That smell.
It’s an aroma that brings childhood excitement flooding back to me. Sweet, pleasant and yet artificial, like turpentine and yet not. The smell of preservative. The smell of death.
It hits you before you enter the museum proper. The great antlers, more than three metres from tip to tip, greet me as I step inside this treasure trove of Victorian natural history collecting. They crown the skeletons of two Irish elk stags, among the largest deer that ever lived. They form a vanguard from the distant past, emissaries from an Ireland emerging from the grip of the last Ice Age into an uncertain future, a human future. A world now gone forever. In the cabinets all around them, a gallery of Irish wildlife locked in death. Ambassadors from almost every Irish bird species stand or perch entombed in glass jars or cabinets: ravens from Luggala, cuckoos from Terenure, merlins from Clare and Kerry. Bullfinches in a wilting gorse bush crouch over eggs that will never hatch, while a beakful of pigeon remains stuck in permanent transit between peregrine parent and chick.
It’s hard not to admire the incredible skill of the taxidermy and the array of exquisite specimens amassed over generations. And yet, you’re reminded that each one was once a living creature: a parent sundered from its young, a chick torn from a nest, an endangered species one individual closer to the precipice. Some of the creatures that make up the collection remain endangered to this day. Others have already crossed that threshold – and a few have even made it back again.
RM Block
You can’t choose the times you live in. And I am sad to say that we live in an age of extinction. Pádraic Fogarty, author of the landmark book Whittled Away on Ireland’s (depressing) environmental history, estimates that more than 100 species have become extinct here since the arrival of man. Some are irrefutably gone: outside of captivity, you are not going to find a wolf in Ireland now, no matter how hard you look. Others have been absent for so long, or are now so incredibly rare, that they can be practically discounted as a going concern in Ireland. The sighting of right whale off the Donegal coast last year – the first confirmed in Ireland in more than a century – was a cause of great excitement. But with so few of these magnificent giants left in the North Atlantic, will we ever see one again?
[ Ireland’s natural environment in ‘very poor’ condition, EU analysis findsOpens in new window ]
On land, too, the picture has been grim. The loss of Ireland’s ancient forests over the centuries forced our last wolves into the hills, while woodland specialists, such as the great spotted woodpecker, disappeared altogether. As the forests faded, an agricultural Ireland of the kind so many of us are familiar with today emerged. This, in turn, became a welcome home for creatures designed to thrive on a verdant steppe that could take equally well to the man-made grassland now carved out of Ireland’s lost wilderness. Sadly, changes to that habitat would send some of our farmland birds – including the iconic corncrake – into a near-terminal decline. For others, such as the corn bunting, the changes were too much. Once it thrived on small holdings across Ireland, until we stopped growing cereals and laced the countryside with pesticides. Man giveth, man taketh away.
What we are left with is a slow-motion drama, from triumph to tragedy, playing out over the course of centuries, mirroring the highs and lows of human history in Ireland, as the forces of colonisation, industrialisation and modernity conspired to change our landscapes beyond all recognition. The creatures that have gone from those landscapes still have fascinating (if tragic) stories to tell us. All we can do is wander the desolate spaces they once called home – farms without corn buntings, forests without capercaillies, hills without wolves – in homage to what once was there. We can learn from what was done to them, and aspire to consign the mistakes of the past to the past.
They say you don’t miss what you never had. However, I can’t help but wonder if Ireland is less now for what we have long lost. With the disappearance of species that our ancestors once shared the forests and fields with, the creatures they saw, whose sounds formed part of the natural symphony they knew, what have we lost in the process? Is our experience of Ireland poorer for the vanishing of creatures that left their imprint on our ancestors’ folk tales, art and even their laws?
Incredibly, we still have people in Ireland old enough to have heard the corn bunting sing – a bird now lost to us altogether. I wonder who the last person in Ireland was to hear a wolf howl. Did they realise the magnitude of what they were hearing?
With this in mind, if you know anyone who can recall a time when the likes of corn buntings, corncrakes and other birds now largely gone from the country could still be heard on farms nationwide, cherish them. They are a living link to a disappeared Ireland, part of a memory we should treasure for as long as it lives with us. It’s not like this corrosion is confined to the past. It continues, on a localised level, all around us. There is a generation of children growing up in Kerry without hearing the song of the yellowhammer, now gone as a breeding bird in that county. I, a Wicklow native, had to cross the country to find my first corncrake, something that would have been unthinkable to my grandparents. It is a depressing thought, but in the decades to come will I be telling my daughter about species I saw that she never had the chance to enjoy?
Thankfully, all is not lost. Ours is an age of extinction, but it’s also a time when a desire to preserve the natural world has never been more acute. This is certainly the case in Ireland. Even within my short lifetime, species once lost have returned and recolonised the country - either under their own steam or with the help of man. When I was a child, the return of the white-tailed eagle or great spotted woodpecker would have looked like pipe dreams. Both have since come true. Species like the pine marten and the grey partridge, previously on the verge of extinction, have been saved either through a cessation of human hostility or an incredible conservation effort. The crane, a bird that has left a deep imprint on Irish folklore, is breeding on our bogs again after an absence of centuries. These turn-arounds testify to nature’s incredible resilience, its ability to right past wrongs if given space and time, and our own capacity to conserve what is left. Once, we destroyed the habitats our lost creatures needed. Now, we’re creating and preserving refuges for our endangered wildlife: abandoned buildings for bats, ponds for the natterjack toad. All of them have benefited from the work of dedicated groups and individuals across Ireland to stem the tide of extinction and conserve the wildlife we still have. It is to their stories we must turn for hope for a future in which man and nature can coexist and, with a little compromise, even flourish together. It’s not too late. The future is still for us to write.
Conor W O’Brien’s new book The Living and The Dead - Tales of Loss and Rebirth from Irish Nature is published by Irish Academic Press
