The Snipe

Icy Weather

2010-12-12T10:04:00.002-08:00

Despite a persistent feeling that this would be wonderful weather for the middle of February, we cannot avoid what Nature chooses to throw at us. Three cheers for the drivers who brave the cold weather and dangerous roads to get food, fuel, post and other necessities to us – and the binmen who take away the detritus of our seasonal excess. Where would we be without them? Meanwhile out in the non-human world, the cold and frost mean tough times for our fellow creatures, but also wonder and beauty for those who care to look.

At Cabragh Wetlands the landscape is draped in frost, highlighting details and perspectives hidden for most of the year. Spiders’ webs glisten from fences and foliage, each utterly unique in design, different from every one of the billions of webs around the world. In the reedbeds the stalks of last summer’s growth are brought closer to collapse and decay by the penetration and weight of the freezing frost. The cycles of life and death continue inexorably. Nature is clearing out the old and unwanted, and preparing for the new and vigorous growth of next spring.

Small creatures can suffer terribly at times like this. As the ground and water froze last week, so a curlew abandoned the safety of the marshland meadows to search for food in, of all places, the mud and slush which cars had heaped in ridges along the road to Holycross. With its elegantly streamlined long, downward curling beak, the curlew must have been pretty desperate to venture to such a public, dangerous place, and the poor thing looked rather pathetic as it forlornly penetrated the soft material before inevitably bashing into the unyielding tarmac beneath. This once common bird of the moors, marshes and fields is now officially classified as endangered, placed on the Red List and carefully monitored. They will be glad of a thaw, and we hope enough survive winter to breed productively in the spring.

The ponds are mostly covered in ice, with lines of footprints across the surface giving more evidence of the wealth of wildlife about. A few corners are ice-free so ducks and other birds can drink and clean their feathers; one author suggested that birds are more likely to die of thirst than hunger in very cold weather. They can always find something in the hedges and ditches to nibble on, especially this early in the winter, but if all sources of water are rock-hard, like the curlew pecking at the tarmac, they will be in real danger. My laziness has produced an added bonus this autumn. Hundreds of windfall apples were left lying where they fell, waiting to be raked up and composted. Now they are a wonderful source of food for the starlings, rooks and crows.

The sturdy pony tethered near the Cabragh Centre has done invaluable work eating down excess vegetation, manuring the ground, creating crevices with its hooves for other creatures to shelter in and opening up the tightly packed thatch of grass and weeds at the base of an overgrown fence, allowing light and space for new growth next year. In bad weather even the least becoming food source can be a lifeline for something.

Do not forget the CAVA (Community and Voluntary Association) meeting at Cabragh at 8.00 this Thursday (9th December).

Icy Weather

2010-12-12T10:04:00.001-08:00

Thank you to Lisheen Mines

2010-12-12T10:01:00.000-08:00

There was very good news for Cabragh Wetlands on Monday of last week, when John Elms, the General Manager of Lisheen Mines, Terry McKenna, Human Resources Manager, and Brian Keaty, Mine Manager, met the Trust’s Committee, supported by a good turn out of members, friends and several local groups who work closely with the Wetland Trust. After an introduction and welcome by the Chairman, Tom Grace, there was a presentation by three Committee members on the development, current work and future plans of the Trust. Michael Lowry TD, spoke about his pleasure in returning to invaluable local matters at the end of a tough day dealing with the national economic and political crisis. He has long been an admirer of the work of the Trust and his commitment and energy were instrumental in drawing attention of Lisheen Mines to the value of Cabragh’s work.

Mr Elms spoke of his surprise at and admiration for the extent of the Trust’s activities and ambitions, and acknowledged the importance of local and community organizations. He then handed a cheque for €50,000 to the Chairman. This extraordinarily generous donation shows the commitment of Lisheen Mines to the environment, and will be put towards completing the planned extension of the Centre, which should be underway early in the New Year. With this work finished, the Wetlands Trust should be in a position to extend its conservation, educational and recreational work, with a permanent exhibition in place and other facilities to help boost both tourism and local business in North and South Tipperary.

At a recent dinner in Borrisoleigh, North Tipperary CAVA (Community and Voluntary Associations) held its 2010 Annual Awards Evening. Community organizations from all over North Tipperary were present, with Awards given in several categories, including Environment, Youth and Sports, Economic, Social Inclusion, Arts, Culture and Heritage and Outstanding Achievement. The prizes were spread around the county, from Ballingarry to Lorrha, and Cabragh Wetlands was very pleased to win the Community Empowerment Award, reflecting the values of cooperation and local responsibility which are so essential if communities are to deal with the range of problems facing all of us at this difficult time.

To build on this, the Thurles branch of CAVA will be meeting at the Cabragh Wetlands Centre on Thursday 9th December at 8.00pm, when representatives from CAVA will give a presentation on the work of the organization, highlighting what it can offer in the way of training and support to all sorts of local voluntary organizations, from soccer clubs, to groups caring for the elderly, disabled or otherwise disadvantaged, to environmental supporters like Cabragh or Tidy Towns groups. If you are not affiliated to CAVA, you really should send someone along to this meeting and find out what you could gain – and, of course, how you might give even more effectively to your local community.

Extinction

2010-12-12T10:00:00.000-08:00

If you are free this Friday evening (26th November), then come along to an evening of Song, Music and Story at the Cabragh Wetlands Centre, starting at 8.00pm. It is so important to maintain culture and traditions in a convivial atmosphere. You will be most welcome.

A few weeks ago we printed a small article focusing on the good news about tiger habitats being preserved in the kingdom of Bhutan, on the southern slopes of the Himalayas. This weekend the Sunday Times brought a dose of reality with the news that the South China tiger is now functionally extinct. Surveys have found no trace of it in the wild and all 100 South China tigers in Chinese zoos have been proven by genetic testing to be cross-breeds. The genetic purity of the South China tiger, believed to be the common ancestor of all other tiger species, has been lost for ever. Within the last 30 or so years, three other species have become extinct – the Balinese, Javan and Caspian tigers have all disappeared. Those that are left (perhaps just 3200 individuals in the wild) are still subject to poaching for their fur and, most worryingly, for other body parts for use in traditional Far Eastern medicines.

We can only give our best wishes to the international conferences and organizations that are working heroically to save the remaining tigers. Like every other living species, tigers have taken about 4,000,000,000 (four billion) years to evolve – the same time as you and me. Indeed we are related to them. If you go back enough generations, humans share common ancestors with the tiger, just as surely as about 7,000,000 years ago there were creatures living, some of whose children became humans while others became chimpanzees and others gorillas.

Man emerged just 2,500,000 years ago – that is 100,000 generations of identifiable humans (about one generation every 25 years, for argument’s sake). Why do we believe that the values and lifestyle we have developed within the last mere 15 generations are so important and so right, that it is acceptable to destroy the natural environment that has produced and sustained so many different yet closely connected and interlinked forms of life over so many billions of years?

We live in an era of extraordinary technology and wonderful cultural and scientific achievements. Yet for every gain, there are losses. Yes, it is great to combat disease and extend human life, but the consequence is more people, more environmental degradation and more species lost. With each lost species, the fragile web that binds all life is stretched and damaged. The losses cannot be replaced. We need a bit more Socrates – logical questioning and answering to probe far more deeply into the consequences and implications of how we are living. Should our schools teach a bit more about how ideas and values are created and a little less about economic growth and technological wizardry? Should we spend more time thinking about balance and sustainability and a bit less about job creation and economic ‘progress’?

Robins

2010-12-12T09:58:00.000-08:00

With Christmas approaching, one bird immediately comes to mind – the little robin redbreast. Robins cling to their territory and seem to form a uniquely close relationship with humans who share their area. One of the most rewarding aspects of working in the garden on cold winter days is the constant companionship of a robin, which follows you around taking advantage of your digging and clearing to help itself to a meal of freshly turned worms, millipedes and other tasty insects.

Legend has it that the robin got its redbreast because it was pricked by Christ’s crown of thorns and the flow of blood stained his chest feathers, and because of this and its constancy during the long winter months, the robin has become a favourite on Christmas cards and decoration. Traditions also go back many centuries about how bad luck will come to anyone harming a robin - “Who killed Cock Robin?”

Before man chopped down and built over so much of the natural landscape over the last mere 5000 years, robins would have been forest dwellers, pecking around in the leaf litter on the floor of oak forests and ancient woodlands to find beetles and grubs. David Lack in his wonderful book “The Life of the Robin” noted how robins take advantage of the heavy work done by stronger species like pheasants which disturb the ground more effectively, especially during freezing winters which kill a very high proportion of robins. Next time you are digging your vegetable patch and a robin is lurking a yard or two away, ready to leap in if you move away for a few seconds, bear in mind that he probably sees you as a variant of badger, pig or wild boar, which its ancestors will have followed as faithfully as today he sits by you. Lack even saw a robin waiting where a mole was tunnelling, ready to grab a turned up worm before the hard-working mole could get its reward.

Adult robins pair off as early as January, though the female will suffer a sustained torrent of territorial aggression for hours, perhaps days, as her persistence steadily wears down the male’s resistance; he will fight males that come too close. That chirpy male song is as much warning as attraction. Pair-bonding will continue until nest-building begins in spring. Nests are clearly very common, but notoriously difficult to find – adults will not want to show you where they have hidden it. They are inventive and opportunistic in their choice of site, though feminists will not be surprised to learn that only the female builds. In the natural world they favour hollows in banks or on the ground, using moss, hair and leaves to line it.

Man’s influence cannot be by-passed. Apart from bird-boxes (available shortly from Cabragh Wetlands) they have been known to use jam jars, a boot, a drawer in the garden shed and a human skull. Lack records a gardener hanging his coat in the tool shed at 9.15; when he took it down at 1.00 to go for dinner, a nest was almost complete in the pocket. One pair nested in a horse-drawn cart, which then set off on a 200-mile round trip after the eggs had hatched. Catastrophe? No. The loyal, hard-working parents flew with the cart, collecting food to feed their young on the journey and keeping them alive until they all got back to their precious home territory.

Enjoy your robins this winter, and do your bit to give them food, shelter and open water. They are as tame a wild creature as you will find.

Happenings

2010-10-25T14:21:00.000-07:00

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.

Tipperary Biodiversity

2010-10-11T12:21:00.000-07:00

We have an exciting new venture that we hope will attract a lot of public use. To help you enjoy and understand the wealth of biodiversity around us, a website has been set up that will help us all to recognise and appreciate the species we encounter. Over time the natural biodiversity of our landscape is changing, and we want to keep track of what is happening. We would like to receive pictures and news of what you have seen, where and when you saw it, what it was doing, what it was feeding on, and so on.

If you go to our website (www.cabraghwetlands.ie) you will find a link to Tipperary Biodiversity. Alternatively try tipperarybiodiversity.blogspot.com/. There you will be invited to download your pictures of animals, plants, insects and birds, and if you have no picture, then leave a comment about what you have seen or want to find out. This is a great way to get help from other users to identify what you cannot recognize, or ask questions on the blog which someone out there in the cyberworld will surely be able to answer.

It is early days, but the site already contains more information and pictures on the marsh fritillary butterfly which we wrote about two weeks ago. There is a request to identify an unusual spider that someone found on the wall of their house, and an answer. A hairy white caterpillar has been photographed, posted on the blog and identified as a Pale Tussock moth larva (there’s a new one to most of us).

Most interesting of all, a Vapourer moth has been pictured. The comments tell us that it has to be a male, because the female is wingless. Our writer tells us that he found a colourful and distinctive Vapourer caterpillar feeding on willow late in September, took it home to show the children, and then, when going to release it, found that it had begun the next stage of its lifecycle – the cocoon phase. Leaving it where it was, he awaited its hatching. This Sunday (10/10), a wingless adult female Vapourer emerged.

She can scarely move, swollen with eggs and waiting for a male to fertilize her. She appears to have no function other than to produce eggs and propagate the species, and as she has no wings, she hardly has an independent life. Using the scent of pheromones, she can attract males, so smell can be seen as a language, a means of communication. After her eggs are laid, she will die. The eggs will overwinter before hatching in batches from March onwards. As the female cannot fly or move more than a few centimetres, the dispersal of the species and the joining of different clusters to ensure genetic diversity are entirely dependent on how far the caterpillar can walk from the pupating site. Not surprisingly it is very localised and relies on its habitat suffering no sudden changes of the type that man in his wisdom is wont to cause. Birds and other predators will give wingless moths and fragile caterpillars a hard enough struggle to survive without human damage to their habitat.

Use the new blog to post pictures, ask and answer questions, add comments and advice, and give extraordinary creatures like the Vapourer moth a little more chance to survive.

Deaths Head Hawkmoth

2010-10-05T08:17:00.001-07:00

As with almost every other life-form on the planet, butterflies (17,500 species) and moths (163,000species) are under real pressure. Around the world many species have become extinct; as always the biggest reason is habitat destruction, which means that once again the finger of blame has to be pointed at human activity. Forms of life that can be traced back in the fossil record over 400 million years are threatened by a species that in perhaps just 10,000 years has grown to exert a very dangerous form of control over much of the environment.

Pictured here is the Death’s Head Hawkmoth, common around the Mediterranean, North Africa and the European continent, but rare in Ireland. Recently there have been sightings from Cork City to Inishowen Peninsula, Co. Donegal. One must suspect that the warming climate is bringing it to pastures new. It is a most distinctive moth, with that extraordinary skull design on the back of its thorax giving rise to superstition that seeing the moth was a potent of death or serious misfortune. The Death’s Head Hawk-moth cannot feed from flowers because of the shape of its proboscis, so it instead raids beehives and uses its strong little tongue to stab into waxy cells and feed on the honey.

Their distinctive streamlined bodies make them very quick fliers, reaching 30 mph (hence the name hawk-moth), and the larvae (caterpillars) feed on potato, deadly nightshade, verbena and olive plants. An endearing feature is that when threatened the moth will give out a totally unexpected loud squeaking noise to deter predators. Local entomologists are hoping to establish whether it is present in Tipperary. Have you seen it? Pictures will be most welcome. It is a very large moth, with a body 2.5 inches long and a wingspan of 4-5.5 inches, likes cultivated and lowland. If you keep bees you might be lucky enough to see one. Please let us know.

Flies

2010-09-08T10:50:00.000-07:00

The darker mornings and heavy rain take us that first step into autumn. The leaves are starting to turn, telephone lines are filling up with birds gathering for their great annual migrations and plants are going into seed to ensure their survival through the winter. Autumn is a wonderful time to be out in the countryside. Wind and rain freshen the land after prolonged dusty dryness, and many insects are coming into their own.

We tend to be very dismissive towards insects, as if they are of no importance. But of course their place in the food chain and web of life is central; so many birds depend on flying insects for the bulk of their diet – just think of those circling swallows swooping over your garden, scooping up small insects by the hundreds every day. Swifts live almost all their lies in the air, landing only to nest and living entirely on a diet of flying insects and air-born spiders.

At this time of year there is a plentiful supply of suitable insects, with obvious autumnal regulars like the Crane fly (Daddy long-legs) abundant wherever there is a good patch of grassland. The Crane fly spends most of its life as a larva underground; you will have dug up those large leatherjacket larvae, plentiful under your lawn and voracious munchers of grass roots. The mature adults are also known as mosquito hawks, though they won’t bite you, preferring to sunbathe on walls and windows on warm days, and at night lights attract them into houses where they buzz and flap around – annoying, but no danger. With their lanky legs, wings and long abdomen, they are not a cuddly insect. The female has a pointed tip to her abdomen, which makes her easily distinguishable from the male.

There are at least 120,000 recorded species of fly, and probably the same amount again waiting to be identified. Some can be dangerous, like the malaria-carrying mosquitoes (3,500 species) which still kill about five million people every year; the nice male lives off fruit juices and plant nectar – only the female drives her proboscis into the chosen victim to suck blood. Horse flies (3,000 species) have a reputation in this part of the world for biting aggressively, but they are also valuable pollinators. Again it’s only the female who has the mouthparts capable of biting through skin and she needs the blood to help her eggs develop; the male feeds on nectar and pollen.

Blow flies (1100 species) have a terrible reputation, but are really beautiful creatures, with irridescent green and blue bodies. Found across the globe they can be a problem if the female lays her eggs in human food, which they tend to do in batches of about 200 so that the protein can help the eggs. We call their larvae ‘maggots’, and tend to shrink from them in fear and disgust because they are always associated with death and decay. Any mammal corpse in the wild will, if not rapidly eaten by other predators, be full of blow-fly eggs within a few hours. The maggots hatch within a day and consume the dead animal; after about a week they are ready to pupate, burrowing underground to emerge as mature blowflies after another seven days. Disgusting and smelly perhaps, but a wonderfully simple, efficient and necessary way of removing an equally unsightly and inevitable problem of dead animals littering the countryside. Take away the veneer of civilization and that is the fate of you and me.

Heritage Week Success

2010-09-08T10:49:00.000-07:00

Heritage Week has been very memorable at Cabragh Wetlands and many thanks must go to the dozens of people who gave so generously of their time and energy to help ensure that our Open Day was such a resounding success. Among the many benefits of the day was the sense of community involvement, both in the planning of the event and on the day itself. To have so many people willing to help out was humbling and reflects positively both the work of the Wetland Trust and the great spirit of fellowship in the area.

Our afternoon with Dale Treadwell went very well, and special thanks to Thurles Library for supporting the event. It was good to see an expert and showman like Dale enthuse the children (and adults) about the smaller members of our community – the insects, bugs, and creepy-crawlies that play key roles in the web of life, and whose myriad numbers are crucial to support the food chain that sustains us. Love that wasp: he does more than you probably realise to clear debris in your garden and pollinate plants. Help those bees, whose future thankfully seems less worrying than a year or two ago. We have several varieties here at Cabragh, including a beautiful red-bottomed species which can be seen readily enough flying from flower to flower on these warm late summer days. Take time to enjoy the wonderful array of butterflies which have been evident this year; think about how you can preserve corners of your garden or farm where plants can grow which sustain species of butterfly and other insects.

Dale’s influence on the children could be seen in our Open day Fancy Dress Parade, when there were some magnificent butterflies, with colourful gossamer wings. I loved the colourful garden fairy, and among the mammals on display were several brown and white ponies (or were they cows?). A fine pair of vivid black and yellow wasps buzzed up and down the catwalk, stings hovering menacingly – perhaps they were visiting Kilkenny fans? They are very welcome at Cabragh, even in this momentous week! Many thanks to every child that took part in the parade, and to their creative advisers!

All Ireland Tickets!

2010-08-17T02:24:00.000-07:00

Tickets for the All-Ireland final will be frantically sought by one and all after Tipp’s great semi-final victory on Sunday. Well, just between you and me, we have a pair available at Cabragh Wetlands. All you need to do is invest a couple of euro in a ticket for our Open Day (August 29th 1-5) Raffle (or a book of 6 for €10) and you have as much chance of two Stand tickets at Croke Park as the next person. What a cost-effective way of giving yourself a fair crack at seeing the long-awaited toppling of Kilkenny! There are other great prizes available in the raffle – thanks to those who donated the Fuji Digital Camera and Dinner for Two at the Horse and Jockey.

Open Day preparations are going ahead well, and we hope to see a good turnout on the day. With talks and guided walks, animals and pond life to look at, wonderful pictures and cards to buy, cakes, teas and so much more, this will be a great family day out. Don’t forget the Children’s Fancy Dress Show, with entries on a theme of nature, please. This is a chance for real creativity and memorable fun for parents as well as children. We are still looking for donations of good quality items for an auction, so if you have something, please get in touch (0504-43879). As always we are immensely grateful for the support and generosity of the local community.

There should be plenty of stands for you to see, which as a whole will give a clear message about the great things being done in the Thurles area to create a less damaging and more sustainable way of life. We cannot continue to burn fossil fuels indefinitely, we cannot continue to foul our waterways, desecrate the countryside and damage the eco-systems and habitats that sustain the balance and variety of life on Earth. Cabragh Wetlands Open Day will give you and your children important ideas to reflect on, awareness of new technology and the chance to connect with local groups and individuals who are doing their bit to move us towards a better way of living. Do you want your grandchildren to live in a world where success is measured in terms of material prosperity, financial wealth and conquest of nature, or in a world where the natural biological wealth of our flora and fauna are healthy and resilient, where man and other species can live alongside each other in mutually beneficial harmony? At the basis of this must be a network of communities living good lives.

Dale Treadwell invites you to join him at Cabragh Wetlands this Sunday 22nd August from 3-5. The Den’s resident Bug Man will be explaining the wetlands to children and families – Let’s Explore Cabragh Wetlands! Entry is free, and thanks to Thurles Library for their work in setting up this event.

Severe Weather and Global Warming

2010-08-13T04:01:00.000-07:00

by Fr. Seán McDonagh, SSC
Last week I wrote about severe weather events in Pakistan, China, Russia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Poland. I could have included Africa where a severe drought is causing hunger and malnutrition in the eastern Sahel in west Africa. It is estimated that 10 million people are affected in four different countries. In Niger, the worst affected area, it is estimated that 7.1 million people are hungry and facing a bleak future as livestock have been lost and food prices are soaring. This catastrophe has received very little coverage in western media.
In Latin America in April 2010 heavy rains in the state of Rio de Janeiro caused floods and mudslides leading to the death of at least 212 people. In June, Brazil experienced severe floods once again, this time in the states of Alagoas and Pernambuco in the north eastern part of Brazil. At least 1,000 people died or were reported missing.
Another spectacular event happened on August 5, 2010, when a section of the Petermann Glacier on the north western coast of Greenland, measuring 97 square miles, broke off. While there is nothing new in icebergs ‘calving’ this is the largest break off since 1962. Robert Bindschadler, a Senior Research Science at MASA Goddard Space Flight Center, points out that changes in calving will happen as climate changes because the environment is changing.” Increases in temperature due to climate change are not uniform across the world. The increase in temperature in the Arctic region has been very significant and scientists are predicting that the Arctic Ocean could be free of summer ice within a decade or so.
Peter Scott who is head of climate monitoring and attribution at the Met Office has been sifting through the data on the extreme weather events during the past few months in Asia and Russia. He writes that, “ evidence, including in India and China, that periods of heavy rain are getting heavier, is absolutely consistent with our understanding of the physics of atmosphere in which warmer air hold more moisture. Our climate change predictions support the emerging trend in observation and show a clear intensification of extreme rainfall events in a warmer world.” Nevertheless, he concedes that it is problematic to state categorically that climate change is the cause of a particular climate event such as the hurricane Katrina. Extreme weather events happen once every 50 or 100 years. Peter Scott is now arguing that, as a result of global warming, these extreme events will happen much more frequently and “become considered the norm by the middle of this century.”
In the light of the deteriorating climate situation it was very disappointing that the recent climate change talks in Bonn ended so inconclusively. The 194 countries which attended the meeting failed to agree on a common target or method for reducing greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. It appeared that many of the gains which had been made in the UN climate conference in Nairobi, Bali, Poznans and even Copenhagen were beginning to unravel. In Bonn many so-called “developing” countries were retreating to positions which they held some years ago. They are insisting that while their attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would be done on a voluntary basis, “developed” countries must agree to reduce their greenhouse emission through legally binding treaties. China, which as a country, is now the number one greenhouse gas emitter in the world, refused any suggestion for monitoring its emissions by an international agency. The Chinese point out that their per capita emissions are much lower than either North America or Europe.
The Copenhagen Accord agreed that action needs to be taken on a global level to keep the average increase in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius. This would give the world a “carbon budget” of 750 gigatons of emission by the year 2050. Poor countries suggest that this figure should be divided between countries on a basic of population and how much greenhouse gases that country has historically emitted. Rich countries have about 16% of the world’s population but they generate 74% of greenhouse gases. The bulk of the 750 gigatons should be allocated to poor countries with huge populations. In this way they would be able to develop their economies to meet the development needs of their people. Unless there is a credible solution soon, extreme weather events will increase dramatically.

Climate Change and Extreme Weather

2010-08-13T03:59:00.000-07:00

Article by Fr. Seán McDonagh
Extreme weather is one of the clearest signals that climate change is happening. During the first part of August 2010, news of extreme weather in various parts of the world was seldom off the headlines.
Pakistan suffered its worst monsoon-related floods in 80 years. More than 1,600 people were reported dead, though the real number is probably a multiple of that figure. Rivers burst their banks sweeping away houses, food crops, roads and bridges, leaving areas such as Gilgit Baltistan cut off from the rest of because the Karakurram road has been swept away. The extreme flooding in the Swat valley was partly due to the fact that since the Taliban took over that area forests had been chopped down at an alarming rate.
By the end of the first week of August it was estimated that around 12 million people have been affected by the flood waters in Pakistan. Because the rains had not stopped, rescue operations were difficult to mount. Some charities reported that the only way they could reach the victims was by loading the supplies on donkeys.
The tens of thousands of people, fleeing from the floods by whatever means they could, were often without food, potable water, medicines, dry clothes or rainproof tents. The Pakistani authorities are worried that the death toll will rise dramatically as people suffer from malnutrition and water borne diseases such as typhoid, cholera and malaria. The elderly and the very young are most at risk.
Further east 127 people died and almost 2,000 were reported missing on August 8th after mudslides in north-western China. At least one village in Gansu province was buried entirely in mud forcing 45,000 people to evacuate. One half of Zhouque country was submerged by flood waters which forced 50,000 to flee their homes. The flood waters swept away cars, trucks and even houses. According to figures issued by the Chinese government the number of people who have died in flooding in the first seven months of 2010 stood at more than 2,000. The number of people forced out of their homes by the recent flooding has reached 12 million.
Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic have also been hit by extreme weather events. On August 7th 2010, torrential rain caused rivers to burst their banks in south western Poland, submerging towns and causing at least 3 fatalities. In the town of Goerlitz close to the Germany Polish border, 1,400 were evacuated as flood waters cascaded through the main street. At one point the flood waters topped the seven metre mark. Three people were killed by flood waters in the northern part of the Czech Republic. The Mayor of Bogatynia in the Czech Republic said that the there was little warning. Within an hour the town was totally submerged. Many houses collapsed and the inhabitants were cut off from the rest of the country. Storms and high winds left many communities without electric power in eastern Slovakia.
Further east in Russia the problem is not excessive rain or floods, but the opposite, a prolonged heatwave with temperatures at record levels of 38 degrees Celsius. These have led to numerous forest and peat fires right across the country. A government minister, Sergei Shoigi told the media that there were more than 550 fires covering 17,000 hectares burning across Russia. As a consequence Moscow and its many landmarks such as the Kremlin have been shrouded in a toxic smog for weeks. Flights into Moscow’s southern airport were severely delayed and car drivers used fog lights. The air monitoring service reported that carbon dioxide levels were more than six times higher than they should be. Many people wore gas masks in an effort to protect themselves from the toxic fumes. Despite such initiatives, the mortality rate has doubled in recent weeks according to Andrei Seltsovsky, the head of the Moscow’s health department. Normally there are about 360 to 380 deaths per day in Moscow. In late July and early August 2010, it was double that number. ` Further south there are fears that the fires could release radioactive nuclides from the land contaminated by the Chernobyl nuclear accident.
Yet, despite this extreme weather, global efforts to tackle climate change seem to be unravelling.

Heritage Week

2010-07-31T02:56:00.000-07:00

Heritage Week (August 22nd – 29th) is fast approaching, and Cabragh Wetlands is planning a special Open Day on Sunday 29th August, when we hope to celebrate the many good things that are done in the Thurles area to support, cherish and sustain our natural and human heritage. We want to encourage awareness of and support for the many local enterprises and groups which play a part in raising awareness of environmental and heritage issues, be it hill walkers, green schools, sustainable energy businesses, farmers’ market stallholders, food producers, allotment groups, gardeners, chicken coop manufacturers, education and transport providers, and so on.

We face a difficult future in the light of so many environmental challenges, and as individuals and communities we will need to be resilient and innovative if we are to adapt more sustainable styles of living. For our Open Day we hope to have a range of stalls and displays set up by groups and enterprises which can contribute in this area, adding to our local vision of how a better future can be built from the grassroots. We hope that the cumulative effect of a number of such displays will make an informative and challenging statement to visitors about how we can cherish our heritage while adapting a new mindset to help us build a more sustainable future.

As an Open Day there will of course be the usual range of raffles, sales of cards, cakes and bird boxes, animals to see, children’s events, and guided tours of the Cabragh Wetlands, and plenty more. A great afternoon out for the family! Visiting stalls will be welcome to advertise their own events, sell their goods and seek new members. After all this is a community day, a chance for those of us with a common interest to network and build links.

If your group would like to take part, please get in touch in the next two weeks, via e-mail (cabraghwetlands@eircom.net), or call 0504 43879 (mornings), or 086-3179919. The event is supported by the Heritage Council, which will give it some national advertising.

There will be a second Heritage week event at the Cabragh Wetlands on Sunday 22nd August, run in conjunction with Thurles Library, when popular bug expert Dale Treadwell will join children and families in exploring the wetlands, and there will be a display about how the European Union is helping to protect our environment – a timely reminder that communities and government institutions from the local to the supranational, must work together. Competition for progress is a myth – it is cooperation that is needed.

Summer Course

2010-07-20T02:20:00.000-07:00

For many months now Cabragh Wetlands have been ringing with the most important sound of all – that wonderful chorus of children delightfully absorbing this fascinating corner of the natural world. Michael Long and his team have brought the ooh-ah factor to hundreds of children throughout the early summer, while the recently held Summer Camp saw drawn-out, sunny dappled days go down a treat along the towering passages through the humongous reedbeds. While having fun, the children have also been learning ideas, values, skills and information that will help them adjust to living in a world facing great environmental changes and challenges.

On an adult level, this joy of limitless movement in the great outdoors turns to concern for the future of all “wildscapes”, and particularly their defining characteristic – their biodiversity. Maintaining the biodiversity of any natural habitat entails a good knowledge of those habitats, initially through personal experiences and hands-on approaches. When we come to understand how a natural habitat developed, its stunning variety and current threats to its viability, then we can work to ensure that this patchwork world of Irish nature survives and maybe flourishes for generations to come.

Increasing numbers of visitors are experiencing the magic of reedbed, wet meadow, hedgerow and pond at Cabragh. This year in the last week of July an introductory course about Tipperary’s varied habitats takes place at Cabragh Wetland Centre, Monday to Friday, 9am to 2pm July 26th to 30th. The course is entitled “A Handful of Habitats” and is targeted at adults who enjoy the varied world of Irish nature. It will also be enjoyed by Primary School teachers who want to develop their confidence and expertise to take children out of the classroom and into the real world, and also older teenagers who might wish to add to their store of knowledge of the natural world, perhaps in preparation for their science certificate examinations. Tourists will also be very welcome.

Wherever you are coming from, your time at Cabragh in the last week of July be of great benefit and is “probably the best staycation” around! The course costs €60 and will be led by local teacher, naturalist and heritage expert Jimmy Duggan. For details phone 0504-23831 or 087-7567273.

Nettles

2010-07-20T02:19:00.001-07:00

Of course many people had a good moan, but hasn’t the rain been fantastic over the last week? Getting deep into the ground, it has revived the struggling roots of many plants, from hedges, trees and grass to flowers, fruit and vegetables. The spuds have really perked up. Rivers were running very low and it’s been a blessing to have several downpours. Sorry if your tan has lost its edge, but after months of sunshine, rain is unequivocally good weather – just ask those who live near the world’s expanding deserts.

Being confined indoors for most of July, I was taken aback to see how much the nettles have grown recently – in part due to the rain, of course. This is a much maligned plant, which most of us are only too keen to chop down and rip out of our gardens. It is as important a plant as you will find for the conservation of Ireland’s butterflies, and it is getting close to the time of year when most butterflies will emerge from their chrysalis stage to adorn our gardens and countryside. Their habitat needs protection, and that means looking after your nettles. Nettles are the solitary food plant for the larvae of three major butterfly species, the Small Tortoiseshell, the Red Admiral and the Peacock, and are a major food source for the Painted Lady, which you may remember arrived in Ireland in unusually great numbers last summer. Please allow a patch of nettles to grow somewhere on your land, and cut it back now so that new growth can come through for a second brood of butterflies.

So what if the hairs of nettle leaves secrete a liquid containing formic that causes a few tingles, if you are careless enough to brush your skin against it? Remember the old saying: “A little bit of pain never hurt anyone!” This is a seriously valuable plant. What we eat is largely a combination of fashion and food company policy – they select the vegetables and seed types that we use, giving us a choice from a mere handful of options, while Nature has tens of thousands of varieties that are mostly ignored. Fresh young nettles can be picked and cooked like spinach, chopped nettles make great liquid manures and organic pest deterrents, nettle seeds mixed with mash induce hens to lay more. Many homeopathic remedies pick up on age old folk-wisdom which used nettle to help cure eczema, cramps, anaemia, dropsy, diabetes, diarrhoea, urinary problems and rheumatism – and even dandruff and baldness. Throw young nettles (without roots and seeds) on your compost heap – they are nitrogen-rich and their long root systems draw in much goodness from deep in the ground – more green manure.

I heard a familiar yet out of place sound yesterday, a solitary buzzy-bellow that spread hauntingly across the fields on the edge of Holycross. Could this be a lone specimen of a southern African species that normally lives in huge flocks, enjoys human company and displays with memorably vibrant tones? Despite scanning the area with binoculars, there was no sign of its instantly recognizable long streamlined body and bulbous head, but one must have migrated from the southern hemisphere, perhaps smuggled in a tourist’s luggage. Yes, the first vuvuzela has arrived in Tipperary. No doubt many more will be in the pet shops in the coming months. Now there’s another use for a large patch of nettles – just chuck the vuvuzela into it.

June on the River Suir

2010-06-22T02:50:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to George Willoughby for this beautiful video
http://www.thurles.info/2010/06/20/river-suir-water-lilies-and-mute-swans/

June On The River Suir, Thurles, Co Tipperary, Ireland. from George Willoughby on Vimeo.

Tigers and Whales

2010-06-18T09:41:00.000-07:00

It is hard to find words to describe the anger felt when reading about the continued slaughter of two of the most iconic species on the planet. There are apparently only about 1400 wild tigers left in India today. Between 1800 and 1950 something like 160,000 were shot by virile, trophy hunting big game hunters, with numbers reduced to around 40,000 by 1900, and by 1972 down to just 1,800. Hunting, felling of forest habitat for timber and encroachment of ever growing human populations into precious wild areas, brought this beautiful animal to extinction in some parts of India, as well as in Java and Sumatra.

The Indian government in the 1980’s stopped the export of tiger skins, but they still fetch €28,000 on the Tibetan black market, and the demand for tiger body parts for traditional Chinese medicine and aphrodisiacs has been met by the rise of poaching. To preserve the skin, trapped tigers were sometimes killed by the insertion of a red hot poker into the anus. Protection boosted numbers to about 4,000, but standards slipped, more habitat was lost and although tiger tourism boosted income for conservation, it created more problems with tourist vehicles disorienting and killing animals, and continued growth of human habitation to support the tourist trade. Two Indian tiger sanctuaries now have no tigers. At least 12 have been killed by poachers this year already. As numbers fall, so it gets harder to avoid in-breeding and genetic decline.

Now the Sunday Times has exposed the extent of whale hunting over the last few years, at a time when there was meant to be a moratorium. Tens of thousands have been slaughtered, and it seems as if the ban on hunting will be lifted, with certain wealthy whaling countries using dubious financial inducements (including offers to build valuable infrastructure) in third world countries to buy their vote to overturn the embargo.

Man claims to be rational, but it beats me how any sane person can justify or tolerate this sort of extermination of our fellow creatures. Of course species die out, but by natural processes over tens of thousands of years, not by the deliberate action of a deluded self-important branch of the great ape family who has decided over the course of a mere 5,000 years and 200 generations that we humans are more important than anything else. What we are dealing with is not human rationality, but human mass hysteria, and human alienation from the natural world which produced and nurtured our species. We no longer seem to know who or what we are.

There is an urgent need for us to think. Ideas matter. Human rationality requires thought, reflection and silence. Education needs to move on from teaching children how to find an appropriate role in human society, and to start to focus instead on understanding the place and nature of human society within the framework of the natural world.

Thank You!

2010-06-15T13:50:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to the good citizens of Thurles who gave so generously to the Cabragh Wetlands Church Gate Collection at the end of May. The total raised was beyond our expectations, and remarkable given the current economic climate when so many of us are having to tighten our financial drawstrings. We take it to mean that the local community supports and appreciates what we are trying to do at Cabragh, and that environmental issues are steadily becoming more important in public debate and education.

This is just as well, because climate change science has taken a bit of a battering in the press in recent months. We are indebted to Nenagh-based Father Sean McDonagh, a prolific writer on environmental issues, for a recent e-mail containing his latest thoughts on the issue. He points out that in the last year global temperature has been the warmest on record, despite the obvious contradiction that China, Europe and North America had a very cold winter in 2009-2010 (our coldest in 47 years). He cites NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen (mentor of Al Gore), who reports that data from 6,300 monitoring stations around the world show that the mean surface temperature was 0.65 degrees Celsius warmer in the year April 2009-April 2010 than the period 1951 to 1980.

Those childishly petulant private e-mails at the University of East Anglia damaged the climate change cause, as did overly pessimistic UN reports that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by the middle of this century. But the glaciers are still melting away; if they survive a century longer than predicted, say to 2165, the message is still the same. The planet is warming; the science is overwhelming. Predictions about the precise rate of change will always be predictions, and thus subject to doubt and imprecision. As a result of a well-organized campaign by climate change sceptics, a growing number of people think that global warming is not happening. Remember that climate and weather are not the same thing. Weather is what hits us locally day after day, with wide ranging temperatures and varied rainfall. Climate is the long-term global trend, which is demonstrably and inexorably getting hotter.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association reports that the first four months of 2010 were the hottest ever recorded, with record temperatures in North Africa, Canada and South Asia. In India and Pakistan temperatures have reached 47 degrees Celsius (116 Fahrenheit). On June 1st 2010 the mercury hit 53.7 Celsius in the Indus valley, the fourth highest ever recorded on Earth. In Baghdad there have been several days of over 50 degrees Celsius. People in northern India are dying from heat-related illnesses. Lake Tanganyika is at its hottest for 1500 years, threatening both fish stocks and the fishing industry on which many depend. You will not find many doubters about climate change in these parts of the world, nor in the Pacific Ocean, where they are watching rising levels remorselessly engulf their homes, and the evacuation of the Carteret Islands continues as the land is submerged.

Average ocean temperatures in the Atlantic and Caribbean are at their highest since records began in 1880 and scientists predict a very active hurricane season with 8 to 14 expected, half “major storms”. We may yet see that Gulf oil landing on Irish coasts as it is washed into the Atlantic tidal streams. Raw oil pollution seems an apt punishment for a problem largely caused by our fossil fuel usage. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

As Monday 21st of June will be the longest day of the year, there will be a celebration of the Summer Solstice at Cabragh Wetlands at 8.00pm.

Water and Toilets

2010-06-07T14:03:00.000-07:00

There will be a great chance for you to fine-tune your composting skills this Saturday, 12th June, when a Home Composting Seminar will be presented in Holycross. The event will be lead by Aine Madigan, who is Education Officer for the Peat Council of Ireland. The event starts at 2.00pm, and will be in the Riverside Park, Holycross opposite the Old Abbey Inn. Following Aine’s presentation, local environmentalist and Tipperary Institute graduate, Joe Bourke, will give an overview of biodiversity.

I enjoyed the article in last week’s Star about the great work going on at the new Cabragh allotments, and in particular the launch of the new ladies’ powder room, or compost toilet to give it a more realistic name. Apparently some leading figures were asked recently on television what the most important technological advance was in the last couple of centuries, and the immediate reply was ….the flushing toilet. This was the invention of Thomas Crapper, and there’s no need to explain how his name has been immortalized. Imagine what life might be like if it were not for this simple device, so central to all our daily lives.

In a number of African counties (Uganda and Rwanda from memory) plastic bags are banned because they were being used as toilets and then flung away – locally known as flying toilets. This foul brew would lie on the ground without decomposing, the plastic stopping water and light getting through to the ground below, eventually killing off the fertility of large areas of ground as fetid, stinking, disease-infested swamps were created around human habitation. As human populations mushroom and urban areas sprawl without planning and essential infrastructure to get fresh water in and sewerage out, so there is a growing risk to human wellbeing and a threat to healthy habitats for biodiversity.

In The Humanure Handbook Joseph Jenkins makes the case for going back to composting toilets, exhaustively studying the benefits of composting rather than flushing our faeces down the loo. Water is such a precious resource. Over 95% of the Earth’s water is in the oceans; about 2.5% is fresh, and most of that is locked up as ice in Antarctica and the Arctic. About 1% of the planet’s fresh water is available for our use, which amounts to 0.01% of the world’s total water supply. And yet every day 40% of the water you and I use is simply flushed down the toilet.

What a waste of such a precious resource. Furthermore the majority of private sceptic tanks do not work properly, so that much flushed water resurfaces to contaminate ground water. Jenkins suggests that this is the biggest cause of groundwater pollution in the USA, and goes on to argue that it is possible to treat human faeces in a safe and healthy way. What has always been seen as a foul pollutant can be a resource to be cherished. Composted human waste can become a valuable fertilizer for growing more food.

I yield to none in giving thanks to Mr Crapper for his life’s work, but maybe it is time to move on to less wasteful systems of waste disposal and save more water. It takes 130 pints of water to make a pint of beer and several more to flush it away. We can do better than that.

Willow trees

2010-06-07T13:59:00.000-07:00

At Cabragh Wetlands the mallard parents are doing their very best to keep their ducklings alive, but inevitably some predator has taken a few of the brood. The yellow flag iris is flowering, lilies are developing on the surface of the pond, tadpoles are getting ever-closer to maturity, and the welcome recent rain means that our walkways are in need of regular mowing to keep them open. Perhaps surprisingly the birds are getting quieter, but you can put this down to parental exhaustion after weeks of nest-building, egg-sitting and chick-feeding.

A stroll around those walkways will bring you to the small river from Killough Hill which feeds into Cabragh the pure water which has done so much to sustain the exceptional biodiversity of the wetland habitat. There are about 400 known species of willow, with more expected to be identified when the botanists manage to do systematic research in western China. Willows are widespread in the northern hemisphere, but very rare in the south (like oaks). Each region has developed its own subspecies, as populations of trees have evolved in relative isolation, and even for the experts identification is a real challenge. Nearly all willows have male and female as separate plants; they produce catkins and rely on the wind or insects for pollination. Seeds are tufted and float on the wind.

Few plants have been as widely used by man. Osiers (the thin twigs) have of course long been grown in wetland areas and used for basket-weaving, but also for boats like the coracle and for hurdles and walls, while larger timbers have been used in the building industry. Today it has great potential as a fuel, with many seeing it as an invaluable biomass to supply energy without worsening the problem of global warming. Willow bark also has traditional medical value; it is rich in salicin, which is the core molecule of salicylic acid, from which aspirin was developed. So from willow a painkiller and anti-inflammatory was developed, and is used today (but don’t take it without appropriate expert advice!) to reduce the risk of blood clotting and thrombosis.

With so many plants out there waiting to be researched, who knows what benefits have yet to be unearthed? All species matter.

The Burren

2010-06-07T13:55:00.000-07:00

How nice to receive a letter from a Cabragh member who recently went on an outing to the Burren organised by Bird Watch Ireland. It was one of those lovely sunny Sundays in May and not only did they hear that rare visitor, the cuckoo, but they also saw it. A personal thrill was to come across a group of newts in a small pool. At first movement in the pond weed seemed to be caused by tadpoles, but slowly the newts ventured into clear water to feed on surface insects. What a delight it was to see a group of these beautiful creatures in a pristine habitat, simply getting on with their lives.

The number of habitats in the Burren is amazing, and they support an equally impressive variety of life. Our visitor became very aware that if we can but maintain the range of existing habitats, then the cycle of life will continue to flow quite naturally. Be it a flower, insect or bird, if there are suitable places to live, then they will find them and take occupation.

In conversation on the bus, a fellow traveller pointed out that while he has installed a solid fuel stove in his house, he tries to avoid burning turf. You would think that he laudably wanted to reduce his CO2 emissions, but he went on to explain that when the bog is stripped for turf cutting we destroy valuable habitat. There it is again. We don’t need to teach survival skills to the birds and the bees, but we should leave them a place to live.

This beautiful Earth of ours has worked out many difficulties over eons of time. It has created numerous communities of life which inter-connect and inter-depend in extraordinary ways. We too exist within this precious web, and are invited to play our part.

Come out to Cabragh Wetlands, where the walkways are drying out, the ducklings and young swans are enjoying their first dabblings in the ponds, the shimmering blue of the dragonflies can be seen darting over the water and in the reeds, and the summer snowflake will still be looking magnificent for a few more days in this wonderful spell of weather. We won’t claim to match the Burren, but there are many wonderful things to see right on the edge of Thurles

Marsh Harrier Returns to the Wetlands

2010-05-13T14:45:00.000-07:00

Word spread quickly last week that a rare visitor was spending a day at Cabragh Wetlands. The Eurasian marsh harrier was once a very familiar sight in Ireland and Britain, with the Victorian folk lore writer Charles Swainson reporting an old story that considerable numbers of harriers would land on the Wiltshire downs before heavy rain. Victorian hunters, egg and skin collectors raided nests and shot them out of the sky. Agro-chemicals and drainage of fenland habitat caused more problems, with organochloride pesticides wrecking attempts to re-establish numbers in the 1950’s and 60’s. By the 1970’s there was just one breeding pair in the west of Britain and one at the great Suffolk nature reserve at Minsmere, which is perfect harrier reedbed habitat. Many books published before the end of the millennium did not even record the marsh harrier as a resident of or visitor to Ireland.

Reduction in chemical use allowed numbers to grow at about 20% per year, and by 2000 there were 206 breeeding females spread from Kent to the Orkneys, with individuals crossing the Irish Sea. With luck a success story is developing.

Marsh harriers are the biggest and heaviest of the harriers, with the male about 50cm long and the female larger. She has a brown body and wings with a pale yellowish head, throat and forewing. It was a male that visited Cabragh, magnificently photographed by Eamonn Brennan, who captured its pale body, head and wings as it spent some time investigating our owl box atop a telephone pole. Most impressive were the great reddish-brown shadings on his wings. Old Irish names include Duck Hawk and Snipe Hawk, which reflect the lifestyle of the marsh harrier as he glides over reedbeds and wetlands searching for prey.

The marsh harrier is not a fast-flying hunter. In fact he is master of slow flight, gliding silently over reedbeds at barely 10mph, giving himself every chance to spot mice, frogs, reptiles, eggs, nestlings and rodents that make up its varied diet. Like the owl, marsh harriers have keen hearing, with facial feathers hiding large ear openings which help it to funnel sound and improve ability to detect prey in thick reedbeds. Nests are a mass of reeds and willow twigs, lined with grass and containing four or five eggs, which the female incubates for 36 days, with the male feeding them for another 40 before the young fly. Resident harriers spend winters in communal roosts on wetland sites.

It was a real pleasure to have a migratory marsh harrier at Cabragh for a day. Perhaps they will nest here in the future, though our ducks, snipe, frogs and mice will have to be on their guard.

Swallows

2010-04-29T06:44:00.001-07:00

All members of Cabragh Wetlands Trust are reminded that the AGM will take place at the Wetlands Centre this coming Tuesday, May 4th, starting promptly at 8.00pm. As always, this is a very important time for communication between the Committee and the membership, and as a local community-based organization, the Trust welcomes the chance to update members on the plans to renovate the Centre and the ever-growing education programme, as well as our core work of conservation of habitat and bio-diversity.

With spring well on the way, the rain over the weekend was very welcome, easing the task of digging the vegetable patch and watering the new crops. Gardeners at the newly inaugurated Cabragh organic allotments have been out in force preparing the ground for their first growing season. The sight of swallows arriving has certainly gladdened the hearts of many of us – is there a more graceful sight in nature than the gliding-swooping flight of the swallow? One almost feels that telegraph wires were made for them to sit and survey the world beneath.

After wintering in southern Africa, the swallows have flown 6,000 miles or more to return to their breeding grounds. Most adults will go to the same locality year after year, so you really are welcoming back old friends. They tend to build their nests on ledges on top of walls or against roof beams, and may well use exactly the same nest for many years, upgrading it with fresh mud and straw so that it is secured with architectural precision. Ornithologists conclude that swallows were originally cave nesters, and began to move to man-made structures when human construction began in the Tigris-Euphrates valleys some 10,000 years ago. They love to nest under bridges, recreating their ancestral caving instinct, and nests have been found several metres underground in old mine shafts. Last week Kevin Collins showed us a remarkable picture of a swallow’s nest at his house that contained 17 tiny wrens, crammed into it for shelter on one of the coldest nights of the recent freezing winter.

Swallows play a major role in keeping insect populations under control, catching them in flight. Often they live around busy farms and are known to follow farm machinery, no doubt because the activity will disturb insects like aphids, flies and bluebottles, driving them into the air for the swallows to seize. Their natural habitat is that invisible space hanging over the earth up to about 500 feet in height; as they fly lower than house martins and swifts, swallows are more susceptible to pollution and pesticides and are consequently declining in numbers compared to their close cousins. They will often drink on the wing, gliding open-beaked over a pond and swooping low to scoop up a mouthful of refreshment. In late summer and autumn places like Cabragh Wetlands provide reedbed roosts where hundreds of swallows may gather before migrating in mid-September.

The good news is that Ireland’s population of swallows is holding up better than most, largely because of the relatively low use of pesticides and the preservation of a lot of ruined buildings. One man’s ruin is someone else’s niche habitat.

Starlings

2010-04-19T13:28:00.000-07:00

At Cabragh Wetlands we love the autumnal appearances of those huge flocks of hundreds of thousands of starlings, which swirl and sweep across the evening sky in massive grey-black clouds before settling into the reedbeds to roost for the night. But at this time of year we see a different side of this little fellow, as they busily set about nesting and breeding.

They love to build their nests in the eaves of our houses, landing on the guttering and finding gaps up into the roof space through which they can squeeze. For weeks now our garden has been festooned with little yellow tufts of soft material, like cotton wool. This is (or was) our precious roof insulation, dragged out and casually tossed away by the fussy starlings, who work very hard to clear out unwanted debris and create a nest as soft and clean as they can manage. A few days ago a skeleton appeared on the lawn, the dessicated remains of one of last year’s brood that did not survive infancy. Thrown out of the nest to create space for the class of 2010 and stripped of everything unpleasant, the bones now make an interesting exhibit for children to study on visits to Cabragh.

With its speckled feathers glinting in the sun, the starling is a truly beautiful bird. In summer and autumn a purple plumage on the chest makes him even more impressive, especially if you can put up with the noise. Almost from hatching they hold forth with a variety of indescribable noises, clicking, gurgling and whistling but never managing the mellifluous sounds of the blackbird or thrush. They are also great mimics, not least of human sounds. They have been known to imitate cats, frogs, owls and chickens; at least one dog has been driven mad as it dutifully tried to respond to its owner’s whistle, and people have rushed indoors to answer phones that weren’t ringing. Nowadays mobile ring tones are a favourite. Mozart’s pet starling is supposed to have inspired his G-major Piano Concerto, and certainly Mozart and the starling share a reputation for being brash, aggressive and generally obnoxious.

They are considered dirty and unhealthy (she-who-has-to-clean-the-windows would agree), but are good friends of sheep, pecking off ovine ticks in their fleece. The sites where they roost in the autumn can be devastated, vegetation broken down and killed by acidic guano from vast numbers of individuals answering the call of nature; in such death and decay mould and fungi flourish. Introduced to North America in the 1890’s, they are regarded there as a serious and invasive pest, with millions of dollars spent trying to eradicate them from Alaska to Mexico. In contrast the Russians love them, seeing them as a friend of the farmer (think of the number of insects a large flock will eat) and the harbinger of spring. Under the communists, the state provided 22.5 million nestboxes to encourage starlings, with children given school projects to record their usage.

The collective noun for a flock of starlings is a “murmuration”, which memorably evokes the sweeping rhythm of a million starlings on the wing, but certainly not the raucous cacophony coming from our roof spaces at this time of year.

Frogs

2010-04-06T09:17:00.000-07:00

A year ago the papers were publishing alarming stories about the plight of the world’s frog populations, reporting that many species were under threat and not producing enough healthy young to guarantee their long term viability. That may still be the case, but it is great to report that here at Cabragh Wetlands our frogs seem to be in very robust and noisy good health.

Our artist-in-residence, Eamonn Brennan, has produced more wonderful pictures of frogs doing what comes naturally in late March as the weather warms up and spring gets underway. The females are laying huge quantities of eggs, and the males are busy fertilizing them at extraordinary rates – up to 4,000 each. Areas of the wetlands are alive with small bodies piled on top of each other, with pools of frogspawn spreading around. The air is filled with a cacophony of croaking as the males try to find a female partner.

This of course is one the best known signs of spring, and most of us will remember as children collecting frogspawn in a jam jar and studying the life-cycle of the frog by watching the eggs turn into wriggly tadpoles. It can almost be seen as one of those childhood rites of passage, an event which takes us out of the narrow cocoon of the family and introduces us to the wonder, beauty and variety of the natural world. How many of you remember that the frog begins as a fish-like creature, breathing through gills in its tadpole stage, before growing a tail and legs? In an amazing transformation it then abandons its gills by growing lungs and breathing like a land-based animal before emerging tailless as a fully mature frog.

Here at Cabragh Wetlands we are in a great position to give children the chance to study this sort of process at first hand, rather than from an indoor textbook lesson, computer screen or newspaper article. Children will love learning out in the middle of nature. If you can, get in touch and arrange a visit for your school or group. We can be contacted on 050443879 (mornings) or via e-mail at cabraghwetlands@eircom.net. Give the kids a chance to experience those tadpoles and frogs in their natural environment.

Furze

2010-03-28T10:05:00.000-07:00

There is a fresh feeling to the countryside this week. Much needed rain is putting a touch of green back into the yellow-brown grass and the daffodils are beginning to open out, giving a wonderful golden-yellow display in our gardens to supplement the still-flowering remnants of snowdrops and crocus. Spring is here. Of all the plants of spring, my own favourite is one that barely gets a mention in most gardening and flower books – the spiky furze, or gorse.

We cultivate broom, its less dangerous cousin, which fits nicely into any sizeable country garden as well as colonizing wild areas, but you can be sure there would be vociferous objections from many in the family if you tried to introduce clumps of furze with its long branches covered in sharp-spined thorns. So the poor old furze tends to be an outcast, left on the edge of civilization, flourishing only in wild heathland, open grassy areas high up in hill country with only a few sheep and cattle for company. But what a magnificent display it provides at this time of year. As the road from Thurles to Nenagh climbs higher, the landscape from the Devil’s Bit across to the hills beyond Templederry is ablaze in a fiery yellow swathe as the furze flowers in its wild beauty.

It makes wonderful cover for wildlife. Canoeing on a lake one day, we enjoyed great views of a fleeing fox with hounds and huntsmen in close pursuit. Large patches of furze sprouted across the open moorland; the fox ducked into one for a few minutes’ rest, and then slipped unseen to the next while the dogs gathered on the perimeter of the first, apparently intimidated by the ferocity of the bristling spikes on the furze. For the best part of an hour the fox toyed with its pursuers, who could never quite pin down where it was hiding (we were not going to tell them) as it moved from cover to cover before eventually escaping to live another day.

Furze is a reminder of the natural wildness in the environment, helping us remember that our cultivated farms and gardens are all unnatural creations of the last few thousand years, and that the plants we grow for food and beauty are almost all bred by man from original species that slowly evolved over countless millennia.

Linnaeus the great Swedish naturalist visited Britain in the 1730’s and is supposed to have fallen on his knees and given thanks to God when he saw his first furze-covered common, so overcome was he by the sheer beauty of the scene.

So enjoy the furze, which will flower for most of the year and will give the bees an early source of pollen. If you make your own wine, gather its flowers and you will find it makes a wonderful, fragrant dry white. Use the plant to reconnect with untamed nature. Walk around Cabragh Wetlands and you will find a number of bushes; note that the flowers grow from leaf nodes and smell of cocnut. And you may enjoy putting that wonderful old saying to the test – “When furze is in blossom, kissing’s in season”.

A Lecture on Soil

2010-03-16T12:37:00.000-07:00

Cabragh Wetlands is getting down to the basics at its next evening talk on Tuesday 23rd March starting at 8.00pm. The speaker is Stella Coffey, an organic farmer from Cahir; she has a BSc in Biological Sciences and her subject is “The Wonder of Soil”. This is a topic that most people will recognise as being of prime importance, especially for those interested in the quality of the food they put on the family table and in sustaining healthy biodiversity. Stella has one of the oldest organically certified herds (of Aberdeen Angus cattle) in the country. If you value the health of your garden, are starting out on a new allotment, enjoy the fruits of the Farmers’ Market or are concerned about the state of farming and use of chemicals on the land, then this is a key evening for you to attend. All are welcome and entry is free.

At the heart of any consideration about the health of our soil is that most undervalued of creatures, the humble earthworm. Though surrounded at home and Cabragh by books on wildlife, it is alarming that so many contain no indexed references to this crucial little fellow. The normal public reaction to a wriggly worm is almost invariably one of disgust, and total failure to recognize the key role played by worms in the development of life on earth. The sprawling compost heaps in my garden are a constant source of fascination. They act as breeding grounds for worms, which live in their thousands, eating their way through remains of plants and other biodegradables thrown on the heap. Material passes through the body of the worm, is cast out and gradually transformed by the action of bacteria into humus, that essential ingredient of fertile soil.

In a day a single worm will eat about a third of its bodyweight, well under a teaspoonful. Insignificant on one level, but on another perhaps the most important day-to-day activity on the planet. Every ounce of organic vegetable mould has passed through the body of worms many, many times. Worms alter the composition of the soil, improving its ability to absorb and contain moisture, changing the balance of microorganisms and nutrients. Through these processes they determine the ability of soil to grow particular kinds of plants, thus playing a key role in deciding which plants grow above the surface of the earth, and in turn influencing the type of insects, mammals and birds that can evolve and live in any area.

The worm moves through the ground, eating tiny particles of decaying organic material, which it ingests with a few grains of clay, creating a permanent burrow. At night it comes to the surface, leaves a few milligrams of castings and then searches for new material (leaves, grass, anything organic) to drag underground and break up. As well as acting as a miniscule plough, worms will, piece by tiny piece, shape the landscape above the surface, burying items left on the ground. That key you dropped, those stones you flung in a corner of the garden, that path you laid, all will be buried by the action of worms. Given enough time and enough worms, collapsed houses, towns and whole civilizations will disappear under the ground. Is it an illusion that things sink below the surface? Surely worms are causing the level of the surface to rise? Archaeologists having to dig down several feet to find their lost treasures are surely clear evidence of the unlimited power of the humble earthworm to shape the landscape above.

Charles Darwin spent his last years studying and writing about worms. This most humble of creatures has a strong case to be considered the most important and indispensable creature on the planet. There can be no doubt that it plays a far more important role in sustaining life on earth than humans. Come to Cabragh Wetlands on Tuesday 23rd to reflect more on “The Wonder of Soil”.

Biofuels

2010-03-05T00:34:00.000-08:00

As part of a vast raft of ideas to reduce carbon emissions and greenhouse gases, stop global warming and save whatever we can of the huge range of life on earth, the European Community is legally committed to ensuring that a steadily increasing proportion of petrol and diesel used in road transport is sourced from renewable sources. This will mean more electric vehicles, but most (it is anticipated) will come from plant-based bio-fuels, including soy, sugarcane, rapeseed and palm oil. The advantage of plants grown for fuel is that they are renewable year-by-year, and that each litre of green biofuel burnt will reduce carbon emissions by 35% compared with a litre of traditional fossil fuel (coal, oil).

This sounds wonderful, but inevitably problems are emerging. The fuel-crops mentioned above are mostly tropical plants, and palm oil (apparently the most efficient for biofuels) can only be grown in regions like Indonesia and south-east Asia, west Africa, Brazil and the Amazon rain forest. To grow crops for biofuels to reduce greenhouse emissions, rainforests are being cut down at a frightening rate – rainforests which soak up carbon dioxide emissions as they grow. To meet desirable emission targets in Ireland, Britain and the EU, millions of acres of pristine forest are being logged, burned and converted to palm oil plantations. In Indonesia alone an area the size of Wales is being deforested every year. The orang-utan, one of our closest relatives, has been driven to the verge of extinction in Sumatra, and the survival of many tropical species of plants, insects, animals and birds is in doubt, including species only recently discovered – and probably others that we have yet to find and study.

We are now at the stage when studies are emerging which suggest that it is better to burn oil in your car than green biofuel, because of the environmental cost of producing palm oil, which is directly causing an acceleration of the loss of rainforest habitat. Burning rainforest releases greenhouse gases and reduces Earth’s natural ability to soak up carbon dioxide. A Danish study says that it would take 75-93 years for the benefits to the climate created by switching from fossil to biofuels outweigh the terrible damage caused by converting tropical forest to palm oil plantations. Apparently it will take 840 years for a palm oil plantation to soak up the carbon emitted from trees and soil by clearing forest to plant the crop.

This is a problem of horrible complexity. What is becoming clear is that palm oil is not likely to be a magical solution, despite massive lobbying by the multi-billion dollar business. Needless to say there is also evidence of corruption, violence and trampling on the rights of indigenous peoples. Can we ask those who are experts on these issues to share their expertise and perspectives with the general public? Are there crops that could be grown for fuel in the Irish climate? Certainly our farmers seem to open to chances to diversify with traditional agriculture struggling at the moment.

Birds

2010-02-27T02:09:00.000-08:00

So many good people have devoted a lot of time and money to feeding the birds during this very cold winter. Whether helping the birds in your garden or feeding the ducks at your local pond, everyone deserves praise for their generous efforts. Now, with spring surely just a few weeks away, can we ask you to help out again? This is the ideal time for getting your nestboxes sorted.

With older rough-walled buildings gradually disappearing from the countryside and walls, hedges and woodlands all under a bit of pressure, anything we can do in our gardens to help the local birds to build nests, sit on their eggs and raise a brood of chicks is to be welcomed. Garden centres and pet shops are obvious places to look for commercially designed birdhouses, but if you fancy making your own, drop by the Cabragh Wetland Centre one morning and I am sure someone will find you an easy design to take home.

Make sure you get boxes that are suitable for the birds in your neighbourhood – some are very specialist and may be designed to be attached high on the wall of a house. If you have space and can put up several boxes, then get a variety of types. A box with a small hole in the front will attract garden regulars like tits, sparrows and nuthatches, and if the hole is larger then bigger birds like starlings will take over. This sort of box can be placed in a hedge, attached to a tree or secured to the wall of your house or shed.

Robins, wrens and pied wagtails do not normally nest in holes, so a small, open fronted box is better for them. House martins and swifts like to nest in communities tucked up under the rafters of your roof, so two boxes near each other is desirable.

Placement is crucial. Think about predators in your area. Cats are so agile and climb so well that they are a huge threat to nests, so look for a site two to five metres high and well away from overhanging branches which might be a launch pad for your local puss. Do not put a perch under the entrance hole – it will make access easier for predators and also allow noisy house sparrows the chance to sit near the nest and upset the occupants, perhaps driving them away.

Another key issue is to face your box the right way. If you face it south or southwest, there is a danger of too much sun and wind getting into the heart of the nest, and this can dehydrate and kill the defenceless chicks. So north to east is the best direction for the opening. Another important tip is to keep nestboxes well away from the place where you feed the birds. Feeding sites will always be very busy, with noise, squabbling and a lot of species very active, all of which will discourage parents from choosing a nesting site nearby.

There are a lot of things to bear in mind, not least trying to ensure that you are rewarded for your community spirit by having a good view of nesting sites. So act now to get boxes up, and do drop in to Cabragh Wetlands Centre or contact us by e-mail (cabraghwetlands@eircom.net) if you want more advice.

Squirrels & Pine Martens

2010-02-12T03:38:00.000-08:00

There are advertisements in the Shinrone area asking for information about red and grey squirrels and the elusive pine marten. A group is trying to collate information about these three species, of which two might be considered native to Ireland. The story is well-enough known. Red squirrels thrived here for centuries, but have been under threat ever since their grey cousins were introduced from America. Gradually the reds have been pushed back, clinging to ever smaller pockets of territory while the more aggressive greys expanded their range and took over the prime sites. It is hoped that the Shannon will provide some sort of barrier to the western spread of the greys, but by and large the outlook for the red squirrel is not good.

Now it seems as if the pine marten may be helping to restore some sort of balance. Its numbers are rising and they are serial hunters of grey squirrels, providing a much-needed natural predator to keep numbers under control. Information is sought from people who have seen all three species living, and hence interacting, in the same neighbourhood.

Squirrels are rodents, of which there are about 2,000 known species, including rats, mice, marmots, prairie dogs, beavers, voles and moles. About 40% of mammals are rodents and they are some of the most successful breeders and colonisers on the planet, moving in to just about every habitat you can think of. Red squirrels are among the most endearing. They make a nest or “drey” and are imperfect and erratic hibernators, driven inside to sleep only in severe weather. They rarely spend the whole winter in a state of coma, but will often pop out to look for nuts they have buried in their winter store.

Squirrels hurriedly dig shallow holes, in which they will deposit a nut, usually hazel nuts or acorns. The process is haphazard and unmethodical, and there is no reason to suppose that they ever recover more than a small proportion of what they have buried. This is almost certainly a major reason why oak trees tend to grow in unexpected places (along with the less pleasant bowel habits of horses and pigs). Our squirrel will smooth the soil over the hastily buried nuts, and then moves on to a new site until a vast store is laid down throughout the woodland to see him through the coming winter.

The more aggressive grey squirrels are an alien introduction from America, and they lack the plumed ears, grace and fascination of our native reds. They have gained a bad reputation as thieves, snatching what they can from bird tables and birds’ nests. They have been remarkably successful in spreading far and wide across Ireland, and once they move into an area, you will not see much of the downtrodden reds.

The pine marten is a handsome cat-like creature. They are mustelids, related to badgers, otters, mink and weasel. Pine marten numbers were driven to the brink of extinction because of the cutting down of forests and woodland. They are by nature arboreal (tree-dwelling) but have been forced to ground level and have learned to adapt by taking on a totally new way of life. This tree loving beast of the old woodlands and pine forests is now a raider of hen houses and underground hunter. Ducks, hens, rabbits and rats are all favourites of this highly carnivorous hunter. Nothing is safe from them. They will search the tree canopy for nests and eggs, burrow into rabbit holes, grab fish, frogs, newts and lizards out of streams and ponds. Insects and berries are also favourites.

Reafforestation has played a major part in the growth of pine marten populations in Ireland and Scotland. Legal changes give them much needed protection, not least by stopping the use of the terrible gin traps that were once far too common in the countryside and nearly exterminated this much needed predator. Nature needs a balance of species, and a flourishing pine marten population will help to control rats and grey squirrels. If you can provide information about these three species, contact us at Cabragh Wetlands and we will pass it on - cabraghwetlands@eircom.net, or telephone 0504-43879. Visit our website at www.cabraghwetlands,ie.

Using our Earth wisely

2010-02-04T12:55:00.000-08:00

In 2005 the United Nations published a landmark study called the ‘Millennium Ecosystem Assessment’ It stated that ‘everyone in the world depends completely on Earth’s ecosystems for food, water, disease management, climate regulation, spiritual fulfilment and aesthetic enjoyment’. While that may seem obvious, our behaviour sometimes appears to put the earth’s systems under unreasonable strain. Our extractive economy is stretching the resilience of the planet’s resources to near breaking point. So to be reminded that we all depend completely on our earth’s systems does make sense.

The study found that we are using 60% of available resources unsustainably, notably fresh water and marine fisheries, and it concluded ‘over the past 50 years humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fibre and fuel.’

This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on earth. The distinguished primatologist Jane Goodall has written recently that mankind is causing the sixth mass extermination of species in the history of the planet, and that it is probably unstoppable. So while one part of the UN study affirms that everyone (and everything) in the world depends completely on earth’s ecosystems, the same study is confirming that we are using these resources in an unsustainable way – indeed we destroying the life-support systems that created and support us.

We all have to budget in order to live. Imagine trying to run a house where the weekly shop is €300 and the weekly income is €200.Soon enough action would have to be taken to balance the books.

The bigger budget of the earth is really no different. Currently we are using up what the planet can produce by September of each year. From then until December we are dipping into the earth’s reserves. Unless the deposit account is very large we all know we can only dip into it for so long. There are adjustments which we need to make and it is well within our capacity to respond. The first steps are to acknowledge that there is a problem and that business as usual is not an option for us or our children.

By putting our heads together and working together we can begin to work within earth’s budget, but we do need to give it our attention. That is what we are trying to encourage at Cabragh Wetlands. We encourage you to share your thoughts, offer your advice, respond to our efforts and to get involved. Thoughts for these articles will also be passed on and used whenever possible. Contact us via e-mail at cabraghwetlands@eircom.net and visit our website at www.cabraghwetlands.ie.

Water Rails

2010-01-26T03:22:00.000-08:00

The water rail is one of the most elusive birds, rarely seen but often heard by those who frequent secluded, marshy ground. If you want to see them, patience is a useful virtue. Photographers Eamonn Brennan and Joe Byrne spent many hours one Sunday in early January, waiting in the hide at Cabragh Wetlands for the shy little creature to walk into their camera lenses. Several times the bird was on the point of emerging, when something would scare him back into the undergrowth – perhaps a family walking round the ponds, or someone approaching the hide a little too noisily. With a sigh of resignation and infinite patience, Eamonn and Joe settled down to wait all over again and in the end were rewarded with fine pictures of this mysterious and secretive bird.

The water rail is closely related to the moorhen and coot family, with the very rare corncrake and bittern as cousins. It is slightly larger than a garden thrush, with a pointed red and black wader’s beak, long legs and toes, a tail cocked upwards like a wren, and a rather sideways-flattened body, which apparently makes it easier to escape into thickets of tangled grass. His back, head, wings and tail are sandy-brown, speckled black, while his flanks are striped black and white, and his chest ash-gray. Male and female are almost identical.

The call of the water rail is very hard to pin down. Its piercing cry has been likened to squealing piglets and “heart-rending and fearsome groans”, but they can also purr like a cat and croak like a frog. They buzz, grunt, screech and squeak, “their wheezy grunting (is) the sort of noise a hedgehog makes when grubbing in the dusk” and on occasion they can reverberate like a klaxon horn, or even sound “like a recalcitrant cork being repeatedly and forcefully drawn from a bottle”. For those of you still uncertain what it sounds like, this description should clarify things for you: “… incessantly uttered purring noise likened to the purring of a contented squirrel”. That’s clear, then!

The water rail is so elusive, that in effect he is routinely invisible. But where you have marshy ground, reed beds, sedge and ditches, there is every chance that they will thrive. The more tangled the undergrowth the better. Cabragh Wetlands are ideal for them, with perfect cover in the thick vegetation. Their movements have an almost rodent-like character as they scuttle into a thicket or drain. Their nests are normally deep in a sedge tussock or on watery vegetation, with seven to ten eggs laid in May and June. After three weeks of incubation by both parents, they hatch. If there is danger, the female has been known to carry her nestlings in her beak, one by one, to safety. The young can fly at about two months old.

In general they eat anything, using that long beak to dig out earthworms and catch small fish and crustacea, beetles, water boatmen, leeches, earwigs, watercress roots, seeds from grass and weeds. One was trained to jump for worms from the end of a fishing rod! They also eat caddis flies, which will not be popular if they finish off the two very rare species living in Cabragh Wetlands and nowhere else in Ireland! In weather as bad as we have experienced recently, they can be more obviously predatory. Nine bird species are known to be prey to the water rail. It has two methods of attack; firstly it will seize its victim and hold it under the water till it drowns, and secondly it will use that long slim beak as a sword, driving it through small victims like the wren and impaling them. Quail and greenfinch have been recorded as prey. It seems that this sort of aggression is so out of character that other birds do not anticipate an attack and thus are relatively easy victims.

A rare but very valued resident of Cabragh Wetlands, there are no more than a few thousand pairs of water rail in Ireland and Britain. We must preserve their habitats.

Cold Weather

2010-01-09T08:51:00.000-08:00

There is something special about this bitterly cold spell; it is the sort of winter that creates lifelong memories in the minds of children. Those of us of a certain age remember the great freeze of 1963, when the rivers froze over and ponds and lakes became skating rinks. Toboggans came out (how many own one today?), mass snowball fights replaced football on the school timetable until the snow became dangerously icy, spades were issued instead and we were sent to chip ice off roads and pavements. A colleague at work was recalling today how her father walked across the frozen surface of Lough Derg, and sea ice formed off the coast of Donegal. We have not quite reached those temperatures yet, but there is still plenty of time for snow to fall.

Here at Cabragh the ponds are covered in ice, and the ducks are very grateful for any food put out for them. If they can keep their feathers clean, healthy birds will cope well with these low temperatures. Have you noticed how large many of them seem at the moment? Their puffed-up feathers provide wonderful layers of insulation. Please do your best to keep feeding the birds – you will be rewarded with great entertainment around your bird table if the supply is regular and reliable.

Are your New Year resolutions still intact? We all have good intentions, but it is so easy to lapse. May we with humility suggest a few late but easily-kept resolutions for 2010?

1. Use the car less. See if you can phase out a few unnecessary car-miles by car-pooling to work or on the school run. Walk and cycle more.

2. Think about how you can save energy at home, perhaps by turning down the heating a degree or two and wearing an extra layer of clothing, insulating the loft more effectively, phasing out non-essential power-guzzling appliances.

3. Find out about alternative ways of heating and powering your home. Start yourself thinking about how best to replace your heating system with something more sustainable. What you have will not last for ever, and fossil-fuel systems will be very expensive in a few years.

4. Recycle more, and compost your organic waste. If you have young children, get them to take responsibility for some element of your environmental management.

5. Grow more food for your family. Pots and growbags will do the job if you lack garden space.

6. Look at your property and see what you can do to encourage wildlife and biodiversity. Certainly reduce chemical usage, (the frost will have killed off large numbers of slugs, so they will be less of a problem in 2010), and leave a few untidy areas - some rotting logs and a nettle patch would be ideal. Ask about which plants will attract friendly insects and birds.

If we all make small changes in our habits and lifestyles, and educate ourselves to think differently about the environment, it will make a difference to the future of the Earth.

Winter Visitors

2009-12-18T09:07:00.000-08:00

Our countryside is inundated with thousands of visitors flying in from the northern regions of continental Europe. These ‘tourists’ spread themselves in loose flocks over the greener fields and bushier hedges. They are known as the ‘winter thrushes’. Older people called them ‘siocáns’, meaning ‘the frost birds’ as their arrival coincides with a drop in temperatures and the beginning of the winter frosts, so this is the perfect week to give them a few moments’ thought. The siocán is actually a fieldfare - a bird somewhat bigger than a blackbird. The first sign of its arrival may well be the quick cackle of its flight call – sounding like ‘cack-cack-cack-cack’. This is delivered as it flies high above the tallest trees. It is a striking bird with a grey head and rump, dark brown back and wings, spotted breast and black tail and wingtips.

Its cousin the redwing is often the more numerous, traveling in large flocks and staying in close contact with each other. This smaller bird is very like a songthrush, but can be distinguished from it by the noticeable cream-coloured stripe above the eye. There is also a reddish patch under the wing which is very conspicuous in flight and which gives it its name. Even at night it can be identified as it flies overhead by its high pitched ‘tzeep’ call. Its Irish name is appropriately ‘deargán sneachta’ –or ‘the red snow bird’.

Neither of these thrushes breed here, but for the winter months watch out for them loosely scattered over the greener fields, hopping along and pausing now and again to pick up a tasty worm or other invertebrate. Fieldfare and redwing are often to be seen helping themselves to the bright red berries of hawthorn, yew and rowan. If you have had your eye on a beautiful sprig of holly flush with red berries for the Christmas decorations, only to go out one day and found it stripped bare, there is a good chance that the redwing or fieldfare have beaten you to it! They seem to be a lot more numerous this year. Their coming south equates to us heading off to the Riviera for a winter break!

May we at Cabragh Wetlands wish you all a very happy and peaceful Christmas, and take this chance to thank the many people who have supported our work over the course of the year.

Adaptation

2009-12-14T13:38:00.002-08:00

Fr. SeánMcDonagh SSC December 10, 2009.

Last year at the Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland, I wrote an article about the importance of prioritizing the Adaptation Fund in any overall climate agreement. I made the point that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the primary goal of the whole process. According to Article 2 of the UNFamework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) the ultimate goal of the Convention is to achieve the “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”.

However, it is important to remember that we are not talking about what may, or may not happen, in the future. In the 20th century average global temperatures increased by 0.74 degree Celsius, while sea-level rise, resulting from both the thermal expansion of the ocean and melting of ice across the globe, amounted to 17 cms. Even with a relatively small increase the Maldive Islands, several Small Islands states in the South Pacific and low-lying coastal nations such as Bangladesh, with lands surfaces barely a metre or two above sea level, would find that every storm and tidal surge represents a serious danger to human life. In fact, these areas may soon have to be abandoned by humans because they can no longer sustain human life.

So, Adaptation is designed to deal with the current and future casualties of climate change. From an ethical perspective it is about applying the moral principle that “the polluter must pay for the consequence of the pollution they cause.” Unless economically rich countries in Europe, North America, Japan, Australia and New Zealand and current major polluters such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa reduce greenhouse gas emissions within the next decade, then catastrophic climate change is almost inevitable and it will affect the poor more severely. Because Columbans are missionaries, much of our work on Climate Change is focused on the Adaptation measure because these will intimately affect people in many countries in which Columbans work, namely, Peru, Chile, Pakistan and the Philippines.

The Fourth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was published in 2007, before the Bali Conference. One could summarize its finding with a few quotations from the document. It claimed that “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and oceans temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global sea levels.” It goes on to link these changes with human activity, mainly the burning of fossil fuel to power our industrial economies, since the beginning of the industrial revolution,. “Most of the observed increase in temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations”.

Adaptation Fund received a lot of attention at both the Nairobi meeting of the UNFCCC in November 2006 and the Bali meeting in 2007. Disagreement centred around where the Fund would be located and how it would be managed. Economically rich countries wanted to have the Fund located in the IMF/World Bank complex, which would make it easier for them to control. This was anathema to many people from the South who suffered massive economic shocks as a result of the Third World Debt crisis in the 1980s and 1990s. Instead of attacking the banks that loaned the money or the governments that raised interest rates, the IMF/World Banks forced destructive Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) that often crippled the education, health care and welfare systems of economically poor countries.

While the architecture of the Adaptation Fund was finally agreed at Bali, the main problem that Copenhagen has to tackle is simply that the needs are great and there is little money in the kitty. It is estimated that at least $100 billion annually will be needed by 2020.

A favourable outcome Copenhagen would involve: Firstly, a shared vision on Adaptation itself, which would take on board all aspects of the Bali Action Plan. This would mean a massive increase in designing Adaptation plans at the national and international levels. Secondly, rich countries must fulfill the promises they made 8 years ago to fully fund the actions which will address the immediate impact of climate change between now and 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol runs out. Thirdly, Adaptation funding must be new and additional to the Official Development Assistance (ODA) commitment of 0.7% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which the UN has called on all rich countries to make. The money must be delivered as grants and not as loans.

Setting the Stage for Copenhagen

2009-12-14T13:38:00.001-08:00

Rev. Seán McDonagh, SSC December 8th 2009

This is my fourth time attending the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). My first one was COP 12, which took place in Nairobi in 2006. About 5,000 people were present at the event, including country delegates, people from civil society organisations and the media. We all gathered at the headquarters of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in Nairobi. Security was tight and all events closed down before 6 p.m. I stayed at the Maryknoll house which is situated just outside Nairobi. As far as I can remember the only Head of State who attended, the president of Kenya.
The following year, COP 13 took place on the beautiful island of Bali in Indonesia. It was housed in a complex of luxury hotels close to the beach. Because of the nightclub bombings in Bali some years previously, security was very tight. About 8,000 people attended among them two heads of State, the President of Indonesia and the, then, newly elected Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd. The most memorable moment in Bali meeting happened on the last evening when the US delegation was attempting to derail what became known as the Bali Road Map. In exasperation a negotiator from the republic of Vanuatu called on the US delegation to, at least get out of the way, if they did not want to be party to the negotiation process. The Bush Administration was opposed to any globally binding climate change agreement. The Bali Road Map set out the programme of work which would have to be completed in order to deliver a follow-up treaty to the Kyoto Protocol at Copenhagen in 2009. The reason why a robust treaty is essential here at Copenhagen is that the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

COP 14 took place at Poznan in Poland, in December 2008. I stayed at Capuchin monastery in the centre of the old city. On the first night one of the friars brought me for a tour and of the Christmas markets. I was particularly drawn to the ice sculptures, especially the intricacies of many of the designs. The Friar explained that traditionally these sculptures were carved in December and usually lasted through out the winter. In Poznan in December 2008, most of the sculptures had melted by the first Sunday of the Conference, a sure sign that climate change is already a reality. One of the disappointments of the Poznan’s meeting was the fact that European Union drew back from the commitments it had given at Bali, which was that rich countries, Annex 1 countries in the language of the COP, would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by between 25% to 40% by 2020. The row-back was as a result of pressure from the coal industry on the Polish governmentj and the fact that Chancellor Angel Merkel of Germany was facing re-election in 2009. She did not want to alienate the car, steel and coal constituency.

It is estimated that there will be 15,000 people at the Copenhagen Conference, including 100 Heads of State. The opening ceremony took place on December 7th 2009. It was addressed by the Prime Minister of Denmark, Mr. Lars Lokke Rasmussen, He said that COP 15 was taking place at a time of unprecedented political good will. He urged the parties to reach an ambitious agreement in order to deliver “hope for a better future” for all.

He was followed by the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Mr. Yvo de Boer. He hoped that Copenhagen would result in an agreement on significant elements of the on-going negotiations. These include: Mitigation, which means cutting carbon emissions drastically in rich countries: Adaptation which involves making financial resources available to economically poor countries which are now and, in the future, will be badly effected by climate change; Initiatives to protect forests as carbon sinks and to make clean, non-fossil fuel technologies available to countries in Africa, South Asia and Latin America are also part of the negotiations. He emphasised that Copenhagen would be successful only if it delivered significant and immediate actions, beginning the day the conference ends
Madame Ritt Bjerregard, the Mayor of Copenhagen highlighted the Copenhagen Climate Summit for Mayors which will take place from December 14th to 17th 2009. She said that the city of Copenhagen aimed to be carbon neutral by 2025. She called on the negotiators to “go very far and very fast” and turn Copenhagen into “Hopenhagen.”

How Robust is the Science of Climate Change?

2009-12-14T13:36:00.000-08:00

Fr. Seán McDonagh, SSC, December 9, 2009

In the run up to the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change, hackers broke into computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Centre and got access to many private emails exchanged between climate scientists who have worked with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This ignited a global controversy about the reliability of the IPCC’s data and methodology. It forced the chief scientist at the centre of the row, Professor Phil Jones, to step down temporarily as head of the university’s climate research centre, while an independent enquiry into the matter was being conducted,
Many of these emails were seized upon by climate sceptics who claimed that scientists associated with the IPCC had excluded data from scientists who questioned the IPCC’s consensus that human-induced activities, especially burning fossil fuel, are significant elements in the current planetary global warming. News outlets such a Fox News in the U.S. and conservative politicians such as Senator James M Inhofe, the Republican Senator from Oklahoma, and Tony Abbott, the new leader of the opposition in Australia and Nigel Lawson in Britain claimed that the content of the emails vindicated their scepticism.
So, everyone expected that the chair of the IPCC, Prof. R.K Pachauri would deal with the issue at the first possible opportunity at the Copenhagen conference. At a meeting on the “IPCC Findings and Activities and their Relevance for the UNFCCC Process” on December 9th 2009, Pachauri addressed the controversy head on. He said that “it is unfortunate that an illegal act of accessing private emails communication between scientists who have been involved as authors in the IPCC assessment in the past has led to several questions and concerns. It is important for me to clarify that the IPCC as a body follows impartial, open and objective assessment of every aspect of climate change carried out with complete transparency.” He pointed out that “the IPCC relies mainly on peer reviewed literature in carrying out its assessment and follows a process that renders it unlikely that any peer reviewed piece of literature, however contrary to the views of any individual author, would be left out. Furthermore, “the entire report writing process of the IPCC is subjected to extensive and repeated review by experts as well as governments. Consequently, there is, at every stage, full opportunity for experts in the field to draw attention to any piece of literature and its basic findings that would ensure inclusion of a range of views.” He went on to emphasise that “there is no possibility of exclusion of any contrarian views, if they have been published in established journals or other publications that are peer reviewed.“
He was at pains to point out that the IPCC reports while using the best available science, are not completely dependent on scientists. “I would like to highlight the fact that the summary for policymakers of all the reports of the IPCC are accepted and approved by all the governments of the world.”
As a consequence of this painstaking and thorough process “no individual or small group of scientists is in a position to exclude a peer-reviewed paper from the IPCC assessment. Likewise, individuals and small groups have no ability to emphasize a result that is not consistent with a range of studies, investigations, and approaches.” There are many layers in the IPCC process, beginning with the large number of authors, from a wide range of scientific disciplines, who are involved in the writing process. On top of that, there is an extensive monitoring and review process and, finally governments sign off on the findings. As a result Dr. Pachauri rejected any biased findings. On the contrary he claimed that “the IPCC assessment Reports are comprehensive, unbiased and based on the best scientific data available at the time. Its findings can be relied upon and can form the basis for relevant policy decisions by policy makers. The remit of the IPCC does not allow it to become policy prescriptive.”

At the end of his statement he returned to the illegal hacking of private emails at the University of East Anglia. According to Pachauri the private emails have been taken out of their proper context. If I say, in a private email, that I could kill a particular scientist for writing a non-peer- reviewed, contrarian article about climate change, it doesn’t mean I plan to buy a gun and go out and shoot him. It means that I am as mad as hell, because I believe promoting non-peer reviewed, contrarian positions muddies the waters and slows down the possibility for the decisive actions which will be needed to stabilize atmospheric gases immediately. It is essential that these decisions are taken here at Copenhagen in order to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, which will affect the poor disproportionately. According to Dr. Pachauri the “incident only highlights the importance of IPCC procedures and practices and the thoroughness by which the Panel carries out its assessments.” Whether these answers will satisfy the sceptics or those sitting on the fence remains to be seen.

Updates from Copenhagen

2009-12-14T13:33:00.000-08:00

We are delighted to have updates from Sean McDonagh from the Climate Change conference in Copenhagen which we will be publishing on The Snipe over the next weeks

Copenhagen and Carlow

2009-12-11T14:19:00.000-08:00

All eyes should be on Copenhagen, as leaders from 190 countries gather to try to thrash out a workable treaty to deal with the immense challenges presented by climate change. One of the earliest theories of global warming was put forward in 1824 by the French physicist Joseph Fourier, who explained that gases in the Earth’s atmosphere can trap heat like a glasshouse – the “greenhouse effect”. In 1861 John Tyndall, born in Leighlin Bridge County Carlow, published a work on heat radiation. He was an ordnance survey and railway engineer who studied physics in Britain and Germany (under Bunsen, of burner fame) and became a celebrated mountaineer, touring with Darwin’s right-hand man T.H.Huxley and making the first ascent of the Weisshorn in the Swiss Alps. He showed that water vapour and other gases combine to create the greenhouse effect: “This aqueous vapour is a blanket more necessary to the vegetable life of England than clothing is to a man”.

Tyndall was one of the pioneers of climate science, and is remembered today through the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester. His early work spawned a vast body of research involving chemists, physicists, geographers, oceanographers, geologists, botanists, naturalists and just about any branch of science that you can think of. The unanimity of these scientists is almost total. The Earth is warming, potentially very dangerously. Ten of the thirteen hottest years on record have been since 1995. The planet is at a temperature level not seen for 1300 years, and is overwhelmingly likely to get hotter over the next century. Yes, there is a cyclical element in the rise and fall of global temperature, but this rise is very largely caused by man through use of carbon-emitting fossil fuels to power our industrial revolution and economic growth since the mid-18th century.

There is a general consensus that a 2C rise is the largest that can be safely absorbed by life on Earth and human society. That is what Copenhagen is trying to guarantee, with countries pledging to reduce carbon emissions by 20% from 1990 levels by 2020 This is a worthy goal and achievable if we adopt sustainable sources of energy (wind, water, waves, geo-thermal) or even nuclear power. In itself the consensus is that 20% is not sufficient to contain warming to 2C. Cuts of up to 80% on 1990 levels will have to be implemented within a generation, not easy when there are ”developing countries” wanting to ape the lifestyle of the materially prosperous, energy-greedy west. American and Chinese (and others’) pledges to cut emissions are currently way short of the short-term minimum requirement of 20%.

If you are a climate-change sceptic, or even a denier, then ask yourself if you are being rational. The unanimity of scientific judgement is so great, that to reject it without pointing to creditable research is no longer a valid position to hold. Yes, there is a small chance that tens of thousands of scientists are wrong, that they have colluded to mislead the public, that almost every government is deluded into backing the “20 by 2020” call. If they are wrong, then we should still take the chance to make changes to our lifestyle that will make a decent standard of life and living possible around the globe once fossil fuels run out in a few decades. Changes for sustainability need to be made anyway.

If moderate climate change opinion is right, we will all have to make adjustments to our lifestyle and to our values. Can we any longer place individual and national freedom above other considerations? Global standards and rules will be needed to get emissions to sustainable levels. Personal freedom to pursue economic growth and wealth is perhaps a value that is increasingly out of place in the new global reality. That doyenne of free-market capitalism and personal freedom, Margaret Thatcher, was herself a chemist by training, and as long ago as 1989 told the UN that “we are seeing a vast increase in the amount of carbon dioxide reaching the atmosphere. The result is that change in future is likely to be more fundamental and more widespread than anything we have known hitherto”.

Climate change events are being held around Ireland this coming week. Try Kinnity Co, Offaly this Sunday (13th Dec) at 5.00pm. Show support for what more and more people are realising has to be done.

The Director of the Tyndall Research Centre, Prof. Kevin Anderson, has warned this week that 20% cuts are now simply token gestures. Global carbon dioxide emissions will peak much later than anticipated and will be reduced far too late for temperatures to be held at a mere 2C rise. He thinks we are almost inevitably on course for a 4-6C rise. This is a catastrophic scenario for human society and global life.

Volunteering and Community

2009-12-04T12:56:00.000-08:00

It has been a memorable November for the Cabragh Wetlands Trust. The Star gave great coverage to our manager, Michael Long, who was awarded top prize in the environment category at the Ireland Involved Awards Night in Dublin, where prizes were presented by the President. Michael must take much of the credit for the expanding range of activities at the Wetlands Centre, and thoroughly deserved his moment of fame!

This week a group of us attended an Awards evening in Kilcommon Hall, where the North Tipperary Community and Voluntary Association (CAVA) Awards for 2009 were presented. The guest of honour, our MEP Alan Kelly, spoke about how CAVA was his favourite organization, because it is there to encourage, support and recognise the importance of work done by volunteers in local communities. Voluntary work is at the heart of do much that is good in our society today, and as we approach a very unsettled period in history, with climate change, economic downturn and many other problems threatening our futures, there is more and more recognition that the way forward has to be through local action and voluntary involvement.

Have we become too reliant on governments and local councils to tell us what to do? If more of us had the initiative to tackle problems in our communities by direct involvement and local leadership, the world would quickly be a much better place. One of the best ways of defining the difference between man and other species is that humans are working and creative animals, but we live in a period of history where we have been slowly transformed into consumers of the goods produced by others. Are we in danger of losing our creativity and independence as a result?

Think about your own community. Talk to friends and see what you can identify that could be improved by collective participation. The Cabragh Wetlands Trust came together to conserve an area of outstanding natural interest that was under threat. Do you have something similar in your area? Perhaps there is some old woodland that needs protection, or some waste ground that could be transformed with a bit of local effort. Non-environmental issues may be your concern – supporting local businesses, a farmers’ cooperative, preserving a village shop or local school, provision of cycle routes, help for the disabled or disadvantaged. Over the next twenty years, energy will be a massive issue for all of us. Is there something that could be done to provide renewable energy to your community? Could your local river be harnessed to produce power via a small water turbine? Can wind be used? Friends of mine bought a house in 1949, used a little windmill (about a metre across) on a ten foot pole to power a generator and spent the last 50 years of their lives using their own free and renewable electricity to run the house. Why not do this at a community level?

The possibilities are endless. Already we see farmers’ markets and allotments flourishing, as people recognize the need to take more control of their own lives and their own communities. If we all make sure our own piece of the planet is in good order, the threats we face in the coming century will be much reduced.

CAVA is there to help, developing networks of similar groups, providing training, helping with funding, empowering people, promoting equality and social inclusion, providing a forum where ideas can be shared and issues discussed, lobbying on behalf of member organizations to influence policy at all levels of government. You can contact CAVA at the Council Offices in Nenagh. Find a way to get involved and make use of this excellent organization

Floods

2009-11-27T13:48:00.000-08:00

Flooding is a pretty serious issue at the moment, and our sympathy goes out to anyone suffering as a result of the terrible floods that have hit so much of the country. While the extent of the damage is catastrophic for some, it is not entirely unexpected. At this time of year very heavy rains have been the norm for some time now, and if the climate change predictions are right, things will get worse in the coming decades, with winter rainfall in this part of the country predicted to rise by about 20% by the middle of the century. More reasons to re-evaluate how we live and what we can do to reduce our carbon footprints.

Needless to say, flooding per se is not necessarily a bad thing. It has a positive role to play in shaping and managing the natural world. At present Cabragh Wetlands has put on her winter clothes. The swollen River Suir and the Killough stream, following lines of least resistance, are pouring water into Cabragh Wetlands. In a matter of days the landscape has been transformed from a place with a variety of foliage to a watery landscape with sparse clumps of protruding vegetation.

As is the way of nature, the availability of food generally coincides with the arrival of waders from the North to join our resident birds. Waders like greylag geese, whooper swans, wigeon, teal, and mallard duck, lapwing and curlew can be heard singing excitedly in their watery abodes. The source of their excitement is the emergence of food. A large variety of invertebrates, which happily reside in the ground during the summer, are flushed out by the autumn floods. Snails, beetles, earthworms and a huge range of insects now become a valuable food source for arriving waders, as well as the resident bird population.

Wetlands are part of the landscape and fulfil a variety of important functions. They act as a sponge to absorb huge quantities of water during heavy rains and then release it in a slow controlled way. They act as a filtration system for water, purifying and restoring to good health the water that passes through. A variety of fauna living in a wetland habitat actually pump oxygen into their roots to support the bacteria; this oxygenates the water. Reed bed systems are increasingly being used to purify waste water from houses and farms.

Wetlands act as a carbon sink by storing in the vegetation huge quantities of carbon, which otherwise would be stored in the atmosphere adding to the greenhouse effect. Wetlands actually contain up to fifty times more bio-diversity than ‘good land’. This in turn attracts a corresponding amount of insects, birds and wild creatures.

The floods carry with them welcome loads of sediment which settles in to fertilise the wetland for the new growth that will emerge next Spring. So as the wetland takes on its winter appearance, it is fulfilling its cycle of life and sustaining huge populations of flora and fauna. We can enjoy the life they sustain and appreciate the role they play in sustaining life on Earth.

Five Minutes to Midnight - Ireland and Climate Change

2009-11-20T02:09:00.000-08:00

Cabragh Wetlands Trust is hosting a very special evening on the crucial topic of Climate Change at the Wetland Centre on Wednesday 25th November at 8.00pm. Our speaker is a very distinguished Tipperary man, Dr Kieran Hickey, Lecturer in Physical Geography at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Kieran has taught and studied widely in Ireland and the UK, writing many articles in academic journals, and recently published a very well reviewed book on Climate Change, entitled “Five Minutes to Midnight? Ireland and Climate Change”. He has made a special study of the impact of climate change on storm patterns, coastal vulnerability and sea-level rise in Ireland and elsewhere, and has spoken at conferences as far afield as New Zealand, Slovenia, Spain and the USA as well as Ireland and the UK.

This promises to be an exceptional evening, with a chance to hear a recognized expert talk on a complex subject that could not be of greater significance for each and every one of us. Here at Cabragh Wetlands we are striving to work within the local community to address the important questions raised by the changing climate. Do come. Listen, learn, think, and share your ideas. Let’s work as a community to move towards a better future. As Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world”. Students (especially budding Third Level Geographers) will be very welcome. Entrance is free, and copies of Kieran’s book will be available.

The UN Conference on Climate Change is meeting in Copenhagen in December to try to hammer out a treaty that will replace the Kyoto Protocols and set new binding targets on carbon emissions, though the latest news is not encouraging. Perhaps the best we can hope for is productive talks, better understanding and a move towards a binding treaty in the next year. One proposal is to reduce damaging emissions by 40% by 2020, with an 80% reduction of CO2 emissions by 2050. The changes to our lifestyles could be immense, and the prospect of failure suggests a very bleak future for mankind and the rest of life on Earth.

It is alarming to read this week that a poll of 1500 people in the UK found that two-thirds of them do not believe climate change is happening. Equally concerning are the number of ordinary, decent folk who turn their backs on the problem – “2050? I’ll be dead by then. It’s nothing to do with me.” It makes you doubt that oft repeated cliché, that man is rational. In the last few months we have been able to read reports about Australian states and cities that are debating the abandonment of their coastlines because of rising sea levels – steps to build sea defences are likely to be banned. Outlying islands in the Carteret group north of Australia are being evacuated by their inhabitants because sea level rises are already making them uninhabitable. The Maldives government is openly searching for a new piece of land that they can buy and move to, lock stock and barrel; it is the only way they can keep together as a national community, as their own islands steadily flood. According to the United Nations 300,000 people are already dying each year because of climate change, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Essentially this is the fault of the over-material western “developed” world, with their excessive demands for oil-based energy. Questions need to be raised about our morals and values, as well as our lifestyles. Can the planet cope with a population that has gone from 4.1 billion in 1975, to 6.7 billion today and a projected 10.8 billion by 2100, within the lifetime of children born today?

This is not a question that any of us can afford to turn away from. We can look at it on many levels. The massive populations of Asia must be persuaded away from the wasteful materialism that obsesses the West; that can only be done if we lead the way and give up much that we have come to regard as our right. You may prefer to see this as a local issue; every community and every family must take the responsibility for controlling their carbon emissions, preserving biodiversity and habitat, switching to sustainable sources of energy, limiting population growth and reshaping their values so that over the coming decades man becomes again a species that lives within the limits of the planet’s finite resources.

Come along to Cabragh on 25th November and join the debate. If you think those who are concerned about climate change are wrong, come and tell us why. If you have ideas on what we as a community can do, come and share them. Local councillors? Churches? Energy suppliers? Farmers? Scientists and engineers? You all have important contributions to make. Let’s hear from you.

Garden Birds

2009-11-18T02:12:00.000-08:00

There will be a talk on "Garden Birds and How to Attract Them" on Wednesday 18th November at 8pm. Further details here

Our Ancestors in Cabragh 2

2009-11-11T07:19:00.000-08:00

Last week we noted that there were more as many as ten historical sites mapped in the area enclosed by the Cabragh wetlands in the elbow of the River Suir. Most of these sites were ringforts, where families lived for centuries in relative safety, sheltering in the protection given by the marsh and river on their east, north and west sides.

These circular ring forts were used by pastoral Celtic people. Most of them are thought to have been built between 500AD and 1000AD, but it seems likely that some of the sites were occupied many centuries before. In places the ringforts are barely a hundred metres apart, suggesting that expanding families necessitated the building of new homesteads close by, which would have been another source of protection and tells us something about the cooperation between family groups.

For centuries then humans lived with the wetlands, adapting themselves to the natural rhythms and cycles of the local environment, growing crops, grazing cattle and moving livestock to seasonal pastures.

The rectangular enclosures or moated sites were built by the Anglo-Normans, probably dating from the late 13th century. They are mainly defensive sites with a wide fosse (ditch) or moat on the outside. This was often filled with water. Inside this was a substantial bank enclosing a flat area where wooden dwellings and outhouses would be erected. The total area of one of these enclosures at Fertiana is about 1500 sq. metres.

What changes these Anglo-Normans brought to Cabragh / Fertiana can only be imagined. Did they clear the forests and replace them with their rundale system of farming? Had they long fields of ploughed land and some fallow strips? Did they save hay in the area and introduce the mute swan and rabbit to the river and fields? We can only speculate, but they have left their marks on a place that adds variety and interest to a beautiful landscape. It is our duty to preserve them so that future generations can encounter them and unfold their secrets.

What we do know is that in 1326 Thomas Stapleton, Lord of Fertiana, living in his grand house on the high ground west of Fertiana, gave permission to the monks of Holycross Abbey to cross the wetlands. It is probably too speculative to suggest that the monks carved that beautiful barn owl into the wall of the old Abbey as an expression of appreciation for his gesture.

There has been a symbiosis between man and the wetlands sine time immemorial. It is this that the Cabragh Wetlands Trust is committed to preserving.

Autumn leaves

2009-11-06T07:09:00.001-08:00

It’s autumn, and the oak tree is in the process of sending out countless invitations to a great feast. One by one the yellow leaves float and drift down to the ground where the feast will be held. Hundreds and thousands will be invited; so many, that the guests cannot all come at once. Instead they come in waves.

The first wave of guests don't have far to travel; in fact they already live on the leaf. They are the bacteria that have lain dormant on that leaf; only waiting for the dew from the grass to wash out the bitter tasting compounds. The bacteria are present in such great numbers. Colonies of them are so large, that dark blotches of them appear on the leaf. Take a look next time you are out and you will see them.

The next to arrive are the spores of fungi that arrive by wind. These fungi bring with them special enzymes, which enable them to break down the parts of the leaf that are quite difficult to break down. These decomposers are invaluable.

You might know some of the next guests. They include the millipedes, springtails, mites and worms. Among the worms is a very modest hard working member of the community that we all know; the earthworm. The leaf by now is shredded into small parts.

The earthworm leaves to attend to other important business, however the feasting continues with more invertebrates arriving. The leaf is reduced to microscopic particles and another wave of bacteria and fungi have second helpings and enjoy these remains until the leaf is fully decomposed.

The invitations continue throughout the autumn, until they gradually begin to subside. The oak tree still stands tall, but now begins to reveal its stark bare brown branches. It will rest for quite some time now, and deservedly so.

Plays, Talks and Ancestors!

2009-10-30T02:01:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of events coming up in the next few weeks, and your support as always will be greatly valued. On Monday 9th November, Thurles Drama Group will be opening a run at the Source of its new show ‘Flying Feathers’ by Derek Benfield, which promises to be a great evening of comedy. Very generously the Drama Group and the Source have offered the opening night to Cabragh Wetlands as a Benefit Night and fundraising event (though with that title, a conservation charity does seem the right choice!). Please get your tickets and come along to a cheese and wine reception at the Source at 7.30pm, with the curtain due to rise at 8.15. We look forward to seeing you there. http://www.thesourceartscentre.ie/whats_on/view_event.php?Event_ID=331

The Friday before that (November 6th) An Taisce is hosting an evening on Climate Change at the Convent Hall in Nenagh, starting at 8.00pm. The speakers will be Eanna ni Lamnhna and Jon Sweeney. Eanna’s abilities as an inspirational speaker are second to none, while Jon Sweeney has a great reputation as a man who can get across the growing urgency of the climate crisis and also clarify the key scientific detail that can be so confusing to the average non-scientist. There is likely to be no more pressing issue than this over the next century, so don’t miss this opportunity to improve your understanding of what is inevitably a complex issue.

While one crisis forces us to look ahead, it is no bad thing to look back and see what was going on in previous centuries at Cabragh Wetlands. Many thanks to our local history correspondent for researching the following material. From the many archaeological sites close to Cabragh Wetlands it seems that the marsh itself had a lot to offer the people of former times. Between Cabragh Castle and Holycross Abbey the bend of the river Suir encloses the wetlands, with higher ground found on its western edges. There are at least ten prehistoric sites on the Record of Monuments and Places (RMP) Maps. If we travel a little further south to Graiguenoe the ring barrows there suggest that late Bronze Age people lived in the area some 3000 years ago. The most obvious sites on the western fringes of the wetlands are the ring forts and some moated sites.

A ring fort is a Celtic (500BC) farmstead. It is a circular area enclosed by an earthen bank. The material for this bank was thrown up from inside thus creating a fosse. Inside the flat area different types of buildings were constructed; these would probably have been thatched circular structures with wattle and daub or sod walls. On the bank outside a strong fence of stakes would give security from wild animals or enemies. Usually one family occupied the fort, and when the group grew too big another fort would be constructed close by.

How did the Celtic people use the wetlands? The most obvious use was the natural protection the marsh and the river afforded them. They also used the wetlands and river for food. They probably fished and killed wild animals that came to drink, including deer and wild boar. They more than likely enjoyed the meat of wild duck and geese. The presence of a fullacht fia close to the wetlands gives evidence of communal cooking. We can only speculate on the uses they made of the marsh. The archaeological sites show us that people lived here since the Bronze Age. The secrets of these beautiful landscapes features await excavations by future generations. It’s our duty in the meantime to value them as part of our rich heritage, and also to think about how our ancestors lived in balance with their local environment for many millenia. We have much to learn from them.

Apologies!

2009-10-26T02:57:00.000-07:00

Due to unforseen circumstances the lecture on Tuesday 27th October on garden birds has been cancelled. However it will be rescheduled at a later date. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Winter Lecture Series and Chief Seattle

2009-10-21T14:29:00.000-07:00

Cabragh Wetlands Trust is beginning its series of Winter Talks, with a popular event next Tuesday (27th October) when well-known local naturalist Tom Gallagher will talk at 8.00pm on “Garden Birds and how to attract them”. This is a wonderful event for the whole family to attend, and will give you plenty of ideas about how to get more of our feathered friends into your gardens. Entry is free, as is a restorative cup of tea.

In an inspiring testament written in the mid-1850s the Native American Chief Seattle described people as “but a strand in the web of life”. In our time we are returning to this realization and learning to appreciate the world about us in a whole new way.

So much of what Chief Seattle intuitively understood, we now know to be true. Science has since confirmed that all of life is indeed related and springs from from one unbroken source. In this year of Darwin’s anniversary, we are surely in a position to understand better than any previous generation where man came from and what is his true place in the spectrum of life. We are able to join the indigenous wisdom of our ancestors and “undeveloped” people like Seattle, to the hard science of the anthropologists who painstakingly piece together bone fragments to demonstrate ever more clearly the stages by which modern man emerged.

For 30 years we have read about Lucy, over 3 million years old and ancestor of just about everyone on the planet. Now the scientists have come up with Ardi, from east Africa as well, but 100,000 generations before Lucy; 4.8 million years old, but bi-pedal (walking on two legs) like us today. The bone record is getting ever closer to identifying that famous missing link, the common ancestor of both humans and the great apes like chimpanzees and gorillas.

As a species modern man emerged from Africa about 80,000 years ago. A small band of people searching for food, pushed out into the Middle East. Over the millennia our ancestors spread around the world and increased in number. As a species we have been extremely successful, with almost seven billion people now occupying every habitable corner of the globe.

Over time many cultures and languages emerged offering amazing diversity and color. Each landscape and environment evokes its own particular flowering of the human spirit in response. We may have developed cultural and physical differences, but we are one people, all sharing common ancestors.

We exist and flourish within the context of the web of life on which we depend. We wouldn't draw our next breath but for the trees taking in our carbon dioxide and giving us life sustaining oxygen. Our food would not grow but for the earth worms, the billions of micro-organisms in the soil creating the conditions for the seed to germinate and grow.

Seattle recognized that we are entirely dependent on the interconnection of all life, that we are but a strand in a web of life. Like links in a chain, the web works because it all works together. Each piece of the web has a role to play for life to flourish. As a species humans are as dependant on the web as every other species. Damage the web, and we endanger all life, including ultimately ourselves.

The web of life is made up of many different life forms, from micro-organisms in the soil to the Blue Whale in the oceans, yet it is one community of life, and we are part of this amazing, complex, yet intimate community. Everything is related to everything else, even if you have to go back a billion generations to find the connection. At last even the politicians are waking up to these self-evident truths, with dire warnings about the consequences of failure at the Copenhagen climate talks in December. The web is under real and immediate threat.

At Cabragh Wetlands we are working to protect the children, the children of all species, so this wonderful web of life can remain healthy and sustainable for the foreseeable future.

Rarities at Cabragh

2009-10-16T14:39:00.000-07:00

Since Cabragh Wetlands Trust began managing their original 14 acres of the marsh in the early 1990’s, there have been many unusual feathered visitors to the area. Birds like the barn owl, lapwing and lark feed and breed in the vicinity. These are scarce but not as uncommon as a bird like the bittern, which is very rare on these islands. There was some excitement ten years or more ago when word went out that one had been sighted in the reed bed next to the hide. It has not bred in Ireland since the nineteenth century due to the drainage of its natural habitat, like marshes. It is a secretive bird that inhabits big reed beds. Its plumage is golden brown, streaked with dark brown and yellow and is known as An Bonnán Buí in Irish.

In former times it bred in all four provinces and was prized by the gentry for its meat. The simple country folk would have nothing to do with the bittern, because its weird booming call was a “portent of some sad event”. It inspired writers and poets. The famous Irish poem ‘An Bonnan Bui’ by Cathal Bui Mac Ghiolla Ghunna refers to ‘the yellow Bittern’ that had died of thirst in frosty weather. The poet himself feared the same fate for want of a drop!

A more frequent visitor to the wetlands has been the Marsh Harrier. Individuals, usually females, have visited the reed beds three or four times in the last decade. The beautiful bird has a 4 foot wingspan. Its golden head and front wing edges contrast with its dark brown plumage. It has been seen gliding slowly over the tops of the reeds, then hovering slightly before it pounced on its prey - usually aquatic birds or small mammals. This bird, like the bittern, has specific habitat requirements. With the drainage of Wetlands in the 19th century, the bird’s fate was sealed. They no longer breed here.

Other rare or scarce duck species, geese and swans have been sighted at Cabragh. These include a skua, american teal, a white footed goose (eastern race) and a Bewick’s swan. The latter had a numbered neck collar, which allowed it to be traced across Europe as it returned to its breeding grounds in Siberia. Even rare and endangered species seem to view Cabragh Wetlands as a place with potential! “An rud is annamh is iontach.”

Grow your own food!

2009-10-11T04:55:00.000-07:00

In this week’s Sunday Times, Mark Keenan in his Plot 34 column makes telling arguments about the decline of the Irish food-producing industry, with ever-increasing reliance on imported food, the security of which can hardly be taken for granted in the troubled world of today. Climate change, oil crises, financial collapse, supermarket domination and the vicissitudes of world markets all contribute to a very uncertain supply chain for our food, and thus for our very survival. Keenan argues that for the first time in 500 generations, the knowledge of how to grow our own food is not being systematically passed down by adults to children, and that most children are not growing up watching and learning as their dad or granddad works the soil, plants seeds and produces food for the family table.

We all bemoan the rain and lack of real heat in our weather, but we have the most wonderful climate for growing and it is surely a nonsense that farmers, whose industry is more important than any, are being forced out of business, in part because of the low prices they receive. The connection to nature is not being adequately made in our children’s daily lives, and schools will struggle to fill the gap if there is such a strong cultural negation of the importance of the natural world, of our agricultural heritage and of horticultural knowledge and skills. These are things of such overwhelming importance that they should be part of our folk-memory, of our indigenous wisdom, transmitted from generation to generation as part of our daily lives. Without them, we become dependent on others, dependent on chance, helpless in adversity and unable to provide sustenance for our families.

A recent report said that to continue in our current lifestyles, the planet will have to produce as much food in the next fifty years as it has in the last 10,000. Can we even begin to manage such a task unless we all take more responsibility for growing our own? And that means understanding the soil and maintaining its health and productivity.

Cabragh Wetlands Trust is of course doing its bit to get children (and adult visitors) to think more deeply about such issues and to foster better understanding of both our local habitats and global environmental issues. As a new development we are working with our friends at Pallas Hill Open Farm at the Ragg, a family farm with a variety of animals for visitors to see, plus information on wildlife, and a museum and display of horse-drawn machinery, which helps us to understand our farming heritage and the central role of agriculture and food production in the lives of all our ancestors until perhaps the last two generations. We are hoping that some schools might like to spend a full day in the area, perhaps spending the morning at Cabragh and the afternoon at Pallas Hill. This would make a great day out of the classroom, and we hope some schools from further away might make the journey for a field study outing in the beautiful countryside of North Tipp. Contact either Ella at Pallas Hill (0504-54294) or Michael at Cabragh (0504-43879).

Tidy Towns!

2009-10-02T00:53:00.000-07:00

It was very pleasing to read in last week’s Star about the success of Holycross in the Tidy Towns Competition. Sited on the fringes of Holycross Parish, Cabragh Wetlands Trust was delighted to hear of the well-earned success of our friends on the local Tidy Towns committee. Not surprisingly there is some overlap in the membership of the two organizations, and like any small community, the hard voluntary effort of busy men and women is absolutely priceless.

Readers of this column will remember our concerns about too much emphasis on tidiness, which can so often be destructive of habitat and biodiversity, so it was very good to see that the adjudicators placed great emphasis on wildlife and natural amenities, with plenty of practical suggestions about landscaping and preservation of natural habitats along the river frontage, and a strong comment about planting native species that will enhance the food chain. These are tips that we can all apply in our own gardens.

Think carefully though before you act on one piece of advice from the adjudicators: “Do remove the two dead trees”. In the case of Holycross’s river frontage, this is no doubt very sound advice, and if dead trees are unsafe then they will have to come down, but cutting them down and “removing” them are very different. So pause for a moment before you swing the axe or start up the chainsaw. Dead trees are a vital part of many ecosystems, and a key player in the development of our natural heritage. A dead tree left to decay naturally on the ground can be a wonderful source of wildlife, providing shelter for small mammals, a home for countless insects, and a superb environment for new plants to grow. As the tree breaks down over the years, so it will enrich the soil into which it is decaying, becoming a wonderfully rich medium in which new life can flourish.

Out of death new life springs. It has always been thus. The death of trees and other plants has largely created the life in our landscape, determining a specific local chemical balance which influences which species will flourish in the area. Soil is dead plants; death creates life. Dead trees created our heritage.

So perhaps those two trees have to come down, but may be they could be left in a quiet corner as a log pile in which hedgehogs can shelter, beetles and a myriad of other insects flourish, fungi grow, birds feed, small mammals hunt. Worms will turn the logs into good soil, badgers will root and life will go on. And children will come and turn over the logs, see new sights and learn about the non-human creatures with whom we share this extraordinary planet. And perhaps, if we are lucky, they will grow up to mange it better than we have done.

Spiders and thank you!

2009-09-25T05:10:00.000-07:00

At this time of year the early morning dew soaks the grass, and water droplets gather beneath leaves, flowers and stems. Everywhere in the hedges and garden, and across the landscape here at Cabragh Wetlands, can be seen the lacy, fairy-like gossamer threads of spiders’ webs standing out clearly in the morning sun, dew-laden. It is a spectacular sight, and the work of countless tiny spiders which swarm in the fields in the autumn. The young spiders are too small to eat solid food, and depend on the dew drops in the webs and on leaves for survival. They will cling together for warmth, forming pill-sized ‘spider-balls’ which are dotted around the fields in early autumn. They soon separate and look for a likely spot to spin their own tiny webs and catch insects, and before you know it, the air is full of invisible threads.

In early autumn spiders’ webs of all shapes and sizes appear on every hedgerow, drift across long stalks of grass, and sway gently in the breeze from furze bushes, brambles, flower stems, reed beds and every other suitable attachment they can find. You will not have to wander far to find examples of these dangerous little death-traps. There are hundreds of different species of spider, and no two make their web exactly alike. Just as on the Aran Islands each family developed its own unique knitting stitch as a kind of personal identification, so every spider family has its own special pattern for weaving its insect trap, and every young spider spins its little web in exactly the same way as its mother, without receiving a single lesson.

Some weave a mass of tangled threads, others weave their webs very closely. Some construct cobwebby funnels, while others (orb weavers) spin beautiful, regular, open webs (like wheels), with numerous spokes radiating from the centre. The garden spider attaches non-sticky tension lines to nearby sturdy plants and then spirals to form the net of her web. She replaces the outer spirals with gummed silk and oil on her own feet prevents her becoming stuck.

Once caught in the web, an insect seldom escapes, and the more it struggles the more it gets entangled in the silken threads, which are coated with a kind of sticky glue. The spider spends most of her time in her den, waiting for the right moment to pounce. Trapped insects are injected with enzymes to liquidize their tissue, and the spider swallows the liquid. As you look at the early morning webs covered in dew drops and sparkling like jewels in the sun, remember that it is not a good time for the spiders; their snares can too easily be seen because of the dewy fringe, so some spiders will try to shake off the drops to render the web invisible again, and allow them to become efficient killing fields again.

Here at Cabragh we also have the scarily named wolf spider, who does not spin a web, but hunts his victims down. The female builds a nursery web, in which her egg sac is placed.

Arachnophobes beware! Winter will be a hard time for spiders; their favourite victims, flies, have long since gone, and those spiders which survive will seek out a nice warm corner where they can tuck themselves away and pass the time safely to see another spring.

A reminder that the Wetlands Trust is inviting all those who helped organise our recent Open Day (prize-donors too) to a thank-you evening at the Centre on Tuesday next – September 29th at 8.00pm.

Tea and thank you to all!

2009-09-15T16:16:00.000-07:00

Cabragh Wetlands Trust is quite justifiably unknown for its economic predictions, but we anticipate bad news in the coming months for the Irish tea drinker.
There have been severe droughts in the Kenyan highlands, and a consequent collapse of around 50% in tea production. Perhaps our money-driven world takes too much account of the laws of supply and demand, but it seems inevitable that this will be reflected in a price rise for the tea that we buy in our local shops. Ireland leads the world in per capita tea consumption, drinking more cups per day per person than any other country. While we support purchase of locally sourced food, tea is not something we can grow here, so we are at the mercy of international trade, and international weather.

Everything is linked. In Kenya a hundred years ago the realization of the wealth to be created by growing tea and coffee led to a rush to clear ground to plant tea bushes. As demand and profits grew, so did the ambitions of the planters. Hundreds of thousands of hectares were cleared and plantations spread into the hills, where ancient trees had multiplied into vast forests acting as giant sponges, soaking up excess water in the rainy season, and slowly drip-feeding it back out in the drier times, creating a self-sustaining balance of trees, plants, insects and animals perfectly adapted to their local habitat.

Deforestation has undermined that balance, perhaps with far greater damage in other parts of the world like the Amazon basin and Indonesia. Now in Kenya when there is heavy rain there are not enough trees to soak up the excess; water runs off the hills too quickly, destroying precious topsoil and in some years causing devastating floods. In periods of drought there is insufficient water trapped in the depleted forests to sustain the volume demanded by users, both farmers and wildlife. The natural balance has once again been lost. It is hardly a new lesson; the dust-bowls in the American mid-West were a major element in turning the 1929 Wall Street Crash into a global economic depression. There is scope for young historians to build a career writing eco-history, reassessing man's impact on the environment rather than the narrow focus of man's interaction with man.

Talking of conserving local habitat, many thanks to those who helped with the Cabragh Wetlands Open Day at the end of August. An invaluable contribution has been made to our bank balance, thanks to the generosity and goodwill of those who helped by donating prizes, setting up shelters, giving of their time on the day, displaying their skills and crafts, and so much more. There was a wonderful sense of community and cooperation. As a small recompense, the Wetlands Trust is inviting all contributors to a thankyou evening on Tuesday 22nd September. More details will be circulated next week.

Insects

2009-09-08T11:13:00.000-07:00

My recently purchased insect book tells me that so far scientists have identified 360,000 species of beetle, 180,000 of moths and butterflies, 120,000 distinct species of flies, 82,000 ‘true bugs’, 20,000 grasshoppers, 5,000 dragonflies, and so on. At Cabragh we are very proud of two species of exceptionally rare caddisflies that have survived the ravages of time and human encroachment in the pure waters of the Wetlands, but even that pride is tempered by reading that no less than 11,000 species of caddisflies have been identified worldwide. The range and beauty of life is utterly extraordinary, and perhaps most extraordinary of all is the arrogance of humans who assume that our one species is above everything else and is somehow entitled to do whatever it likes with the other beings that share our planet.A quick bit of maths confirms upwards of 750,000 distinct varieties of those common insects listed above, with some naturalists suggesting that the true figure is double that. Another book tells me that there is more life below the surface of the earth, living in the ground, than there is above, including plants birds and animals, as well as insects. Heaven knows where aquatic creatures fit into all of this. Apart from wonder and awe, it is surely humility that should fill us, as we slowly edge towards a clearer understanding of our true place in the natural world. Reason a little further, and surely the conclusion has to be that we have a moral obligation to protect biodiversity and control the growth of human society, both in terms of the numbers of people and their material impact on the resources of the earth. This means a very thorough and basic reconsideration of the core concepts that have underpinned the ‘development’ of human history over the very short period of a few thousand years since our ancestors were hunter-gatherers just two hundred or so generations ago.At Cabragh we are trying to conserve a very special piece of wetland, and the goodwill and generosity of the volunteers and sponsors of our recent Open Day was very heart-warming. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that thinking people really do care about the natural world. We welcomed ten new members into our group, and hope that many more will stop by to sign up or renew their membership in support of our core values of conservation, education and recreation. Look out for those little creatures in your garden; most of them will do you no harm. If you have a healthy range of different species sharing your land with you, it is pretty clear evidence that you are doing a good job in protecting nature on your doorstep, and ultimately that’s perhaps the best thing most of us can hope to do in our lifetime.

Heritage

2009-09-03T11:09:00.000-07:00

The deaths in July of two very old men can hardly be a surprise, and scarcely a cause for mourning outside their immediate families. We all have out span of years, which will eventually run out, and ultimately face the same fate as every other human and non-human that has ever lived. Death is as normal and inevitable as breathing and sleeping. But the two old men in question are worth a few moments of our time, because they were the very last of the many millions who fought in the trenches of the First World War, a war that shaped the course of the twentieth century and touches the lives of all of us today. Most families have their memories of men who went to the war, many never to return.

Henry Allingham died first. At 113 he was the oldest man in the world, the last survivor of the Battle of Jutland, the last founder member of the RAF and the last-but-one to have fought in the trenches of the Western Front. Harry Patch, a stripling of 111, died a week later, and with him went the final direct connection to the abattoir of trench warfare – the only man alive of the ten million or more who were sent to the trenches. His best friends were killed next to him in the muddy bloodbath of Passchendaele near Ypres in 1917. In the stoical way of that generation neither of them said much about the war until the last years of their lives, when they became public figures, speaking out against the madness of warfare, visiting schools and giving direct witness to children about the terrible things they had experienced so many years ago.

But is it really so long ago? This modern world dominated by fashion, youth and the constant demand for renewal of material goods, tends to dismiss anything more than a few years old as out of date, out of touch and ‘unsophisticated’. An old person’s youth and memories are patronisingly cast aside as belonging to another age. The experience of ordinary people is condescendingly dismissed as our celebrity culture focuses its history teaching on the famous, powerful and heroic. Myths of nation building squeeze out the ordinary, mundane lives of ordinary, mundane people like the overwhelming majority of our ancestors.

Our heritage is far more likely to be found in the memories of old men and women than in the sassy razzmatazz of the slick media that infiltrates into so many corners of our lives today. Talk to the old folk around you, get the children to do school projects that will keep alive the experience, knowledge and insight of the elderly. Nearly all of us will be very old one day, and we will want to be treated as valued resources, reservoirs of knowledge and respected for what we have achieved. It is so easy to lose touch with our family’s past; the oral tradition that passes on community history has disappeared from the so-called developed world.

The past is much closer to us than we realise. Henry Allingham 1896-2009 (his father died in 1897!): as a young man he will certainly have known people who lived through the horrors of the famines of the 1840’s. As a baby he will have met old people who were alive during the Napoleonic Wars, perhaps even met someone who witnessed the 1798 rising. Follow the same argument back another two generations and we are into the era of Cromwell. Four generations from direct memories of Cromwell. Our heritage is closer and more real than we think. By and large we are what we are because of the interplay between our environment and our ancestors. Just as we at Cabragh Wetlands are trying to conserve our natural heritage, so we should all do our bit to remember and preserve our human heritage.

Moon Landing

2009-08-21T05:58:00.000-07:00

The media are understandably full of the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing this week. In a normal lifespan, there are always likely to be one or two pivotal, unforgettable moments that seem to transcend our sense of time and place, uniting people across the globe in a single common purpose and making differences of nationality, religion, politics and culture seem utterly trivial and insignificant. To a young mind especially, such events can be enthralling, compelling to live through. They create dreams and spark the imagination. They challenge our assumptions and change the way we think. They move us forward with altered priorities, generating change and progress in human society, moving mankind forward. For this aging writer, the impact of space exploration in the 1960’s on a teenage mind was huge. The sheer drama of the space missions and the human courage of the astronauts, Russian as well as American, was completely absorbing. That was an extraordinary night to live through, when so many of us sat up watching our grainy black-and-white televisions to see the lunar module land on the moon’s surface, and a few hours later held our breaths as Armstrong and Aldrin came down the steps and became the first humans to walk on a surface that was not of the Earth. Unforgettable. Yet it was never the technology that intrigued me. It was always the human drama, and the opening of the imagination. It was being made to think of things that had never crossed my mind before, being forced to see things from entirely new perspectives. As extraordinary as the feats of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins in Apollo 11 were, perhaps with hindsight it was the journey of Apollo 8 a year or so earlier that has had the greater impact on human history. The astronauts were Borman, Lovell and Anders (if my memory is intact), and their mission was to be the first to fly into a lunar orbit, swinging round the dark side before firing themselves away from the moon and back to Earth – a vital test flight before they could proceed with actually landing on the moon. In the process they became the first human beings ever to be literally out of contact with Earth. As they emerged from behind the moon, they saw a vastly reassuring but totally unique sight – Earthrise. From here we see the sun and moon rise, from the moon you see the Earth rise. One of them took that iconic photograph which you have all seen, of a beautiful blue planet partially draped in cloud, hanging in space. It is a picture that has forced us to rethink our place in the universe, to recognize that man is not at the centre of everything, to see that we are totally dependent on this extraordinary planet. It is a picture that did much to inspire James Lovelock in the development of his deeply influential Gaia hypothesis, emphasising the linkage between all life forms on the planet, their mutual interdependence, and the capacity of the Earth to continue without man should we be so stupid as to so despoil the natural resources of the planet that our own survival is threatened. So enjoy the memories of the moon landing, but learn from it too. The media over the decades have always focused on the material benefits from space exploration, from non-stick surfaces to computing (apparently there is more computer power in your mobile phone than there was in the lunar landing module!), once again seeing progress in terms of things, not values and ideas. They had an unlikely opponent. On his return Neil Armstrong was asked what space technology and exploration had done for the standard of life on Earth. His reply was unequivocal: “Nothing. The only thing that can improve the standard of life is wisdom.”

Heritage Day 2009

2009-08-19T11:58:00.000-07:00

Our annual open day at the wetlands is on Sunday 30th August from 1p.m. to 6p.m.

A wide variety of activities for all the family, young and old is promised

We hope to have two marquees, one with local Arts and Crafts and the other will display renewable energy technologies from local people.

Eanna ni Lamhna, of RTE and An Taisce, will give a talk here and lead a walk in the wetland.

There will also be a children's art competition. Children are encouraged to bring an art piece based on nature in any medium. Eanna will be judging on the day.

We have raffle tickets on sale @€2 each or €10 for a book of six with some great prizes

1st Prize Digital Camera

2nd Prize Two nights B/B in Lake Hotel, Killarney

3rd Prize €100 Shopping voucher

Summer morning

2009-08-15T05:57:00.000-07:00

It’s so good to hear from people in the area who watch and appreciate nature. One correspondent was recently enjoying a beautiful sunny June morning, two days after the summer solstice, sitting by the open front door and enjoying the heat over a leisurely breakfast – the perfect start to a summer’s day! Nearby the swallows were working at a hectic rate to rear their young. Their chatter at all hour has a distinctive air of high summer about it. A tiny wren was busily encouraging her young to leave the nest. Hatched into thick ivy by the wall, the five chicks now had the task of leaving the relative safety of their nest and emerging into this brave new world. Courageously each in turn launched itself out and took its first fluttering voyage. There youngsters were faced with journeys that created many new perils for them. They looked so vulnerable as they took that first leap of faith, trusting their mother who was clearly torn between excitement and frantic worry. She disappeared for a few minutes, before returning with some food for the brave youngsters, all calling out for attention. From the security of the nest to the turbulence, chaos and danger of the wider world – and yet the urge is there and cannot be ignored …..move out and move on. It is a dangerous world for the young ones, even at 8am on a lovely sunny day. They have so much to learn if they are to survive, and they need to learn fast. For certain some of the five will not survive, but some surely will. It was not long before a few magpies appeared, with their distinctive menacing shrieks. Those little wrens just have to work it out for themselves. Good luck to them. Life goes on. The web that links all living creatures and plants, and the endlessly turning cycle of life, are truly remarkable. We are very privileged to be part of such a fortunate planet and to have been invited to join the dance of life.

A Handful of Habitats

2009-08-13T05:34:00.000-07:00

To co-incide with Heritage Week a fascinating course for teachers entitled "A Handful of Habitats" will take place in the Thurles Area. The first day will be spent in Cabragh Wetlands.

Mon Aug 24th Wet meadow, Reedbed, Pond, Hedgerow at Cabragh Wetlands
Tues Aug 25th Peat Bogs and Derrynaflan
Wed Aug 26th Ash and Hazel Woodland at Killough Hill
Thurs Aug 27th Geology and Mountains - Devils Bit Habitats
Frid Aug 28th Summary of the Irish Habitats and their interpretation through photography

The Sun

2009-08-10T05:56:00.000-07:00

Cabragh Wetlands Trust is holding its annual Flag Day in Thurles this Saturday (18th), and there will be number of collection points around the town. Of course fund raising is the day’s main objective, and we hope that the good citizens of Tipperary will respond with the generosity they always show when charities and other worthy causes hold out their voracious collecting buckets, but it is also a good chance to talk to people, spread the word about what we are trying to do, spark interest and perhaps even gain some new members. So stop by at one of our collection tables; take the opportunity to find out a bit more about what we are up to.

Despite the frequent deluges of rain, there have been some lovely sunny mornings recently. It’s so easy to take the sun for granted – without its light and warmth we would be in a very sorry state. The sun is the source of so much on our planet, and with the fortieth anniversary looming of Neil Armstrong’s first moon landing, it is worth reflecting on the fragility and interdependence the units of our solar system. The sun supplies our energy needs and the needs of all life. We have come to regard the use of fossil fuels like coal and oil as normal. Our creativity in inventing technology which allows us to exploit and utilize these energy sources has been astonishing, but they are finite sources of energy and will not last much longer – not to mention the consequences for the environment and climate of massive carbon emissions. Our traditional energy sources are going to run low within the lifetime of most people reading this. It is not a theoretical problem for the distant future, it is an immediate problem for you, your children and your grandchildren. We are living off our deposit account and most of us are not acknowledging that it will run out. All of earth’s processes depend on the sun; they work well enough. There are just three of these processes. First the producers supply the food. Many millions of years ago plants learned to trap sunlight and turn it into food, a process known as photosynthesis – a major step in Earth’s evolution. Secondly came the consumer animals which eat the plants and turn them into food, like cattle eating grass. We fall into this category. The last group are the decomposers, like earthworms, which have the important task of breaking down material and making it available for the plants to take up. And so the cycle begins again. For almost four billion years this process has continued. It is well tried and tested. Mankind lives within this process, which looks after our needs so well. We too are part of this interconnected and interdependent community of life. At a time when there is such heightened environmental concern, our challenge is to allow the sun and Earth to provide for all of life, just as they have done so very well for so long.

Summers Evenings

2009-08-05T04:01:00.000-07:00

The old people celebrated St John’s Eve with gusto, and the longest day of the year is always a milestone both in one’s personal life and in the world of nature. At this time of the year Cabragh Wetlands is at its pristine best. A few evenings ago, in a blood-red sunset as close as it ever gets to the Devil’s Bit, a Committee member came across a small group of ladies tucked silently beneath the trees watching the water lilies beginning to close at the end of another beautiful day. In answer to a nosey question they replied that they were waiting for an otter. Of course no otter arrived on demand – nature is a force beyond human control, and efforts to do so have resulted in a cataclysmic outlook for mankind. But here at Cabragh such concerns can seem far away, and time and patience bring their reward. Some come to capture a moment on camera, others on multi-pixel film, and yet nothing can recreate that fusion of sound, colour, smell and a hint of a breeze on the evening air. What is certain is that an evening stroll or quiet sojourn by the lakeside lifts the spirits and gives a feeling that, despite everything, all’s well with the world in this quiet green corner of Fertiana, Cabragh and Galbertstown. Hurrying back to the busy world, one begins to think that on the longest day of the year time is once again gaining on us. How many beautiful May evenings have we lost, just as we missed the churning lake waters of March and the arrival of migrant birds arrived from foreign shores? The children, of course, have another wonderful opportunity this summer. As the marsh at last begins to dry out, the butterflies and damselflies flit and hover, the orchids colour the grassland, reed buntings and stonechats grate the ear, and our youthful Detectives in the Wild are there to observe, record, measure but above all experience at first hand the joy that immersion in the natural world brings to the young mind. Detective in the Wild Summer Camp begins at Cabragh Wetlands on July 13th, and a similar week for adults during Heritage Week at the end of August. All details from the Wetlands Centre (0504-43879) or 0504-23831.

NATURE AND NUTURE

2009-06-17T03:40:00.000-07:00

At one time the agricultural advisory service followed the mantra ‘One more cow and one more sow and one more acre under the plough’ when advising farmers. This advice was very appropriate at the time as it fitted very well into a mixed farming model.
Farms in general were small and had a variety of enterprises. So people had experience with and knowledge of a range of enterprises. A small farm might have a Donkey/Pony, Cows, Calves, Hens, Geese, Pig etc. A kitchen garden with a variety of vegetables. Children growing up on such farms were exposed to a range of experiences. These were not cash economies, to a large extent people were self sufficient. Even if you were not from such a farm you had regular contact with such places, as you friends or cousins lived on one.
It turns out now that the wisdom and insights gained with such a lifestyle are very valuable and much needed at this time.

Our lifestyles have changed a lot especially in the past decade and many insights which we took for granted are now far less common.
Though children to-day have many opportunities they would benefit from more awareness of the world about them. Our experience at Cabragh Wetlands is that nature heals, and it brings out the best in children.

Our generation while we might have had less than children today, yet we inherited so much.
Our parents and communities shared much wisdom and knowledge with us, skills which we need for life. In the same way our children need those same insights. We cannot recreate the experiences we had but we can share our memories and wisdom. We can share some of the magic of the world about us with them, we owe it to the next generation.

MEETING WITH MICHAEL LOWRY TD

2009-05-15T11:03:00.000-07:00

Monday May 11th
Meeting with Michael Lowry TD at Cabragh Wetlands
Demonstrating his ongoing interest in developments at Cabragh Wetlands Michael Lowry T D met with members of the Trust at the Cabragh Wetland Centre .
It was welcome news that following our meetings with Minister Eamon O Cuiv TD and Minister John Gormley TD ( which were arranged though Michael Lowry) that Leader had come on board with a promise of a grant to update the building and facilities at Cabragh Wetland Centre. We also discussed the potential of the Wetlands as a visitor attraction and the possibility of assistance from Shannon Development in the designing an appropriate building and upgrading of facilities.
This is exciting news for us, for the volunteers who have worked so hard over the years to develop the Wetlands.
We are sincerely grateful to Michael Lowry for his genuine interest and support.

MEETING WITH MINISTERS

2009-05-15T11:01:00.000-07:00

Meeting with Ministers
The unceasing search for funding and assistance to help the Cabragh Wetlands Trust took a new twist recently. Following contacts with Michael Lowry T.D., meetings were arranged with Ministers Eamon O Cuiv and John Gormley. Thanks to the Tipperary Enterprise Board, we were able to source advice on the content of a PowerPoint presentation from Lorraine Grainger, Consultant. Armed with the best material we could muster, four members of the Trust Committee travelled to Dail Eirann, and gave their presentation, which involved a brief history of the Trust and a summary of the work done so far, before moving on to our vision for the future of the wetlands and of the Centre.
For obvious reasons both Ministers were extremely busy, but even so we were given generous time to make our case. Both Ministers were very impressed with the project, and especially the work done over the years by a small group of volunteers. Minister O Cuiv was very positive and is looking into how we can best source support for the next phase of development. Minister Gormley noted that the Cabragh Wetlands are a designated SAC (Special Area of Conservation) and NHA (National Heritage Area). He was very impressed by the rich biodiversity of the wetlands and promised to look into how he can best support our forward development. We are greatly encouraged by Minister O Cuiv’s remark that “this is the kind of project we want to support”.
Special thanks must go to Michael Lowry T.D. for his time and interest, and also his enthusiasm for what the Cabragh Wetlands Trust is about. His availability to meet us, and his attendance at both ministerial appointments is much appreciated. Though this is a difficult time to be seeking funds for anything, we remain positive.

NEW MALAWI UPDATE FROM JOE GALLAGHER

2009-04-13T11:32:00.000-07:00

As you walk around the villages along the lake shore large trees canbe seen in the middle of the street around which people and the few vehicles have to maneuvre! One might wonder why these trees remainhere in the way of things and two reasons emerge - firstly they are thousands of years old and were here before any humans arrived and secondly their wood is poor for burning and therefore cutting themdown is of little use and a lot of work for local people! These trees are known as Baobab trees and this is the common name of a genus(Adansonia) containing eight species of trees, of which one typeoccurs on mainland Africa. In Malawi Baobabs are found principally on the lake shore. Storieshave passed down through the generations of how God angry with the baobab picked up the tree and flung it back into the ground upsidedown. In Namibia it is said that God gave each animal a seed of a tree to plant. The hyena was left until last and angry at this planted the seed of the baobab tree upside down. Research has shown that the tree grows fast for the first 270 years and then slows down.Baobab trees do not produce annual growth rings and so radiocarbondating is used to estimate their age.

They produce big white flowersin October with each bloom lasting only 24 hours. These flowers are then pollinated by the fruit bat. It is a deciduous tree and shedsits leaves during the dry season from April until October. Baobabs store water inside the swollen trunk (up to 120,000 litres) to endurethe harsh drought conditions which occur during the dry season and hence their poor burning potential.The species reach heights of 5 to 30 metres (16 to 98 ft) and trunkdiameters of 7 to 11 metres (23 to 36 ft). An African Baobab specimenin Limpopo Province, South Africa, often considered the largest example alive, has a circumference of 47 metres (150 ft) and anaverage diameter of 15 metres (49 ft) and has been radiocarbon datedto be 6,000 years old.

The baobab has many uses here in Africa. The leaves are commonly used as a leaf vegetable throughout the area of mainland African distribution. They are eaten both fresh and as a dry powder. The fruit is nutritious possibly having more vitamin C than oranges and exceeding the calcium content of cow's milk Also known as "sour gourd"or "monkey's bread", the dry fruit pulp separated from seeds and fibers is eaten directly or mixed into porridge or milk. In Malawi,the fruit pulp is used to make a nutrient-rich juice.

Having a distinctive foul smell, tree parts may have been used by primitive tribes to ward off evil spirits, making the tree known inAfrican folklore as "God's Thumb."A Major Trollip while stationed in Namibia during World War One installed a flush toilet in his local hollow baobab where it remainsto this day (see picture)!

So these ancient trees have many uses here on this continent and are likely to remain an obstruction in thestreets of Africa for some time! Tionana

Google Video - Spring Lecture Series

2009-04-10T03:44:00.000-07:00

If you missed the talk on the 25/03/09 the The Cicada's 17 Year Sleep - Complexity and Emergence in the Natural World given by Dr. Declan Murphy you can view it through google videos by following the link below http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2763690042769934717&hl=en

If you missed the talk on 'Darwin and Darwinism' given by Adam Tozer in Feburary, you can also watch it on google vidoes by following the link http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5765645832228418054

MALAWI UPDATE FROM JOE GALLAGHER

2009-04-01T06:21:00.000-07:00

Muli bwanji! Greetings from Malawi. It is now a month since I arrived in this area to work for 4 months and I have been asked to write a little bit about what is to be found here. You may well ask what interest the natural world here might hold for Cabragh Wetlands but as I arrived here on a Saturday evening 4 weeks ago and saw the swallows flying low over the ponds collecting flys and watched the egrets picking their way through the muddy flats I realised that many of these birds were en route to Ireland and could well find themselves settling near Thurles for the summer months!

I am here on the the Nankhumba Peninsula which divides the southern end of Lake Malawi. The area here is part of Lake Malawi National Park and is a World Heritage Site This National Park, with its deep clear waters, is home to many hundred species of fish, nearly all endemic. Their importance for the study of evolution is comparable to that of the Galapagos Islands finches. Lake Malawi, lying within the Western Rift Valley, is a unique inland sea 560 km long. The lake's water is permanently stratified, having a warm upper layer overlying a cooler lower layer and is remarkably clear. Because of the these characteristics of the lake, should it be contaminated, the renewal time would be in the order of 1,700 years. The water level fluctuates according to season with a long-term cycle of fluctuation over years. Recent years have seen increases to the highest levels since recording began, probably due to increased rainfall and to forest clearing on the high plateau above. The peninsula has poor rocky soils very susceptible to erosion. In general, the hills are wooded and rise steeply from the lakeshore. Habitat types vary from cliffs and bouldery shores to pebbly and sandy beaches and from wooded hillsides to occasional swamps and lagoons.

The Park was established primarily to protect some of Lake Malawi's very rich aquatic life. The lake contains the largest number of fish species of any lake in the world: over 1,000 from eleven families with perhaps half occurring in the Park area. Over 90% of the fish can only be found in Lake Malawi. The lake contains 30% of all known mbuna or cichlid species of fish of which all but five species of over 400 are endemic to Lake Malawi. More than 70% of mbuna species are not described. They are highly colored, highly territorial and very specialized.
Mammals include chacma baboon and a variety of monkeys, leopard and hippopotamus. The varied birdlife includes black eagle, fish eagle and along the shoreline many waders. The islands, especially Mumbo and Boadzulu, are important nesting sites for several thousand white-breasted cormorant.

Much of the lakeshore is heavily populated. Five shoreline villages, Chembe, Masaka, Mvunguti, Zambo and Chidzale, are included within enclaves in the park. As the soil of the peninsula is poor and crops fail about 50% of the time, local people are dependent on fishing for a livelihood. Some 40,000 people make a living directly from the lake in offshore fisheries, catching 70% of the country's animal protein intake. The Park has been zoned to allow traditional fishing methods aimed at catching migratory fish in limited areas, although in most of the Park the resident fish
are completely protected.

And so this is an introduction to this area of Malawi from which many of our summer visitors will come. Tuanana!

Source: United Nations Environment Programme-World Conservation Monitoring Centre

2009-03-18T05:20:00.000-07:00

Wednesday 25th March 2009 8.00p.m. Cabragh Wetlands Education Centre.

The Cicada's 17 Year Sleep - Complexity and Emergence in the Natural World

Dr Declan Murphy
Have you ever wondered how a large flock of Starlings can fly and even negotiate complex manoeuvres without crashing into each other?

What do ant colonies, slime moulds and the teeming
streets of Victorian Manchester have in common? They are all
examples of complexity theory in action! Learn more about
this fascinating topic

Admission is free

SCHOOL TRIPS

2009-03-10T05:42:00.000-07:00

Once again we are at the time of year when schools come to visit us here at Cabragh. Over the past two years we have had about two thousand school children enjoy the delights of nature at the wetlands. Our experience is that children respond enthusiastically to the delights of the natural world. They are stimulated and fulfilled in a way that only nature can evoke.
During a visit to Cabragh which lasts about two and a half hours children explore a number of different habitats.
The field trip starts with a 20 minute Power Point presentation during which the children are introduced to topics which they will later explore. We present information on the pond and pond life, the hedgerow, bird hide, stream and the wetlands in general.
After this presentation the children are taken on a tour of the various habitats to experience first hand the wonderful variety of plant and animal species, and how they all form a delicate and complex web of life. We divide the children into groups but each child has the opportunity to experience each habitat and partake in each activity. Always popular is the pond and the community of life that lives there. Children study the various insects in the viewing tanks and use charts to identify them. A walk through the wetland has beautifully illustrated information boards along the way.
All our activities are based on the primary science programme for primary schools. While the children enjoy a day at the wetland they are also fulfilling part of the school curriculum. The study area is confined and with the supervision of the school's staff it offers a safe environment for exploration of the natural world.
We believe that if we plant the love of nature in our children they will mature into adults who will care about our planet. Children may make follow up visits to the wetlands at any time. For safety reasons they must be supervised by an accompanying adult.

BIRD BOX DAY - SATURDAY 14TH MARCH 2009

2009-03-06T06:08:00.000-08:00

We are having a Bird box day on Saturday March 14th from 11am to 1pm . Children are invited to come along accompanied by an adult to assemble their own bird box. There will be a charge of €5 for the box. NOTE: If they could bring a Phillips screw driver with them.
While they are working on the bird box Tom Gallagher will present a talk on ‘Garden Birds and their Folklore, and how to attract them’

Be The Change Seminar

2009-01-23T13:02:00.000-08:00

The most critical issue, and the greatest opportunity, of our time......and what you can do about it

We invite all interested people, young and old to attend this fascinating event. This seminar challenges us to create a future that is environmentally sustainable, socially just and spiritually fulfilling. It poses the questions: Where are we? How did we get here? Where can we go from here?

The Seminar will be conducted by Michael Rodgers SPS , Director of the Tearmann Centre Glendalough.

Venue Cabragh Wetlands Centre

Date Saturday January 31st

Times 10.30am to 3.30pm with breaks for refreshments

Please bring packed lunch. There is a registration fee of €20 to help cover expenses. We hope to see you there! Further details can be obtained from info@cabraghwetlands.ie www.cabraghwetlands.ie

Be The Change Symposium Trailer from Emily Smith on Vimeo.

Winter News

2008-12-31T13:24:00.000-08:00

This has been a year full of activity at Cabragh Wetlands.
Thanks to the assistance and support of Tipperary Enterprise we spent some
time during the year evaluating the role of Cabragh Wetlands and charting the course
ahead. We were ably assisted in the task by Environmental Consultant Mieke
Muyllaert and this led to our producing a business plan prepared by Lorraine Grainger.

During the year we initiated articles in The Tipperary Star, which if the feedback is
anything to go by, are appreciated by many people. Thanks sincerely to the editor Michael Dundon for his generous support.

Our Web site is up and running and well worth a regular visit. People visiting the site are from as far a field as China and the USA! Our web address is www.cabraghwetlands.ie

During the year we also produced a short DVD on the flora and fauna of the wetland, copies of which are available here at the Wetland at €10. It makes a lovely gift – recording as it does a local voluntary initiative in preserving a valuable resource. We thank all concerned for their support in bringing this fine snapshot of the wetlands to fruition. Ollie Delaney's editing is only topped by the amazing flight of the starlings captured by Seán Maher on video. We also have greeting cards on sale at the centre with photos of the flora and fauna of the wetlands.

Our school programme continues and we had a big number of Primary School visits during the year. We believe that what we have to offer here makes a valuable contribution to environmental education particularly in the field of habitat studies. The Summer Camp, popular as always, was well attended and the feedback from children and parents is very positive.

Together with Ceoltas we hosted regular evenings of Music and Song. We even managed to dance on the carpet and we look forward to having a timber floor in the future!

Our Open Day in July was well attended. Again we had Eanna Ní Leamhna who is always popular and never disappoints. Despite it being a very wet day it was enjoyable and informative. Thanks to all our loyal supporters for making this day such a success.

We were selected by the Co Council to represent Tipperary in the Pride of Place Competition. We had work to do to prepare for the event as they send out judges to view the place. We did well and received a Certificate. The profile which such competitions offer is valuable.

Bird Watch continue to use the Wetland as a bird ringing site, and they are putting together valuable information on the population and movement of birds. Rarities like the skua which Seán Maher found continue to surprise.

We also organized events in working with clay and stone during the year. Artists who conducted the workshops were Mary Scott and Philip Quinn. This was promoted by the Arts Officer of North Tipperary Co. Co. Thanks to all involved for a successful and fruitful event.

A huge loss to the centre is Marlene Harney who has returned to South Africa with her family. Marlene brought great energy and expertise to her work in promoting the wetlands. We were privileged to host a presentation to her of a beautiful painting of Cabragh Wetlands by Joe Gaynor on the 13th September. We wish Marlene, Durk and the boys success and happiness in their new home.

At this time our series of Winter talks have resumed. We hosted a selection of interesting topics all related to the environment. We believe that Cabragh Wetlands offers a valuable focus for environmental issues. Your involvement with us and your support is much appreciated.

We want to streamline our membership and we request all membership fees to be renewed at
this time. So may we give you a gentle reminder that your membership is due about now!

Many thanks for your support and Happy Christmas,
From all at Cabragh Wetlands

The Wren and Its Folklore

2008-12-28T13:22:00.000-08:00

For almost 1000yrs before St Patrick started his mission in Ireland the Celts and their druids worshiped many gods of nature. They placed great miportance on the belief that birds were messagners of the gods. As the christian religion spread many birds were seen as being good or bad ormens. The robin, pictured so often on Christmas cards, was respected because it was supposed to have received its red breast because it kept the fire in the stable at Bethlahem alight while Mary and Joseph slept.

The wren on the other hand was sacred to the Druids of pre- christian Ireland . The Irish noun for the wren 'Dreoilín' is probably derived from 'drui-éan' or druid bird. It was regarded by the ancient Celts as a messenger of the gods and the godess Clíona (the godess of love and beauty) took the form of a wren. The soul of the Oak King who was sacrificed to the sungod Bel at the summer solstice was embodied in the wren.

Probably because it has such strong connections with the pagan religion christians discredited the wren with stories of betrayal and treachery. The wren was supposed to have made Christ's whereabouts known to the Roman soldiers in the Garden of Gethsemane. It was also blamed for betraying St Stephen to his killers. In our own history when one Irish army was preparing to attack Cromwell's forces their presence was given away by a wren tapping an Irish drum. The Irish were all killed. While the robin stood for summer the wren stood for winter.

The wren was hunted on St. Stephen's Day - Lá an Dreolín. The dead wrens were tied to a holly branch and carried from door to door and the wren boys chanted verses like:

'The wren, the wren the king of all birds

St. Stephen's Day he was caught in the furze

Up with the kettle down with the pan

Give us a penny to bury the wren.'

If the good landlady of the house didn't give them a treat the wren was buried on the doorstep which disgraced that household.

Winter and hedgehogs

2008-11-14T13:33:00.000-08:00

As winter approaches, Mother Nature retreats, with wonderful order and efficiency, into her shell. In the flower garden the annuals have set their seed for the next generation to be able to emerge and take over from this year's dying crop. The great majority of insects have laid their eggs or crept under cover for the winter to ensure the survival of their species for another year. As you give your garden its end-of-year tidy, look out for ways of boosting their choice of over-wintering sites. Don't compost all your sweet-corn husks; leave a few secured in a wall, hedge or tree where their cells will provide great shelter for bees, ladybirds and the like. Sun flower stalks cut into 15 inch lengths and bound together for strength, will be five star accommodation for a myriad of tiny creatures. Be creative and see what you can design – get the children involved!

Frogs and toads bury themselves down into the vegetation to avoid the worst pf the winter's blast. With the increasing chilliness of October evenings, bats will have found a roosting site where they can huddle together for warmth; they might hang in hollow trees, or in the dim recesses of a barn or loft space, or even in your nest box if you have been far-sighted enough to provide one. At Cabragh Wetlands our pipistrelle bats are snoozing happily, but will still be tempted out on unseasonably mild evenings, especially as the moths they feed on may also be on the wing. Squirrels have been busy collecting and storing caches of nuts as winter food, and as it gets colder they will spend more and more time in their nest, or 'drey', popping out every now and then to locate one of their many larders and top up on their favourite nourishment.

But at this time of year do make an effort to remember the hedgehogs. They are one your garden's best friends, an avid consumer of excess slugs and snails, and you could construct a great shelter for them in a few seconds, with a few blocks or timber for walls and some planking for a roof, weighed down with a few stones. Tuck it under a hedge in a quiet corner, preferably away from the road and pop in a few handfuls of warm straw or hay. Last winter was unseasonably warm and many hedgehogs mistimed their breeding season, producing helpless, hairless young too early in the year, and many were killed by returning frosts and icy winds.

Halloween is another great danger for the hedgehogs, who love to overwinter in the depths of a heap of logs. They can retire at a moment's notice to the safety and warmth of a cosy woodpile. Are you planning a Halloween bonfire? Then please take the time to dismantle the wood before you set it alight, and give that most delightful of creatures a fair chance to get out and find himself alternative winter quarters.

October

2008-11-08T13:29:00.000-08:00

October is upon us, a time of mists, cobwebs, fruits and berries – "mellow fruitfulness" as Keats put it. The hedgerows and trees are laden with berries, and many species will be competing to grab the fruit and either eat it now or store it for the tough winter months ahead. At Cabragh Wetlands we have a fine mature hedge, perhaps 200 or more years old, which is an invaluable habitat for exploration with visiting school groups. There within a few yards of each other you will find blackberry, spindle berries, elderberries, rosehips, haws, sloes, holly, ivy and others, all currently dripping with beautiful fruit in various stages of maturity.

There is of course a warning to be given out – many of the berries you see on trees and hedgerows are poisonous, and it is a basic rule that you do not pick and eat anything until you are absolutely sure what it is. But do not be afraid of nature's larder; our ancestors have used the fruits around them for many millennia, and it is one of the many paradoxes of our civilization that as we 'progress' and develop our food technology and convenience shopping facilities, so we are shedding the knowledge and experience of countless generations of our ancestors. With the alarming rise in food prices this year and the dire news from Wall Street and London, there seems to be a lot to be said for returning to a more simple and natural way of life, using the food around us and relying less on carbon-emitting, expensive imports from around the world.

So have a look in your garden and at the trees and hedges around you to see what might be used. Brambles are past their peak now, but there are still plenty of elderberries. They start life as softly fragrant white flowers in spring, long used to make refreshing elderflower cordial and tea, which was a partial remedy for colds and diseases of the throat. Leaves and unripe berries are poisonous, but the ripe berries are free of poison and excellent additions to blackberry pies and jam, not to mention elderberry juice and wine. Elder may be a rather unsightly tree, almost a weed given the rapidity of its growth and its ability to re-sprout from a stump, but it is home to a very large number of insects, perhaps second only to the oak as a habitat.

Small, sour crab apples are abundant this year; it is a great orchard tree for pollinating normal cooking and eating apples, and crab apples make excellent jellies for use with gamey meats, like venison, pheasant and rabbit. Go out and collect rowan berries (mountain ash), which used to be given to chickens, pigs and cows. Wild birds love them, and they are a feast for the eyes as they dangle in large bright red clusters. As rich in Vitamin C as the orange, rowans also can be turned into a gourmet jelly to accompany game dishes. Rose hips are even richer in Vitamin C than the orange, and also make excellent jams, jellies and teas.

A favourite autumn berry is on the spindle tree, which is a modest summer plant, but comes into its own at this time of year when the seed capsules redden. The birds wait until the berry splits open to reveal up to four orange seeds hanging on individual strings. Do not try cooking with spindle berries – they are poisonous. The tree gets its name from our ancestors who used the wood to make spindles for spinning yarn on their spinning-wheels. Perhaps we need to make more use of the wonders that nature provides.

Wild Gardens

2008-11-04T13:28:00.000-08:00

It is never nice to have your garden criticised by a visitor or neighbour. Just as we tend to overrate our driving skills and take criticism very personally, so our gardens are our own territory, organized to our own taste, needs and convenience. But just reflect on the fact that your garden, whatever its size, is also home to countless living creatures, each of which has taken precisely the same length of time to evolve as you and me. Each creature, be it bird, mouse, earwig, earthworm, dragonfly, wasp, bee, moth, beetle or whatever, has its own needs and instincts, each requires sources of food and places of shelter, just like you and me, and each has its own crucial place in the food chain and the greater web of life. As wild places are gradually reduced, so our gardens become ever more important habitats for survival.

So my garden may be too untidy for somebody's taste, but it does contain a rich variety of plants, and a range of places that our fellow creatures can use to good effect. There is a great danger that an over-tidy garden will become sterile and relatively lifeless. Concrete patios, tarmac driveways, decking, cemented walls, sprayed flowerbeds and immaculately cut lawns may well be the fashion of the moment, but they are anathema to most wildlife. Remember as well that too much concrete and tarmac will reduce the ability of the ground to absorb the extraordinary rain we have had recently. If we in Thurles all pave over our gardens, the flooding downstream in Clonmel will worsen.

So as autumn sets in, leaves drop on your lawn, plants die back and the migrant birds begin their travels to avoid a Tipperary winter, don't be in too much of a rush to tidy everything up. Do you really want your neighbour to stand back and pretend to admire your immaculately scrubbed but sterile environment? Leave some grass a few inches long; this will draw in a range of insects that are essential rungs in the food chain and provide regular meals for any mammals that may live nearby. Rake up your leaves by all means, but leave some in heaps (perhaps held together in a ring of wire mesh) to provide shelter and hibernation space for insects and mammals like hedgehogs. Similarly a rough and ready pile of old logs will give wonderful protection and sustenance, especially for beetles, frogs and toads. Nest boxes are easily erected, and a good hedges give both nesting sites for your birds and 'roadways' for mammals and insects too travel along in relative safety. Leave seed heads on

A recent newspaper article bemoaned the decline of traditional bird species like the lapwing and corn bunting, with comments that the decline was probably irreversible because governments are not doing enough to halt the decline. If true, that is a terrible indictment of modern society. But why on earth do we need governments to organise everything? Are we so helpless and so controlled by the tsars of fashion that we cannot take responsibility for our own pieces of the earth and manage them in a nature-friendly way? Many of you will have children who have studied ecology, perhaps at the Cabragh Wetlands. Why not give them a little project by sending them out to do an audit of your garden's nature-friendliness. How many good features can they find in your garden that will boost the chances of some insect, plant, bird or mammal surviving the winter to breed again next spring? Any feedback will be welcomed, and we would welcome the chance to share ideas.

Butterflies and friends leaving!

2008-10-31T13:27:00.000-07:00

David Attenborough recently remarked that we may well be moving into a post-butterfly world, which is by any standards a depressing thought from a man not normally given to unnecessary scare-mongering. True, the abysmal weather has not helped this summer, but there seems no reason to doubt that they are becoming less common. Those who focus their studies on butterflies, moths and insects are called entomologists, and they have recorded an astonishing 170,000 species of Lepidoptera around the world, about 90% of which are moths, the remainder butterflies. Butterflies are day-flying, normally brightly-coloured and with clubbed antennae, with their wings folded together over their back. Moths are more diverse, with both day and night flying species; their antennae do not have clubbed tips, but are feathered or filamentous and most have bristles at the base of their wings.

The fossil record traces butterflies back to about 40 million years ago and moths to about 100-140 million. Go back another eon to 250 million years ago and you find the emergence of the caddis fly, a winged insect very precious to the Cabragh Wetlands, and which is perhaps a link-species in the evolution of butterflies and moths.

Lepidoptera emerged alongside the first flowering plants, and many species of butterfly are still closely linked to particular plant species. At Cabragh Wetlands we are very conscious of the close association of the brimstone butterfly to the rare buckthorn tree; the female lays her eggs on the shoots of the buckthorn, and when the caterpillar emerges ten days later, it can feed on the fresh young buckthorn leaves. A month later they pupate while attached to a stem by a silk pad, and after another 14 days the new adult butterfly emerges. If the buckthorn is chopped down, the brimstone's survival is threatened. Similarly that 'unsightly' nettle patch in your garden is probably home to red admiral and peacock butterflies; the red admiral migrates from Europe in late spring and its caterpillar makes a shelter by drawing nettle leaves together with silk, eats them and moves on. The peacock lays its eggs on the underside of young stinging nettles, and its caterpillars rear up at you if you disturb them. Over-tidy your garden by spraying your nettles, and you reduce the chances of the delights of swarms of butterflies. Plant buddleia bushes (named after the collector the Rev. Adam Buddle, 1660-1715) if you want to attract in hundreds of butterflies and infuse your garden with scent and colour. It is not called the butterfly bush for nothing.

The symbiosis between butterfly and plant is crucial, and not only must the plant be present for the butterfly to flourish, it must also develop at the right moment in the year. One of the signs of climate change is that spring is coming earlier, and it is not easy for butterflies, moths and other creatures to adapt their lifecycles to a new set of man-made timings. We are interfering with natural systems that have evolved in beautiful natural harmony over millions of years. There is a web of life that links all species; all are interconnected and interdependent. Butterflies have been compared to canaries in the coalmines; when something is not quite right with the environment, they are seriously affected. We wrote recently about the serious predicament facing bees; now it is the turn of the butterfly. Man also needs a harmonious and healthy natural environment, and take time to ponder on the recent World Health Organization's prediction that by 2020 mental illness will be the most common health problem facing us. Getting back in harmony with nature and all of creation is vital for us as individuals as well as for man as a species.

Talking of entomologists, this is a sad week for Cabragh Wetlands. For four years we have relied hugely on the dedication, expertise and energy of Marlene Harney to get our educational programmes up and running, writing worksheets, collecting specimens, making displays, helping school groups, giving a wonderful lecture on pollination, pond dipping, advising on décor, and countless other contributions. She deserves a full-page spread to herself. Sadly for us the time has come for the Harney family to migrate back to South Africa. We are immensely grateful for all that she has given to the Wetlands, not least in her professionalism and scientific thoroughness, but also in terms of friendship and simple human generosity. Fair winds and bon voyage, Marlene, and we wish you, Dirk and the boys the very best for the next phase in your globe-trotting lives. Auf wiedersehen.

Starlings

2008-10-29T14:32:00.000-07:00

During the winter months starlings feed up to 30 miles from their night time roost. As evening approaches the flocks of starlings returning to the roost and begin to form into progressively larger flocks. Large pre-roost groups form in places where the birds can get one last meal before nightfall such as Cabragh Wetlands. Just before the birds settle down for the night they fly in beautiful formations, over the evening sky in one of the most beautiful natural displays to be seen in Ireland. At Cabragh Wetlands these flocks have been estimated to be tens of thousands in size. We are holding a joint event with the Tipperary branch of Bidwatch Ireland on Sunday 16^th November, when Kevin Collins will talk at 3.00 pm on the Winter Birds of the Cabragh Wetlands, followed by an evening Starling Watch (weather permitting). Come along and enjoy this wonderful sight! Videos of this sight from other locations can be viewed on Youtube - an example of what can be expected can be seen here

Winter Talks

2008-10-29T13:33:00.001-07:00

Cabragh Wetlands series of Winter Talks gets underway this coming Wednesday (22^nd October) at 8.00pm with a talk by Catherine Keena on 'Farming and Wildlife'. Catherine works for Teagasc and is based at Kildalton, Co. Kilkenny. She is a well-known figure in environmental circles, speaking frequently to a variety of audiences and leading field trips and walks to show both farmers and the public a better way forward for environmental management. Her speciality is in Countryside Management, and only this week she has been involved in the Teagasc Biodiversity Demonstration in Bansha, focusing on native trees and hedgerows.

This talk should be of real interest to the general public and of great importance for those who are involved in land management, be it of a substantial farm or just your own garden. While the news is dominated by banking crashes and credit crunches, such stories as the report last week that up to a quarter of mammal species are threatened with extinction are largely ignored by the media, pushed to the middle pages and unnoticed by the bulk of the public. Which will seem the more important to our grandchildren – bloated bonuses to bankers, a drop in house prices and government bale-outs of banks, or the loss of habitats, destruction of biodiversity, and the reduction and elimination of a great range of our fellow species? We all need to look at what we can do at a local level to improve wildlife habitats.

So please come along to the Cabragh Wetlands next Wednesday evening, at 8.00 pm to hear about Farming and Wildlife, with, we hope, an emphasis on wetland management. We are privileged to have Catherine speak to us and we all have much to learn about best practice in managing the small pieces of the earth for which we take responsibility. Entry is free.

Cabragh Wetlands Winter Talks will continue in November with a double bill of particular interest to bird watchers. We are holding a joint event with the Tipperary branch of Bidwatch Ireland on Sunday 16^th November, when Kevin Collins will talk at 3.00 pm on the Winter Birds of the Cabragh Wetlands, followed by an evening Starling Watch (weather permitting). On Wednesday 26^th November local teacher and naturalist Tom Gallagher will give a talk at 8.00pm on 'Garden Birds, their Song, Folklore and how to attract them'. Make a note in your diaries.

Researchers Wanted

2008-10-29T13:24:00.000-07:00

The watchwords of the Cabragh Wetlands Trust are "Conservation, Recreation, Education", core values that cement the Trust firmly at the heart of the community. Conservation speaks for itself, and with our Open Days, talks, workshops, camps and flourishing school visits, we are doing a lot to develop recreational and educational programmes. With third-level students heading back to University, it seems a good moment to raise the important issue of higher education.

The Cabragh Wetlands are a potential treasure trove for the serious student. Very little research has been carried out here, apart from some crucial work in the mid-1990's which established just how important it was to preserve the wetlands because of the rarity and diversity of species and habitats. More recently valuable work has been done on invertebrates like beetles and butterflies, but much more remains to be done. As the area has had almost no top-flight academic research, any work is almost bound to be original and ground-breaking, and hence should have a very good chance of earning high marks. Any examiner will appreciate the vibrancy of originality.

Botanists, biologists, zoologists, entomologists, hydrologists, geographers, historians, climatologists……there is something here for you. We need talented undergraduate and post-graduate students to get into the wetlands and find out just what is there, how well it is surviving, and how it can be best protected. Whether you are a student at the TI, or a native of the area who is heading to Dublin, Cork, Limerick or elsewhere to study, do bear in mind that a unique opportunity is available here in the heart of North Tipperary. We need to establish good base-line data about the flora and fauna of the Wetlands, both native and seasonal visitors, and to find out more about how the ecology of the wetlands works as a whole, from the flow and purity of the water, to the interrelationships between species in the waterways, reedbeds, watermeadows and hedgerows. There are about a dozen distinct habitats across the site, all worthy of serious study.

Any ambitious and enthusiastic student would be doing themselves a disservice if they did not consider doing their research at Cabragh, and in principle all the Trust wants in return is a copy of your research and results, and if appropriate a presentation to the committee. Bear us in mind, and pass the message on to friends and fellow students.

Apologies!

2008-10-12T13:27:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the recent absence of the Cabragh Wetlands website from the world wide web! We are now back online and hope to update it further soon. Upcoming events include the start of the Winter Lecture Series on the 22nd October with a talk on habitat preservation by Catherine Keena of Countryside Management, Kildalton Agricultural College. Further talks will look at garden birds, evolution theory and Darwin, the history of Thurles, hunting and conservation, complexity theory and taking time to awaken your sense of interconnectedness! A wide and varied topics for all. Further details of times of the talks will be on the website soon

Taxidermists and all that!

2008-08-29T07:10:00.000-07:00

The taxidermy industry must be very pleased with the Cabragh Wetlands, whichmay be committed to conserving life, but is not beyond making good use ofany corpses that are found in good condition. Our collection of stuffedcreatures is growing steadily, and at the time of typing this, I can see twopheasants, a shoveller duck, red squirrel, barn owl, stoat, kestrel, skuaand a splendid fox.These specimens were almost all found within or close to the wetlands; somewere road kills, though we must hope against hope that drivers mature andslow down so that the death toll on the roads is reduced. Have you everstopped to think about how many non-human lives are lost as a result of baddriving? If the global human loss to traffic accidents is around 50 million,the non-human toll must be in the billions by now. And we call it progress!Still, that fox is rather splendid. He has the softest coat of ginger-redfur, with surprisingly short black legs. The children will love the chanceto get up close to such a wild creature and even dare to put a finger in itsmouth and feel the points of his teeth. The tiny stoat has an even moreimpressive set of teeth, razor sharp and almost serrated.The skua is the odd one out, yet he really was found in the CabraghWetlands, as the Star told us in an article last autumn. Identification isstill not finalized, but it is most likely a young pomarine or arctic skua,probably bred off the west or north coast of Scotland and a summer visitorto Ireland. It perhaps lost its way in bad weather last October, came inlandand died of starvation in the Wetlands.As a frequent visitor to uninhabited Scottish islands, your correspondenthas first hand experience of being dive-bombed by arctic skuas, which areutterly fearless in defence of their nests. Skuas are guilty of robbery withviolence, harassing terns, auks and gulls until in panic they disgorge theirfood for the skua to steal. If you go near their nests, they will fly highand swoop down, often working in pairs to drive you away. And if you don'tgo, they will hit you, diving in feet first from behind and cracking you onthe head with those sharp webbed feet.We have placed our stuffed skua eight feet up a wall and you can get someidea of the thrill of him diving at you. Come and see him! And if you doencounter some poor creature on the road, stuff him in a bag, pop him in thefreezer and give us a call. Keep your local taxidermist in work!

Every little helps!

2008-08-25T12:51:00.000-07:00

The nomination of the Cabragh Wetlands Trust for an All-Ireland Pride of Place Conservation Award is very good news both for the Trust and for the local community. North Tipperary County Council has made the nomination for a cross-border award, in conjunction with Cooperation Ireland. Whether or not we get to shake hands with the President at the autumn Awards Ceremony is perhaps immaterial….though it would be nice to win! What matters is that there is growing recognition at a national level of the key role that community groups play in preserving their local habitats.

It would be easy to leave ecological protection to government, whether at county, national or European levels, and they have vital roles to play in setting ground rules and providing expertise and watchdogs….and money. But we have to believe that we as individuals are the ultimate guardians of our own habitats. If we do not care for the health of our own piece of earth, why should anyone else? It would be good to think that it is morally uplifting for us to be involved, and certainly the best possible example and bequest to our children.

The recent death of Edward Lorenz robbed us of the man recognized as the developer of “Chaos Theory”. He once ran a weather-prediction programme on his computer and decided to double-check the results, but to save time reduced his figures from six decimal places to three, an apparently insignificant adjustment of one part in a thousand. The results were dramatically different, and the implications were developed in his 1972 talk: “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”

Small deviations, small actions, can have massive and unpredictable results. Chaos Theory has had a profound impact on scientific and social theory, resulting in “one of the most dramatic changes in mankind’s view of nature since …..Newton”. It’s up there with Darwin and Einstein.

We have to believe that what we do as individuals and a community matters. Who knows what difference putting a coin in a bucket might make, or teaching your child about flowers, or buying binoculars instead of an ipod, or adding your perspective, expertise and enthusiasm to the work of a local group. If we all act locally, we can make a difference globally.

Bird Ringing

2008-08-12T12:49:00.000-07:00

The Munster Ringing group has been continuing its seven year programme of ringing birds at a number of sites across the region, to try and build up some solid data about what is happening to our bird populations in this time of environmental degradation. One of their regular ringing sites is the Cabragh Wetlands, and it is worth stopping if you see them at work – there is often something interesting to see.

A recent capture was a Common Grasshopper Warbler (locustella naevia) – a tiny, secretive bird with an olive-brown back, whitish underside and a faint white stripe over its eye. A very shy bird, it loves to hide in rough tussocky undergrowth and thickets, and will tolerate both damp and dry habitats. It must have found a perfect summer home at Cabragh after its extraordinary migration from sub-SaharanAfrica.

Its numbers have declined significantly in recent years, though it is still spread widely in Ireland and Britain. Loss of habitat appears to be the main cause; people are too quick to dismiss the sort of rough ground the grasshopper warbler loves as valueless.

When people are about, the grasshopper warbler will stay hidden (a sensible bird!), but you have a good chance of hearing it. Its call is easily confused with that of an insect, and has been compared to a mill- or spinning-wheel, or the winding mechanism of a fishing-rod reel. It seems to be able to throw its voice, like a ventriloquist, and the sound can carry over a mile on a still night. One estimate is that it can ‘sing’ 1400 double notes per minute, and up to 250,000 during a single night.

Preserve habitat, cherish and enjoy the presence of such amazing creatures.

Bats

2008-08-05T01:35:00.000-07:00

As you walk around the Wetlands on these summer evenings one can see bats flying above you. With the launch of the new Batman film it is worth having a look at these fascinating creatures.

Bats are mammals which means that they are warm blooded, give birth to their young rather than lay eggs and also feed their young milk. They typically become active in late spring and early summer. A group of female bats come together to roost and form a nursery. Each female gives birth to a single baby that they can identify by its smell and sound. An interesting feature of bat behaviour is how they mate. Although mating will take place at this time of year (August) the female will not release her egg (ovulate) until next spring. She keeps the sperm with her as she hibernates and then will become pregnant next spring. As they hibernate over the winter their body temperature will drop to 8^oC.

The old wives tale that bats will get caught in your hair is not true. Although bats eyesight can be good for daytime, like humans they have poor eyesight at night. Therefore, bats locate their prey using a system known as echolocation. They emit high pitched sounds beyond the range of human hearing and by listening to the sound as it bounces off objects they can locate insects and other objects and tell how big it is and in what direction it is moving. Using special equipment we have been able to record the bat sounds from Cabragh Wetlands and these can be heard on www.cabraghwetlands.ie. Come out and see them some evening – we promise with their expert echolocation they won’t get caught in your hair!

Come and help!

2008-07-30T12:45:00.000-07:00

We are still frequently asked what the Cabragh Wetlands are, so for those of you still unsure, here is a quick overview of what the Trust is about.

Keen local amateur naturalists were aware that something catastrophic could be about to happen, when in the late 1980’s, the decision to close the Sugar Plant was taken. The settling ponds were a haven for a large number of birds, both native permanent residents and seasonal migrants from both the Arctic and Africa, and the flood plains around were well known for the range of plants and insects that flourished. It was feared that the habitat faced possible destruction, with housing estates or landfill mooted as potential “developments” for this unique ecosystem.

The settling ponds were lost, but the formation of the Cabragh Wetlands Trust, generous assistance from the Sugar Company and support from a variety of authorities (N. Tipp County Council, Shannon Development, Leader, Heritage Council, Tipperary Enterprise, FAS and others) enabled the Trust to purchase a few acres and work with local landowners to manage the larger wetland area in an ecologically sustainable way.

Conservation is the Trust’s raison d’etre, but we are in this for the long term, and the best way to ensure the permanent survival of this haven is to make it a community project, and to make recreation and education secondary priorities. So while we are committed to maintaining the wetlands ecosystem, water purity, healthy habitats and biodiversity, we are also establishing the Wetlands Centre as a forum to enhance public understanding of environmental issues, as a support for all levels of education through field studies courses and research and through public lectures and courses. We are doing what we can to promote both our natural and cultural heritage, and to encourage community involvement and recreation.

That’s a very broad brief, and one that needs support and involvement by a large number of people. If you want to help, come out and see us one morning, or call us on 0504-43879. The next Open Day will be on Saturday August 30^th during Heritage Week, but the walkways are almost always open for a quiet, contemplative, restorative stroll.

Wild at the Wetlands 2008!

2008-07-25T05:20:00.000-07:00

A day of events at Cabragh Wetlands to celebrate Heritage Week 2008 will take place on Saturday 30th August from 1-5pm.

There will be two workshops sponsored by an Arts Grant from North Tipperary County Council to cater for adults and children. Placesf for these workshops is limited and registration is essential so please contact us using the details below if you are interested in attending the workshops to ensure that places are available.

1. The Studio, Holycross will facilitate an Art and Craft workshop for 20 children age 4 yrs and up.
Artist Mary Scott and Jackie Matthews will take you on a creative journey using clay, felt (sheep wool) and materialws from the natural environment, culminating in an Exhibition of Art With Nature. Cost of workshop is only €10

2. Philip Quinn on Stonemad, Holycross will run an introductory stone carving workshop. This is your chance to leave your mark (under expert guidance) on a large block that we hope will become the base of a permanent statue for the Wetland Centre. Places will be limited to about 6 and it will not be suitable for younger children. The cost of this workshop is also only €10

In addition to the workshops here will be an Open Afternoon, with guided walks of the education centre, bird hides and wetlands which will be suitable for all ages. The bird hide has a lift to reach it for those who are unable to use the stairs. Tea and light refreshments will be provided allowing a fun day for those of all age groups. Admission to all events apart from the workshops is free.
For further details Call 0504- 43879 ( mornings) Mobile 087-7962177 for more details or email info@cabraghwetlands.ie.

Open Day Thank You!

2008-07-22T03:47:00.000-07:00

Last week was a very busy time at Cabragh Wetlands. Many hours of intensive preparation by a very dedicated team of volunteers lay behind the Open Day, which we think has boosted our coffers by something in the region of €5000. That will make a great difference to our annual finances, and will help us maintain the many habitats and biodiversity of this exceptional site.

It is not possible to thank everyone who helped, but it was a revelation to see how many family, friends and neighbours rallied round to ensure the success of the day. It showed that there is a real depth of community spirit alive and flourishing in the Thurles area, and reminds us of what can be achieved if we all give a few hours a year to worthy local causes. With judging approaching for our Pride of Place nomination, there was a reminder of the potential strength and achievement that is possible if groups and individuals cooperate and work together. Wouldn’t the world be a healthier place if we focused more on mutual aid rather than rivalry and competition?

The day was a reminder too of the creative talent in our midst – stone and wood carvers, artists, photographers, basket weaver, painters, gardeners, cooks and bakers all displayed their talents to good effect and contributed to the buzzing atmosphere. It was instructive to be able to see and hear about developments in greener energy and house-building, and to find out about the educational work of the Wetlands Centre and the courses at the Tipperary Institute. There were animals to see, and a chance to walk with Eanna Ni Lamhna, who offered great insights into the plants, birds and insects of the wetlands. And we must not forget our noble auctioneer, who defied the rain and some customer resistance to persuade us to open our wallets and bid for a good bargain. Thanks too to the many who donated raffle prizes, auction items and bric-a-brac; without your generosity the day would not have gone so well.

Wild at the Wetlands 2008

2008-07-08T15:49:00.000-07:00

This is a preliminary notice of a day of events at Cabragh Wetlands to celebrate Heritage Week 2008. It will take place on Saturday 30^th August from 1-5pm.

There will be two workshops sponsored by an Arts Grant from North Tipperary County Council.

1. The Studio, Holycross will facilitate an Art and Craft workshop for 20 children age 4 yrs and up.

Artist Mary Scott and Jackie Matthews will take you on a creative journey using clay, felt (sheep wool) and materialws from the natural environment, culminating in an Exhibition of Art With Nature.

A small charge will be made for these courses- details later. In addition there will be an Open Afternoon, with guided walks, tea and light refreshments and admission to this is free.

For further details Call 0504- 43879 ( mornings) Mobile 087-7962177 for more details or email info@cabraghwetlands.ie. Further details will appear soon!

Cabragh Wetlands Summer Camp

2008-07-05T00:46:00.000-07:00

When a school trip comes to Cabragh Wetlands, we ask the children: "Are we nature too?" They pause and reflect, but eventually agree that we too are part of nature. That question and response have implications.

We exist in a communion with a wider web of life, inter-connected and inter-dependent, just like every other species. Of course we have our distinctive features, not least that we can reflect on and delight in this wonderful world, but other species have their own unique gifts as well. The fish can live underwater; the owl can hear the heartbeat of the mouse thirty feet away, and swoop and catch it with extraordinary precision. This world of ours works because everything is in balance and inter-connected, is a communion of subjects.

Yet in the past one hundred years we have seen our species grow from one billion to almost seven billion, with almost every other species in decline and too many already gone into premature extinction. We have been happy to see ourselves as the crown of creation, but are perhaps slowly coming to see that we are as vulnerable and inter-dependent as every other species. The Burmese cyclone and Chinese earthquake remind us of our frailty before the forces of the natural world.

When we place a seed in the ground it grows because the micro-organisms in the soil create the conditions for the plant to grow and produce food for us. If those micro-organisms were not there to do their bit, we would have no food to eat. Soil purity is crucial for our survival. Did you know that there is more life below the surface of the earth than on it? Think about that the next time you are tempted to pour chemicals onto the earth or dump potentially toxic material onto a land fill site or discard plastic bags and sheeting which suffocate, rot and destroy the life in the ground beneath.

How do we address such challenges? Central to any corrective action must be to plant the seed of awareness in our children and communities. If you want your child to experience the joy of discovering and understanding nature, why not enrol him/her in the Detective in the Wild Summer Camp at Cabragh Wetlands from July 7th-11th 2008. Ring Seamus on 0504-23831 for further details. Last year one satisfied dad commented: “The children learnt about things that really matter.”

Cuckoo spit (or is it from a witch?)

2008-06-26T06:01:00.000-07:00

Blobs of frothy liquid on young stems and leaves can be seen as you walk around the Wetlands. You may wonder what is in these blobs and their name does not give any more detail. They are commonly known as “Cuckoo spits” but apart from appearing about the same time as cuckoos are heard, the froth has no connection with any bird. Certainly cuckoo-spit was an important ingredient in witches' brew (as in Macbeth) and in Scandinavian countries the froth is known as 'witches' spit'! Instead it is secreted by the immature stages of sap-sucking insects known as froghoppers. The adult insects live openly on the plant and do not produce any cuckoo spit.

The froghopper is an insect, and a member of the order Homoptera. They are called froghoppers because they are able to hop significant distances when disturbed. They feed on plant sap which they extract from the leaves and stems of plants. The life-cycle of the Froghopper is in three stages: egg, nymph, and adult. In this respect it is similar to such insects as grasshoppers and dragonflies. Up to 100 eggs are laid by the adult females in the late summer into an incision made into the tissues of the host plant. The eggs hatch into nymphs the following spring.

The nymph is the sexually immature stage. It resembles the adult in shape but unlike the adult has no wings and only rudimentary legs and eyes. Crucially, it has but a thin outer body layer, or exoskeleton, which unlike the adult's is not covered by a waxy layer. For this reason it needs to protect itself from desiccation. This is achieved by surrounding itself in a frothy mass of soapy bubbles known colloquially as cuckoo-spit. The froth also helps to protect the developing nymph from predators by disguising the nymph. If determined to seek out the insect, the predator will be dissuaded by the unpalatable taste of the froth. Enclosed within this froth, the nymph moults several times before emerging as an adult in early summer. The froth is created by the insect excreting a fluid, the result of excess undigested plant sap, exuding through the anus. This sap, as it is excreted, mixes with a secretion from the abdominal glands. Air bubbles are introduced through a special valve on the abdomen which acts like a bellows, and contact with the air causes the liquid to ferment, forming the froth.

Snipes in the air!

2008-06-22T05:52:00.000-07:00

Anyone walking through the Wetlands on these summer evenings will hear the strange sound of the snipe as it dives through the air. This sound is made by its outer tail feathers and the sound has been likened to that of a kid goat – hence its name in Irish “An Gabhairin” or the little goat. The sound is made by the male during the breeding season and the perched male shown here makes a chucka-chucka call. If you stumble across the snipe as you walk along the paths it explodes into the air in a zig-zag flight, with a rasping ‘creech’ call. Its plumage is brown, with golden-buff and black stripes on the head and back and white edges to its tail. It uses that long beak to probe in the mud for worms and invertebrates, the sensitive tip helping it feel for prey. The snipe has the extraordinary ability to open the tip of its bill while the rest remains closed. Hidden amidst vegetation the nest usually contains four eggs, olive-brown with dark blotches. After 20 days the young hatch and leave the nest almost immediately, able to fly after just two weeks and fully grown after seven. The snipe is the bird of the wetlands and the natural choice for our logo.

Open Day

2008-06-18T10:49:00.000-07:00

The Annual Cabragh Wetlands Open Day takes place again this year on Saturday 6th July with the gates opening at 1.00p.m. A wide variety of events are planned for the day for all members of the family. There will be an exhibition of local arts and crafts and the education centre and bird hide will be open for all to see. Eanna Ni Lamhna, of RTE and An Taisce fame, will lead exciting guided walks of the wildlife of the Wetlands later in the afternoon. There will also be a raffle and auction of a variety of interesting objects. Tea and refreshments will be available and admission is free. Email info@cabraghwetlands.ie for further information

The Swift

2008-05-15T12:42:00.000-07:00

Swifts (Apus apus) are birds that can be seen flying at high speeds and screaming as they fly in these summer months, as they catch flies in the Cabragh Wetlands. They are experts at this and parent swifts returning with food for their young reveal a large bulge below the beak due to a mass of insects packed into the throat pouch glued together in saliva.

The family scientific name, Apodidae, comes Ancient Greek, meaning "without feet", since swifts have very short legs and never settle voluntarily on the ground, perching instead on vertical surfaces. This is because it would be too difficult, if not impossible, for swifts to take off from the ground due to their short legs. Due to this swifts even sleep and mate on the wing. Swifts have a worldwide distribution in tropical and temperate areas, but like swallows and martins, the swifts of temperate regions are strongly migratory and winter in the tropics.

Swifts have a characteristic shape, with a short forked tail and very long swept-back wings that resemble a boomerang. They are all dark apart from a whitish chin. Swifts use the same nest year after year, merely adding fresh material. This is caught in the air. As a result, building is erratic being most frequent when there is sufficient wind to sweep suitable material into the air. The nest is glued to a vertical surface with saliva, which is the basis for bird's nest soup.

Water, Water Everywhere

2008-05-12T07:22:00.000-07:00

It may be stating the obvious to say that water is an essential ingredient in the wetland system, but how many of us think about the implications of this? Water is the primary factor controlling the environment and the range of habitats that surround us. Flora and fauna have evolved to give and receive within a wetland community, with plants like the iris contributing by oxidising the water, in turn allowing other plants and creepy-crawlies to survive and flourish. The purity of the water supply is the prime reason why the Cabragh Wetlands supports such a variety of species.

Wetlands are an important feature in the landscape for a variety of reasons, yet 50% of all wetlands in Europe have disappeared in the last century. In Ireland about one million acres of wetland have been drained in the past 150 years. Pure, fresh water is a precious resource; only about 1% of the earth’s water is available for drinking at any one time, with another 2% locked up in the ice-caps.

Piped water has made life very comfortable for us. We turn on our tap and there it is. Up to 40% of the water we use is flushed down the toilet – a hugely disproportionate amount. Added to this is all the detergent we use to keep our homes clean and germ-free, and which is then returned to the water-table. Water from our toilets and sinks goes directly into the earth or to a treatment plant to be cleaned at great cost.

Earth is finding it difficult to cope with our demanding lifestyles, and hence water quality is suffering. The fewer toxins that go into the earth, the better it is for both the environment and people. There is a range of eco-friendly products now available, from washing-up liquid to toilet cleaner, and a couple of bricks in your cistern will save a surprising amount of fresh water.

In May 2006 the European Community adopted an action plan to meet the target of halting biodiversity loss by 2010 – a major undertaking. When we learn to see wetlands as a resource rich in biodiversity, we will begin to appreciate their true value and worth. It is a bad start to hear that Ireland came last in a European poll asking the public for their understanding of biodiversity.

Summer Camp 2008

2008-05-08T12:53:00.000-07:00

The annual summer camp for primary school pupils in 2nd to 5th classes takes place once again from July 7-11 2008 from 9.00a.m. to 2.30p.m. each day. This camp entitled "Detective in the Wild" allows children to get to grips with the natural world and delve into the secrets of the local wilderness looking at history, flowers, animals, birds and insects and the many habitats of North Tipperary. Cost of the course is €70 including the cost of trips. Please note that numbers are limited and places are allocated on a first come first serve basis. For application forms please contact James Duggan Tel 0504 23831

Hear the Dawn Chorus

2008-05-06T14:52:00.000-07:00

Come hear Nature's greatest symphony (if you can get out of bed!)

BirdWatch Ireland National Dawn Chorus Day 2008 - Sunday 18^th May

Meet at 5:00am in car park at Cabragh Wetlands, Thurles. All events are open to the public and are free of charge; it is not necessary to be a member of BirdWatch Ireland to attend. Children are very welcome, but must be supervised by a parent or guardian. Please note that dogs and other pets are not permitted.

Greylag Geese

2008-05-06T14:47:00.000-07:00

Recently a small flock of Greylag geese can be seen in Cabragh Wetlands each day on the flooded grasslands and are easily visible from the pathways. These geese are the ancestors of most domestic geese. The geese are migratory, moving south or west in winter,. This species is one of the last to migrate, and it is thought that "greaylag" signifies in English "late", "last", or "slow", as in laggard, a loiterer, or old terms such as lagman, the last man, lagteeth, the posterior molar or "wisdom" teeth (as the last to appear), and lagclock, a clock that is behind time. Thus the Greylag Goose is the grey goose, which in England when the name was given, was not strongly migratory but lagged behind the other wild goose species when they left for their northern breeding quarters.

Graveyards - Full of life!

2008-05-03T07:21:00.000-07:00

Graveyards instinctively suggest places of sadness and gloom, but the older ones especially can be teeming with life. Apart from the occasional outing with the mower or strimmer, habitats remain relatively untouched for year after year, allowing colonies of plants, insects, birds and mammals to establish a permanent base. Graveyards in towns can provide oases for species struggling to survive, and in some rural areas are the last examples of ancient grassland meadow. Don’t keep those old graveyards too neat and tidy!

To develop this theme, Dr Siobahn Geraghty, North Tipperary Heritage Officer, will be giving a talk at the Cabragh Wetlands on Wednesday 21^st May at 8.00pm sharp. The title is appropriate: “Graveyards: Full of Life”.

The evening is organized in conjunction with the Holycross Tidy Village Committee which, like so many other groups around the county, does such vital work in keeping up appearances and preserving valuable habitat. We invite all other such groups and those interested in graveyards to come along to the Cabragh Wetlands to hear Siobahn’s talk. She is an expert in the unusual subject of archaeo-botany, and it really does promise to be a fascinating event.

There is no charge for the talk, though donations will be welcome. This is a chance to hear about an important and unusual topic, and no doubt Siobahn will be willing to take a few questions on her wider role as Heritage Officer.