Extinct species questions hard to pin down

THE other day I was being quizzed by a classroom of 10-year-olds and finding it quite hard going.

This age group tends to have a well-developed talent for asking difficult questions. The subject was Ireland’s extinct animals and, as the morning progressed, I began to realise how little I knew. This is not just because of my personal ignorance. Nobody really seems to know exactly what species roamed our land a few thousand years ago.

landbridges

The first problem is the landbridges. We know that after the last Ice Age Ireland was connected to Britain by land-bridges, probably two of them, one to Scotland and one to Wales. The Irish Sea was a large freshwater lake and it’s reasonable to assume that our wildlife was similar to Britain’s at the time.

The problem is that geographers don’t agree on the date at which rising sea levels flooded the land-bridges and turned the lake into a sea and Ireland into an island. They will cautiously admit that it happened between 7,500 and 12,000 years ago.

Then there’s the problem posed by the fact that finding out about our ancient wildlife involves expertise in more than one subject. Ideally you need somebody who’s competent in archaeology, geography, zoology, ecology, ancient languages, folklore and mythology and there aren’t too many of them.

It was once believed that woodpeckers never colonised Ireland. Then an expert in Middle Irish pointed out that there was a word for the woodpecker in the language (‘snagbreac’, with several variations in the spelling). It’s now accepted the greater spotted woodpecker was a native Irish species and became extinct during the forest clearances of Elizabethan times.

Another bird example is the capercaillie. Until relatively recently when bones were positively identified from archaeological sites, the main evidence for its former existence in Ireland was a treatise written in Latin by O’Sullivan Beare in about 1625.

large animals

Among the larger animals that roamed this country we do know that there were once wolves, wild pigs and brown bears in Ireland. There are several competing claims for the date and place of the demise of the last wild Irish wolf, but it was almost certainly in the 1740s. The matter is complicated by the fact that we also know from other European countries, Italy for instance, that when wolf populations decline to very low levels they tend to interbreed with dogs. The last wild wolves were probably hybrids.

We don’t know when wild pigs became extinct in Ireland, but there is evidence to suggest they survived into historical times, possibly into the late Middle Ages.

Bears certainly became extinct before that, though there are hints in myth and folklore that they survived into the Iron Age and possibly the Early Christian Era.

If you go back even further our landscape was as densely populated with large wild animals as the Serengeti is today. The so called Pleistocene mega-fauna included exotic things such as hairy mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses, as well as wild horses and cattle, both now extinct. There was also, of course, Megaloceros, the giant Irish deer, the largest deer that ever lived.

The Stone Age ancestors of the 10-year-olds who were quizzing me interacted closely with all these strange and wonderful creatures. They painted pictures of them on the walls of caves and then they caused their extinction. Almost all these animals and birds, both the ones that are globally extinct and the ones that are extinct in Ireland, are no longer with us as a direct result of human persecution, hunting and habitat destruction.

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