranger is about keeping the equilibrium between all the life that’s in the park. “Observe, monitor, report and to enforce the bye-laws… you’re constantly looking for things that are there today that weren’t there yesterday.”
As well being a Park Ranger, Terry is also the Deer Keeper for the Phoenix Park’s famous herd of fallow deer. “It’s their park. It was made for them,” says Moore. “The deer are a wild animal, they more or less tend to themselves. We don’t have to put food out for them, they’re more or less left to their own devices. It’s a deer park, and it has been since 1662, so the deer have gone through a lot of changes over the last few centuries, especially with transport and the amount of people that come in and out of the park… They would’ve been a major factor in why the park is still 1,752 acres and that hasn’t changed, because of the surrounding wall.”
Throughout June, Moore and visiting UCD were busy tagging the 101 new additions to the herd from this years fawning season, while in October, the bucks and does – who typically dwell in the east and the west ends of the park respectively – will get together for the ritual of the mating season, known as the rut. “It’s the same annual cycle that’s been repeated for generations.” Without its natural predator, the wolf, extinct in Ireland, part of Moore’s job is to manage the herd, meaning a cull of about 15% each year to keep a herd of around 500 in the park at all times.
“Because they’re in the park so long, they’re used to people jogging, to people walking dogs, the events that go on in the park, people flying model airplanes – that doesn’t phase them at this stage because they’re so used to it. They’re good at observing our behaviour, as much as we are of observing their behaviour. The big problem now is people coming in and feeding them because we’re afraid somebody’s going to get injured.”
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END NOTE
National Heritage Week runs this year from Saturday 19th to Sunday 27th August and aims to shine a light on Ireland’s natural heritage. This year the ambition is to encourage more people to not only learn more about Ireland’s extraordinary natural heritage but actually get involved with it on an ongoing basis. It is a great opportunity to raise awareness of the threats to our natural environment and encourage small changes that we can all make to ensure the protection and conservation of our environment in the future.
Coordinated by the Heritage Council, National Heritage Week is Ireland’s most popular cultural event and this year over 450,000 people are expected to participate in over 2,000 heritage events around the country. Each year, thousands of people plan National Heritage Week events in their towns or villages. Over 75% of events are hosted by volunteers or individuals in small communities who champion Ireland’s heritage in its many forms. Many events are free. For more information and full listings please go to heritageweek.ie
Words: Ian Lamont
Photos: Sean & Yvette
