Waking up to the call of the midlands

ABOUT 10 days ago I was woken at dawn by the incessant calling of a cuckoo. Dawn is rather early at this time of year so I went back to sleep, but it was a pleasant alarm call.

When I did get up it had developed into a glorious sunny day so I took our new dog for a walk. He bounded through wet meadows full of spring flowers.

There was a lot of lady’s smock, which is also called the cuckoo flower because it blooms at the same time of year that the bird is calling. Then I found a magnificent clump of early purple orchids.

We walked up a low hill, away from the lake, into an open woodland full of native trees, including some fine oaks and hollies. There was a carpet of bluebells underneath the trees and I found one Irish whitebeam.

On the way back we walked along the shore of the lake. The reed beds were still in winter colours — pale golden browns — but the new growth was starting. They were full of the busy sounds of coots and water hens sorting out their nesting arrangements. In the open water, one great crested grebe was fishing industriously.

It was a wonderful walk but it was an unusual one. Thirty or 40 years ago there would have been nothing strange in seeing so much of interest and beauty in the course of an hour. But cuckoos and orchids and great crested grebes are much less common these days. So where was I? I’ll give you a clue. It had been great to be woken by a cuckoo but a couple of nights previously I had heard an even rarer and more evocative bird call — the distant rasping of a male corncrake.

Yes, I was travelling up the Shannon in my boat through all the glories of the midlands in May. The corncrake had been in north Offaly, the cuckoo just over the border in Westmeath.

And I thought to myself, why isn’t this extravagance of nature rated more highly? Why is it that when people who live in towns or cities want to enjoy nature they tend to drive to Wicklow or Kerry, Connemara or Donegal? Many of them must drive through the midlands without even noticing what’s there. Last week, it seemed that the only people really appreciating the Shannon callows were German.

Take our national parks, for example. With the exception of a small part of the Burren, they are all in mountainous areas and consist mostly of upland blanket bog — all six of them. Why don’t we have a midlands national park? Upland blanket bog is fine and it needs to be preserved but the shores, islands and lagoons of Lough Ree contain 10 times the bio-diversity.

There is also far more cultural heritage along the Shannon, with fascinating and vulnerable remains of prehistoric people, early monastic settlements, Viking long-forts and Norman castles.

And if upland blanket bog is worthy of preservation, so are the fragile and beautiful eco-systems I travelled through on my boat. There’s huge development pressure along the Shannon. Every year the wild places become smaller. Some of the heritage objects have been vandalised and even stolen. The floating nests of great crested grebes get flooded by the wash from speed boats. The huge numbers of wild ducks that visit Lough Ree in the winter can be legally shot.

Something as precious as this needs to be minded. It needs wardens. And our national parks have an efficient system of wardens and rangers. They are guarding vast swathes of heathery mountain while the treasure chest of heritage in the midlands slowly dwindles.

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