Two grey seals were discovered on Tuesday 21 February near Tramore, Co. Waterford with horrific gunshot wounds to the head. The suffering animals were euthanized humanely under veterinary supervision.

Grey seals are a protected species under both Irish and European wildlife legislation. The IWT is wants the relevant authorities to investigate this illegal and exceptionally cruel act and ensure that those responsible are prosecuted. It is vital, says the Trust, to “demonstrate that the law will be upheld and such barbaric acts will not be tolerated”.

Photo Credit: Irish Wildlife Trust (IWT) Website

According to the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group Irish fin whales typically arrive off West Cork in Autumn, moving east up the coast to waters off county Waterford and Wexford as the season progresses. The whales are following the vast herring shoals that traditionally spawn at the mouth of Waterford harbour.

This year, however, the whales seem to be making an unexpected move back to the west, with a flurry of reported sightings off the East Cork and West Cork coasts.

“The collective wisdom is that the end of the herring spawning season heralds the end of the ‘large whale season’; predators following prey and all that. The herring shoals would break up, heading out to deeper waters and the whales would follow suite; destination unknown, until they return in a short few months; typically late May, early June,” explained IWDG Sightings Coordinator Padraig Whooley.

“However, this year as we head towards the end of the large whale season there are still fantastic opportunities for people with the patience and optics willing to spend some time on a headland to view these giants in Irish inshore waters.”

Photo Credit: Padraig Whooley, IWDG

That said, there are times when even the most ardent nature fanatic has to stay indoors. Life’s incessant demands and the vagaries of the Irish climate conspire to make it impractical or impossible to venture out. Time then to turn on the telly!

Television is, by and large, a poor substitute for being outdoors and active, but a well crafted wildlife documentary has a lot going for it. It’s television that entertains and informs in equal measure, and that’s a quality that eludes most programmes these days. In a world obsessed with the unreal antics of reality television, it’s refreshing to get a dose of authenticity now and again: something that provokes cognitive thought and wows you at the same time.

The best natural history programmes do all of that, and more.

They’re also a brilliant way to nurture children’s innate curiosity about wildlife, kindle an interest in nature that can last a lifetime and spend some quality family time together. When I switch on a wildlife programme everybody sits down to watch; few other topics can boast such generation-spanning appeal.

Last week we were watching Earthflight…. the BBCs latest wildlife extravaganza, turning the focus this time on the lives of the world’s astonishing variety of birds. One scene featured a mob of vultures descending on a fresh tiger kill in an Indian national park. The gory detail, captured in high definition glory by the best wildlife cameramen in the business, was at once both gruesome and fascinating. The kids loved it.

The next day I was driving to the supermarket when I spotted some rooks plunging their heads repeatedly into the carcass of a dead fox. It dawned on me that I was witnessing the scene from the telly the night before, this time playing out “live” on the verge of an Irish road. The tiger in this instance was an unidentified vehicle, the “kill” was the unfortunate fox, and the opportunistic vultures were in fact Ireland’s most common crow species… but what was happening was fundamentally the same.

TV wildlife documentaries bring you up-close-and-personal views of jaw-dropping natural phenomena from far flung corners of the globe. But take a closer look, apply a little lateral thinking, and you’ll often find very similar dramas unfolding just outside your door. The same struggle for survival, the same live-and-let-die competition for limited resources: it’s all there.

Your back garden, the ivy strewn wall in your local park, even that ever-so-slightly-neglected window-box you never quite get around to tidying — all of them, in their own way, are a hotbed of natural conflict and drama. It may not be the Serengeti or the Amazon, but there are hunters and hunted, grazers, carnivores, scavengers and more. Every conceivable variation in habitat is occupied and exploited to the max by a plant, animal or fungus uniquely adapted to making the most of a very specific set of environmental conditions.
The animals and plants that surround us every day live and die by the same rules that apply to the exotic species that routinely grace our TV screens. Nature… whether it’s half way around the world or just around the corner… is truly amazing!

This column was first published in the Irish Independent on Saturday 18 February 2012

As a survival strategy that’s probably no bad thing, but it’s also a shame, because some of the wildlife we routinely overlook is every bit as fascinating, diverse an striking as that grabbing all the attention.

Take plants, for example. Plants are nowhere near as prominent as birds, mammals or insects, but they’re infinitely easier to get close to, exquisitely adapted to their environment, incredibly varied and critically important. Plants underpin almost every functioning ecosystem on the planet: without them the rest of the wildlife we see would exist at all. In fact, neither would we.

But despite their many merits plants are sometimes treated as second class citizens in the wildlife world. We step over, around, and even on them in pursuit of quarry that’s more nimble-of-foot or fleet-of wing. I’m guilty of it myself, I often overlook plants right under my nose, only noticing them when something more active inadvertently lands on them.

Plants suffer from an undeserved image problem: because we can’t see them doing a lot (producing the occasional flower, shedding the occasional seed) it’s easy to think of them as, well, just a bit dull. The truth is they’re anything but. Thanks to a new book by Dublin born botanist Zoë Devlin I’m rediscovering the wonderful world of Ireland’s wildflowers, and it’s a revelation.

“Wildflowers of Ireland: a Personal Record” is a catalogue of the wildflowers Zoë has personally found and photographed all over Ireland in a longstanding love affair with plants that spans almost 40 years. It is, in every way, an impressive body of work.

The first thing you notice about the book is its size. This is a hefty tome: a book for leisurely perusal at home. You certainly won’t be carting it with you as you explore roadside verges and field margins. It is a reference book, not a field guide, but not one of those stuffy old books full of lifeless facts. This reference book has personality.

Zoë opens with a look at the history of wildflowers in Ireland, their importance, how they’re built and how they work. She goes on to explore the life cycle of flowering plants, how we name and group them, the habitats they live in and offers a checklist to help the beginner with wildflower identification. All of this sounds a bit “stuffy and scientific” — but it’s not. Zoë brings her boundless enthusiasm to bear, and her prose is it once both engaging and fascinating.

That enthusiasm is best encapsulated by Zoë herself in the introduction where she says: “Although I try to take on board the scientific aspects of wildflowers, it is a sense of wonder and awe that tend to take over when I look at these delicate, beautiful creations”.

The rest of the book is given over to species profiles of the more than 450 wildflowers that Zoë has recorded in Ireland. Each profile includes a detailed description, a distribution map showing where the flower occurs, a legend showing in what months the plant blooms, and striking photographs taken by the author herself. All of this information is presented in a way that’s informative and accessible to the botanical novice.

While the book will undoubtedly help you put names to the wildflowers you encounter, I can’t help feeling that it achieves so much more. Leafing through this book doesn’t just draw you in… it also makes you want to get out and look for wildflowers. That, of course, is the whole point… and is a much more significant accomplishment.

Like many other types of Irish wildlife our wildflowers are being besieged on all sides. Habitat destruction, pollution, climate change, invasive alien species… plants have a lot to content with, and while the furred and the feathered tend to have many championing their cause, those that go unnoticed could do with a few more people fighting in their corner.

“Wildflowers of Ireland” is a beautiful book that brings our wildflowers out of relative obscurity and puts them in the spotlight, promoting awareness and encouraging us all to get out for a closer look. It would make a wonderful addition to any bookshelf. Based on my experience reading it though, it’s not a book that will stay on the shelf for very long.

Check out Zoë’s website for a detailed online guide to Irish wildflowers.

“Wildflowers of Ireland” by Zoë Devlin is published by Collins Press and is available online or in all good bookshops priced €29.99.

It must be a wonderful feeling to set the standard the rest of the world aspires to. Let’s hope RTÉ is paying attention!

This is a resident species, and is found all over Ireland throughout the year. In winter, the resident birds are joined by migratory birds from northern Europe. It occurs in woodland, farmland, hedgerows, parks and gardens nationwide.

Song thrushes have a typically thrush-like body shape – similar to that of the closely related blackbird, but a little smaller. Adults song thrushes reach a length of about 23cm (c. 9 inches). Their plumage is a warm brown above, with a creamy underside heavily marked with rows of dark brown arrow-shaped spots. Sexes in this species are similar, and juvenile birds tend to resemble the adults, but have buff streaking on their backs and smaller spots on their underside.

The song thrush may occasionally be confused with the much more robust and larger mistle thrush, and possibly with the overwintering redwing – a visitor from Scandinavia. However, the song thrush has a much more delicate and diminutive form that rules out its larger Irish cousin, while it lacks the distinctive white eye-stripe and obvious red wing bar of its visiting Scandinavian relative.

The song thrush is a formidable singer, and has a loud, fluting, far-carrying voice. Its familiar song resembles that of the blackbird, but the song thrush has a characteristic tendency to repeat each “phrase” of the song several times before moving on to the next. Typical song phrases include a repeated “cherry dew, cherry dew, cherry dew” and “knee-deep, knee-deep, knee-deep…”. The alarm call is an agitated loud rattle or a soft “seep”-like note.

Song thrushes feed mainly on insects and other invertebrates, and also take berries and fruit when in season. They are particularly fond of earthworms, slugs and snails. Like other thrushes, they are ground feeding birds, and can often be seen hopping along, then stopping dead, head cocked on one side, watching the ground intently for any sign of a prospective meal.

The song thrush is famous for its unique method of feeding on snails. It picks the hapless mollusc up in its bill, then, with a flick of its head, it hits the shell repeatedly against a stone or other hard object. When the shell smashes, the thrush can get to the tender flesh of the animal taking refuge within.

Song thrushes often have a favourite stone – or anvil – that they use repeatedly for this purpose. If you come across a large stone surrounded by fragments of snail shell in the garden, then you’ve found a song thrush’s anvil.

Breeding takes place between March and August. The thrush builds a nest of moss and grass, lined with mud, in a tree, bush or large hedgerow. In it the female lays 4 to 6 pale blue eggs with black speckles, which she incubates for 11-15 days. The young birds leave the nest some 12-16 days later, giving the parents the opportunity to rear 2-3 broods during the course of the long breeding season.

This column was first published in the Weekend Magazine of the Irish Independent on Saturday 04 February 2012.

One of the things I like most about living in Ireland is the changing seasons.

The tropics are over rated. Don’t get me wrong, a bit of predictable sunshine now and again certainly wouldn’t go amiss, but you’d soon grow tired of the sameness of it all. You’d miss the seasons… the quarterly punctuation of your calendar year by cyclical and predictable climate change.

In our temperate climate seasons help to synchronise life. Spring, summer, autumn, winter — we tend to schedule our lives around them, managing our work and leisure time according to seasonal rhythms. It’s something so ingrained that we don’t even notice it, but we all live our lives to the beat of a seasonal drum.

Seasons influence us all… but for the plants and animals we share our island nation with the synchronisation of life around seasonal change is a matter of life and death.

Plants flower to coincide with the activity of pollinating insects (or insects emerge to coincide with the flowering of nectar-rich food plants… take your pick); birds synchronise their nesting so chicks hatch when there’s a super-abundance of food; hibernating mammals, like hedgehogs emerge from hibernation when the invertebrates they feed on are plentiful. Nature is full of these “happy coincidences”, and they are all triggered by the rhythm of established, predictable seasonal change. They happen, by and large, at the same time every year.

Except that this year something is seriously awry.

Frogs have been spawning since before Christmas, when they wouldn’t normally emerge until mid February. I was out cycling this week when I almost choked on a cloud of unseasonal midges. I stopped to catch my breath and there in the grassy verge was a flowering herb-robert — a pretty little pink wildflower that doesn’t normally bloom until April or May.

Our resident birds are in full song, and some are already pairing up. A house sparrow couple getting frisky on the bird feeder outside my office suggests that, for some at least, the breeding season is in full swing. Hedgehogs are out and about, plants are flowering early, trees are budding — all months ahead of schedule. There was even a report of a swallow arriving over West Cornwall last week — not Irish, granted, but not far away either.

It’s all a bit odd.

The catalyst for all this early spring activity is the mild weather, but it’s not affecting everything in the same way. Some spring events are triggered by day length, not temperature, and that puts nature’s careful crafted balance out of kilter. Combine that imbalance with the very real potential for a sting in winters tail, and it could spell trouble for those species who have jumped the gun.

I’m all for the mild weather… and I’m delighted we seem to have avoided the deep freeze that descended over the last couple of winters. I just hope that this “early” spring doesn’t turn out to be a false start for some of our more vulnerable wildlife.

Two men were arrested and several dogs were rescued – some of them seriously wounded from confrontation with wild badgers.

Badger baiting is the illegal practice of digging badgers out of their sets and releasing them in the open where they are set upon by the baiters’ dogs. This horrific and barbaric practice results in the death of the badger and often horrendous injuries to the dogs.

"Apart from the suffering endured by dogs being used in the activity of badger digging, it is illegal to take, injure or kill any badger or indeed interfere with any badger set,” said a police spokesman.

"It is believed that those involved in this illegal activity see the season as running from Boxing Day until 14th February. Police will continue with a robust enforcement of the Animal Welfare and Wildlife legislation where they come upon such matters."

The report below from UTV outlines the operation in Northern Ireland (NB. the report contains scenes of badger baiting that some viewers may find disturbing):

News just in that I’m going to be writing a regular wildlife column for the Irish Independent newspaper.

I’m still finalising the details in terms of column frequency and other logistics with the Independent’s editorial team, but the first column, dubbed “Unseasonal Shenanigans” will feature on page 21 of the newspaper’s Weekend Magazine this Saturday, 04 February. I’ll also be publishing an archive of the column here on the Ireland’s Wildlife website website soon after it’s appeared in the print edition.

While I’m sure the content of the column will evolve over time based on your feedback and ideas from the Independent’s editorial team, the current focus is on encouraging people to engage with the natural world around them, highlighting and commenting on wildlife related issues in the news, and perhaps, if appropriate, the occasional book or gear review to mix things up a bit.

The Ireland’s Wildlife website, the page on Facebook and the Twitter account provides an ideal established platform for engagement and interaction, a rich seam of ideas and inspiration and a wonderful opportunity to get real feedback on the column from readers. Conversely the column will hopefully help more people to discover and join the thriving online wildlife community we’re building together. It’s very much a win-win.

I’m incredibly excited about this opportunity, and look forward to hearing what you all think in due course. So check out Page 21 of the Irish Independent’s Weekend Magazine this Saturday  — and don’t forget to come back here and let me know what you think!

To do that they need help… and they’re calling on local wildlife enthusiasts from across the country all over country to send in records of their frog spawn, tadpoles, froglets and adult frogs.

One of the best places to start searching for frogs, says the IPCC, is in garden ponds.

“This man-made habitat will probably become increasingly important in future years, as the natural and wild habitats of the frog are lost to drainage and development,” said the organisation.

February and March are the peak times for frog spawning, although spawning can occur in January or even earlier in the south of the country if the temperature is mild enough, as has already been happening this year.

Since the first Hop To It frog survey in 1997, the IPCC has received more than 4,200 records. Although frogs are in decline worldwide, due to factors like habitat destruction, pollution and infectious disease, the results of the survey to date show that the Common Frog is widespread throughout the island of Ireland with 40% of records occurring in garden ponds.

The survey team is particularly keen to get frog records from counties that have been poorly represented in previous years: the six counties of Northern Ireland, Laois, Carlow and Leitrim.

The IPCC stresses that monitoring frog populations in this way is vital, and describes frogs as “barometers of environmental health” in wetland habitats. To check out where frogs have been found in your county before, or to download your survey card visit www.ipcc.ie or you can get them directly from the IPCC, Bog of Allen Nature Centre, Lullymore, Rathangan, Co. Kildare, Tel 045-860133