Be The Change Seminar

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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.