Anja Murray: Will the law save Irish birds, which are so threatened?

Species such as the puffin, snipe, hen harrier, kestrel and curlew are plummeting toward extinction here, and even legally protected conservation sites are lacking urgent habitat restoration actions

While there is a great deal of enthusiasm about birds across every cohort of the population, we, as a nation, have been utterly negligent of the needs of the rarest and most threatened of our birds.

Being anywhere in the outdoors, in a park, walking in the woods, or out on a weekend walk by the seashore or rambles in the hills, birds are always present. We hear their calls without generally paying much attention; we see them flit through the branches of trees but rarely tune in to the wildness of their being. 

Hundreds of different species of wild birds are native here — the variety spanning species that are as different to each other as a mouse and an elephant. Many are common and familiar, such as song thrush, blue tit and robin. Others rarely interact with humans, living cryptic lives in remote habitats.