QUIS enim, verbi gratia, lupos cervos, et sylvaticos porcos, et vulpes,taxones, et lepusculos, et sesquivolos in Hiberniam deveheret?
I can’t find out who wrote that but it seems to have been a monk about 1,400 years ago. But it’s still a good question to which we have only partial answers. It translates roughly as "who was it who really brought to Ireland wolves, deer, forest pigs, foxes, badgers, little hares and tiny squirrels?"
Some of our mammal species almost certainly survived the last ice age in warm refuges in the southwest. These include the Irish hare, the stoat and possibly the red deer. Others found their way here when things started to warm up about 10,000 years ago.
Some of them probably walked across land bridges that connected us to Britain and the continent. Unfortunately there’s no real consensus among geographers about when the land bridge disappeared and we finally became an island, and this complicates the whole subject. It’s further complicated by the fact that even after the land bridges disappeared there may have been winter ice bridges that some animals could have used.
European brown bears, wolves and foxes have no problem walking across snow and ice. The only one of these that’s still with us is the red fox. Wolves would have been familiar to the monk who penned the question because they were only exterminated about 250 years ago.
There’s little doubt that brown bears were part of our native fauna up until comparatively recently — there’s even folklore relating to them — but it’s impossible to be accurate about when they became extinct. My guess would be that it was in the late Iron Age or, more probably, the early Christian period.
The "forest pigs", or European wild boar, certainly survived for longer, very possibly into the late Middle Ages.
Animals that were good swimmers had an advantage because it appears that for a time after the end of the Ice Age the Irish Sea was a large lake of fresh or brackish water. It’s very likely that this was the route that otters used to colonise the country.
Of course mammals that could fly, meaning bats, had no real problem.
This is certainly why Ireland has a relatively large range of bat species but is low on things like rodents and carnivores.
But the suggestion implicit in the monk’s question, that somebody was responsible for introducing many Irish animals, is undoubtedly correct.
Of the 22 species of wild land mammal that are accepted to live in this country today (this leaves out bats, seals and whales and dolphins) at least 13 were introduced by humans. There are some others, such as the red squirrel, which were re-introduced because it was believed, rightly or wrongly, that they had become extinct.
The introduced species can be roughly divided into two categories: the deliberate introductions and the accidental ones.
Deliberate introductions include the fallow deer (by the Normans) and the sika deer (by the Victorians). But it’s not quite true to call them deliberate: the deer were brought in for hunting and for ornament and were meant to stay in deer parks, not to escape into the wild.
American mink were also brought in to stock fur farms in the mid-20th century. They escaped accidentally — or were some of them deliberately released when the price of fur fell? It’s not a clear cut subject.
There’s little doubt that the house mouse and probably the wood mouse and the pygmy shrew, as well as the bank vole and the brown and black rat, were accidental introductions, though the black rat may now be extinct in this country. Rabbits and probably hedgehogs were deliberate introductions.
dick.warner@examiner.ie
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, November 03, 2008
