Four-part TV series on Killarney National Park to air tomorrow

A four-part series on the wildlife at Killarney National Park airs on TV3 tomorrow night at 8pm. It will include rare action footage of some of the wildlife.

It’s where Queen Victoria chose to stay during her 1861 trip to Ireland, it’s home to a mysterious herd of red deer that baffled biologists for years and with its majestic setting among the mountains and lakes of Co Kerry, it contains more animal and plant habitats than any of the country’s other five national parks.

A new wildlife series about Killarney National Park begins on TV3 tomorrow and is promising to bring viewers on a unique journey through Ireland’s oldest national park.

Shot over two years, it captures rare action footage of some of the park’s most unique wildlife — focusing in particular on the endangered species that have found a haven in the park.

High mountains, expansive lakes, the largest deciduous woodland in Ireland, lowland pasture, Kerry cattle and a prized salmon spawning river, the people of Kerry have long acknowledged that there is nowhere quite like it on earth.

“It is almost like a lost world, this amazing self enclosed glaciated valley which has this huge variety of habitats, whereas all the other national parks just have the one type,” says Irish Examiner columnist, broadcaster and environmentalist, Dick Warner, who is script writer and narrator of the series.

The four-episode series looks at the life in the 10,000 hectare park through spring, summer, autumn and winter, introducing viewers to its otters, badgers, foxes and the red deer herd whose origins couldn’t be deciphered.

“Biologists have spent years arguing as to whether the herd were native and had somehow survived the Ice Age, had travelled from Britain after the Ice Age, or whether they had come been brought by Stone Age man from Britain as a domestic animal. To many that last third theory seemed the least likely, but in 2009 geneticists discovered it to be true,” said Mr Warner.

Much use is also made of underwater photography with never-before-seen active shots of salmon spawning in the river and of the brook lamprey which first arrived in the river 400m years ago.

Killarney National Park was donated to the State in 1932 by William Bowers Bourn, a US millionaire . He had bought it for his daughter, Maud, as a wedding present. Maud died shortly afterwards, and her grief-stricken father and Irish husband, Arthur Vincent, couldn’t bear to remain in the park without her.

Prior to that, it had been owned by Lord Ardilaun, one of the Guinness family, who used it as a hunting and fishing lodge.

Queen Victoria spent two nights in Muckross House as a guest of its original owners, the Herbert family.

* The Park airs tomorrow at 8pm on TV3.