Happenings

There has been some serious renovation work at Cabragh Wetlands over the last few weeks. Walkways have been strengthened, with renewal of wooden sections over ditches and boggy footpaths, and many barrow loads of stone flattened down to make wandering around the wetlands both safer and drier. Many thanks to those who gave up their time to help get the work completed.

Of greater importance to the natural habitat has been the start of a programme to clear excess silt out of the pond and to get more oxygen and life back into this very important habitat. The easiest way to capture the interest of young children visiting the wetlands is perhaps to trawl a net through the bottom of the pond and tip the captured species into a tank for detailed closer inspection. The appearance of water boatmen, pond skaters, leeches, caddis fly larvae with their extraordinary cases, backswimmers and so on, will evince both shrieks of surprised delight and sudden silence which shows that the attention of the child has been caught and that for once they are really thinking about the implications of what they have encountered. That is education.

What is hidden is always so much more intriguing than what we can see. Most plants, birds, mammals and insects are familiar and in danger of being boringly mundane to many. What we drag from the dark depths of the water, be it pond, river or sea, is very often exotic and strange. Its features are new - frightening to the young, yet compelling to those prepared to study and compare it with what they already know. It’s all about the wonder and awe of nature, and dissemination of that is a large part of the educational role of the Cabragh Wetlands Trust.

So let us give more thought to what which we cannot see and do not experience. There have been a number of important global research projects recently which have focussed on trying to find, identify and catalogue the many species that are as yet unknown to western science. In the dense forests of Papua New Guinea, species have been able to evolve in small isolated communities cut off in steep-sided valleys. In a two month survey in 2009 over 200 new plants and animals were found, including 24 frogs, nine plants, 100 spiders and almost 100 other insects. The white-tailed mouse, orange frog, the tube-nosed fruit bat and a white flowered rhododendron are among many species entirely new to us.

It would have been awful if we had wiped them out before we had found them. Now we know they exist, let us hope that something can be done to save them. That means reducing our pollution, controlling tourism and construction, preserving forests and other habitats, keeping the growth of human populations under control, and learning to think differently about the natural world and the place of humankind on the planet, living by models other than the profit motive and accumulation of monetary wealth.