ANOTHER LIFE:The book took Thompson on more than two years of harnessed flights in a doorless helicopter to seize perfect moments of lighting and composition
THERE ARE PARTS of the world where you could drive all day and not see much change: stony desert, waving corn, endless taiga forest. Ireland keeps changing all the time (though Enfield to Longford could be a bit of a bore), and Ulster – the province – has inherited the most change of all, at least in the rocky turmoil of its prelapsarian past.
"Ulster has a richer, more varied geological history than any area of equivalent size on the surface of the globe." It's an arresting claim, but Philip Doughty, one-time keeper of geology at the Ulster Museum, has written quite brilliantly about it. His chapter on crustal upheavals and impacts of ocean, fire and ice propels the narrative of The Natural History of Ulster, the northern museums' latest and grandest venture in natural-history publishing.
Weighing 3.5kg and with more than 600 glossy images, it is probably the most lavish regional natural history ever produced in these islands (and cross-Border sponsorship has helped offer some remarkable value by keeping its price down: see below). It has been almost five years in the making.
John Faulkner, its main author-editor, regrets the long neglect of Ulster’s natural history in the public mind, with media fixated on the Troubles and treating news about nature as “an appendage to ‘real life’ ”. A subsequent chapter on the North’s pioneering natural history and the Belfast field club of Robert Lloyd Praeger recalls a “golden age” of popular curiosity.
The book’s abundant landscape and habitat photographs again display the talent of Faulkner’s co-author, Robert Thompson. His skill in close-up portraiture has enriched the Ulster Museum’s previous (and almost equally majestic) books on Ireland’s dragonflies, butterflies and moths. This one took Thompson on more than two years of harnessed flights in a doorless helicopter to seize perfect moments of lighting and composition.
The nine-county historical province of Ulster, including Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan, was as close to a natural unit as the authors could conceive, taking in the whole of the Foyle and Bann river catchments and the drumlin belt that extends across Ireland. The Donegal ecologist Ralph Sheppard is among a dozen contributing authors, each a specialist in a habitat or ecosystem (including those of Belfast) or, in one welcome and unexpected case, the work of the North’s nature poets, up to Heaney and Longley.
Ulster’s habitats are certainly special: fiery surges of basalt and granite, great sea loughs and inland lakes, the underwater marvels of Rathlin. But apart, perhaps, from the thriving pollan of Lough Neagh and resurgence of the alien brown hare, there is not a great deal of biodiversity that is not shared with southern counties. This gives all the more reason to seize on its remarkable value: €35 in the Republic, £25 in the North, both including some formidable postage. (Go online to the book’s distributor, at blackstaffpress.com.)
Coinciding with this book is one of allied interest, The Making of Ireland's Landscape Since the Ice Age(Collins Press, €17.99 in paperback). Its author, Valerie Hall, is professor emerita of palaeoecology at Queen's University Belfast. A lifetime of fieldwork makes her expert in reconstructing our postglacial landscapes from evidence preserved in peatlands, lake sediments and ancient timbers. Fossil pollens, volcanic ash, bog bodies and bones, and the tree rings of old mill shafts all speak to her of environmental and human change. She conjures vivid pictures – of a postglacial landscape, for example, thick with seeding docks and yellow ragwort, like a modern urban wasteland. (In my drawing the ragwort is visited by its frequent modern companion, the cinnabar moth).
Another of the spring's natural-history publications is made not for the wider, popular market but for those who work with research – the "literature", as it's known. Back in 1972 a young Belfast mammalogist, James Fairley, decided that his special interest in Irish mammals was not treated as a serious science. To help correct this he compiled Irish Wild Mammals: A Guide to the Literature, listing 970 items.
By the second edition, in 1992, things were changing. Fairley was a professor at NUI Galway and Irish zoology, professional and amateur, could muster 1,421 items. And this week, launched at the National Biodiversity Data Centre, came a third edition, with 2,453 items in the main bibliography and another 163 theses from universities and colleges. For this Prof Fairley, now retired to Belfast, handed on his baton to the Co Cork naturalist and wildlife ranger Pat Smiddy and the mammalogist Dr Paddy Sleeman of NUI Cork.
Their book reaches back to 1739 and a Dublin paper on medicine concocted from animals, and arrives up to date with the surge of interest in Ireland’s whales and dolphins, bats and badgers. In paperback at €18, it will be available online from the websites of BirdWatch Ireland (birdwatchireland.ie) and Owl Books (owlbooksireland.com). It adds context to the new atlas of Irish mammals initiated by the biodiversity centre; meanwhile, the project welcomes new mammal sightings (see mammals. biodiversityireland.ie).
Eye on nature
I watched a male yellowhammer feeding on dandelion seeds. His head was the size and colour of the flowers, and he was hardly noticeable in the meadow.
Peter Pearson, Ashford, Co Wicklow
Every year, in April, droves of hooded crows gather on my driveway in evening time. They are there for a totally democratic meeting, no chaircrow discernible. They walk a bit, talk a bit, play a bit with stones, sit down a bit on their belly. Nothing much happens.
Fons Jasper, Portlaw, Co Waterford
In my garden in mid April there was a huge hatch of black flies about an inch or more long. They looked like miniature dragonflies with very long abdomens that hung down in flight but were straight out when landed.
David Murnane, Dunshaughlin, Co Meath
They sound like St Mark’s flies, but their legs, not their abdomens, hang down in flight.
Early summer! The first cockchafer, or May bug, flew into the kitchen on April 20th, while the first hawthorn blossom was in bloom on April 21st.
Aubrey Fennell, Palatine, Co Carlow
Two bullfinches attacked the white blossoms of the wild cherry, and petals fell like snow.
Brian Devine, Newbridge, Co Kildare
Many reports of female emperor moths this year.
Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, or e-mail viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address
