On a remote patch of land in the south-west of Ireland lies a precious fragment of a lost world […]. Eleven years ago, [ED] […] moved to […] an old farm on County Cork’s rugged coast. The farm, on the Beara Peninsula, included a strip of native woodland, something that is now incredibly rare in Ireland, as well as Europe. [ED] saw that 32-acre (13-hectare) patch of ancient trees as […] [a] temperate rainforest – a type of mossy forest once far more common in Britain and Ireland, made possible in part thanks to moist island air. By pulling out heaps of non-native plants, including rhododendron, and erecting a fence to keep sheep and [non-native] deer from grazing the area, [ED] gave his forest a chance to flourish […] explaining that there’s been a noticeable increase in the presence of birds and insects, too.
The picture elsewhere is less than leafy. The Republic of Ireland has the lowest forest cover of any country in Europe. It wasn’t always that way. Once, 80% of the land here was covered by native trees – the figure now just 1%. Farmland dominates, covering 72% of land in the Republic […].
For an island so often referred to as “green”, there’s a striking lack of [forest]. […] Many wonder to what extent Ireland’s biodiversity can really be rescued through rewilding. Is it even possible […] in the 21st Century?
[ED]’s Atlantic rainforest is full of native tree species including oak, birch, willow and hazel. […]
Julian Friers is an artist living in the north of Ireland who has pictured what lost ecosystems looked like – literally. His paintings of extinct Irish animals show long-departed creatures in familiar places. Some are gone forever, such as the woolly mammoths who once plodded around what is now County Antrim in Northern Ireland. […] Some of his paintings, however, depict potential candidates for reintroduction – including the lynx, which still exists in some parts of Europe, such as Spain. […] But returning large carnivores to the wild in Ireland is a divisive idea. The Green Party in the Republic of Ireland has called for wolves to be reintroduced after 250 years of absence, though there are no official plans to do so yet. […]
But there are other, less emotive species, that [F] thinks could be reintroduced. These include the corn bunting, a small light brown and rather plump-looking bird, and sturgeon, a large river-dwelling fish that has been extinct in Ireland since 1967.
However, as [NR] at Queen’s University Belfast points out, it’s not always clear what groundwork is needed to ensure reintroduction programmes will go to plan. In 2001, golden eagles were brought back to Ireland in County Donegal’s Glenveagh National Park. Although the birds have sustained a population there ever since, their numbers have not grown as expected. [NR] says surveys […] have found that there is not enough prey for the eagles in the area, such as hares and red grouse. That might be because the park is being over-grazed by deer and sheep […]
He says that, on the road to species reintroductions, conservationists could start by following this example of preparing suitable habitats, encouraging fragmented patches of native forest, peatland and wetland around Ireland to expand.
The vast majority of the trees that do exist in Ireland today, explains [F], are actually in non-native commercial plots, such as dense pine tree plantations. “Which is mostly very low biodiversity,” he says […].
There are schemes afoot in this vein. Take the 11,000 hectare (42 sq mile) wilderness area in the Nephin Beg mountains of County Mayo. Here, 4,000 hectares (15 sq miles) of non-native pine are to be transformed into a patchwork of native trees and wetland.
Then, of course, there are the bogs.
Ireland is famous for its once plentiful peatlands […]. But Ireland’s pristine raised bogs have dwindled to just 1% of the area they used to cover. […] Huge volumes of peat were extracted and burned as a means of generating heat or electricity. The use of peat as an energy resource will end in the Republic of Ireland by 2028 but large tracts of exploited peatland have been left barren, says [CO], who was chief executive of the Irish Peatland Conservation Council until December. In winter, these areas become muddy and treacherous, with little or no plant life. And in the summer, they dry out into great seas of dust. […]
There are efforts to re-wet some peatlands and encourage the sphagnum moss that grows on them to flourish again. This would benefit a variety of insects and birds.
Images, captions, and text published by: Chris Baraniuk. “What would a truly wild Ireland look like?” Future Planet. 11 February 2021.
