ANOTHER LIFE:AT THE BOTTOM of the hill, where fields are chewed ragged by the sea, some hectares of watery hollow behind the shore are densely packed with reeds – a sprawling wedge of them, glowing tawny gold as the sun clears the mountain.
It’s a place where a bittern might hide and boom for a mate if ever they come back. Duck shooters sometimes prowl the edge on Sundays, hoping to put up some mallard, and there ought to be a moorhen or two, perhaps some coot, if the mink haven’t found them. I should know these things, but the marsh keeps to itself.
It’s certainly old. All over Ireland, thousands of such shallow wetlands have been drained for farming and forestry. The loss was not just to nature, though many marshy places remaining are now prized and protected as refuges for wildlife.
Wetlands soaked up floods, hung on to water in droughts, and filtered out a lot of the muck that people and their animals shed on the landscape. Now we are learning how to make them again, artificially, in a win-win arrangement with Earth.
Last month, on a day of freezing fog, Minister for the Environment John Gormley stood in anorak and woolly cap to pose for a group photograph on the Castle Leslie demesne, at Glaslough, Co Monaghan. He had just launched his department’s guidance document on integrated constructed wetlands – ICWs – a fine example of which, in a quilt of leafy ponds and streams, was spread behind him. At the edge of the group the naturalist and green campaigner Éamon de Buitléar pressed the document under his arm, a satisfaction after many years of lobbying.
The story goes back more than 20 years to the interest of the National Parks and Wildlife Service in restoration ecology. Its early research trials were for degraded upland slopes around Killarney: which native trees do best, which cattle breeds and so on. But at Anne Valley, on the south coast of Waterford, a senior scientist with the service, Dr Rory Harrington, also worked with a group of farmers with pollution problems.
Under his guidance they constructed a wetland system that filters their farmyard waste through successive vegetated and landscaped ponds and finally delivers water fit for brown trout to the adjoining Annestown river, once just a narrow, dead channel.
The Anne Valley Project, which Ethna filmed for TG4, is a model since followed by other farmers and industrial parks in the southeast and attracting the close interest of European wetland scientists. Domestically, de Buitléar’s enthusiasm encouraged a visit from the Heritage Council and the closer interest of local government.
Low-tech ICWs save money over the conventional sewerage works of concrete pipes and tanks. They absorb virtually all the nitrates and phosphates from waste water, help in flood control and create a pleasant, planted landscape for a rich variety of wildlife. The ICW at Glaslough was created after Monaghan County Council engineers and agents of Castle Leslie estate visited Anne Valley and Dr Harrington, its passionate pioneer.
Glaslough’s network of five planted ponds serves a village, a hotel, a restaurant and an equestrian centre – about 800 people – in a design that allows 20sq m of pond per person.
The workings of an ICW, from raw sewage to safe, sweet water, is carried out naturally by soil and freshwater microbes and the wetland’s plant and animal communities. A constant flow of polluted water maintains a stable, leafy ecosystem, proof against floods and lasting half a century or more. Creating it uses local materials and labour and finds work for all those idle mechanical diggers.
Finding exactly where to put an ICW, however, may not be easy, which is where the guidelines go into detail. Existing “high nature value” corners of the landscape are out of bounds, along with vulnerable water resources.
The precautions and necessary expertise in assessment look quite formidable on the path to planning permission. But even at the cost of setting aside some currently productive farmland or gardens, it may be, to quote the current Rural Water News, "the only realistic means of protecting water bodies while living and working in rural Ireland."
One surprise in the new guidelines is to find the common reed, now waving massed seed heads at the bottom of my hill, a generally unwelcome choice in furnishing an ICW: it can be powerfully invasive and dominating, its deep roots piercing the wetland’s base. The 21 recommended native plants (preferably pot grown for small systems) make a gentler, more attractive mix: bulrushes, yes, but also many other kinds of rush, sedge and grass, with yellow flags and other aquatic and marshy, umbelliferous wild flowers.
Out of excrement, much beauty . . .
Eye on nature
I have a large skimmia bush in my garden, and I always thought that the birds did not eat the berries. This year in the snow the redwings and fieldfares, and even blackbirds, were eating them.
Freda Shorten, Blackrock, Cork
Skimmia berries are poisonous to humans, but I can find no reports of them poisoning birds. That does not mean that they are safe for them, however.
During the recent snow at 1am a fox crossed my garden and tried to climb up into a pyracantha. Do foxes eat berries?
Ursula O’Farrell, Booterstown, Co Dublin
Yes, foxes regularly eat berries.
I have noticed wood pigeons on the lawn pecking intently at withered oak leaves and eating the spangle galls on the back of the leaves. Later a blackbird did the same.
Jim O’Malley, Killarney, Co Kerry
Clever birds to discover the gall-wasp eggs. This is the second, autumn cycle in the life of the gall wasp, which produces only parthenogenetic females in spring. They lay eggs in oak buds, and the first generation of grubs cause currant galls on young leaves in May and June. These hatch into male and female gall wasps, which mate and lay eggs on oak leaves in autumn and become the second cycle.
Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, or viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address
