We don’t own the planet, we share it

Damien Enright reminds us of our duty to nature.

THERE are still a few bluebells in our wilderness, well shaded by metre-tall docks and thistles as big as bushes. The flowers are darker blue than those which grew in the woods nearby.

Day to-day as April ended and May came in, we saw the bluebell heads like pixels growing denser until at last they saturated the ground with a deep, unbroken blue. Robert Frost memorably wrote about stopping one winter evening to see “the woods fill up with snow”. On those late spring evenings, you could, if you had the patience, watch the Irish woods fill up with blue.

Meanwhile, our local meadow continues to fill with rabbits. The land has been untended for 40 years, and, indeed, is gradually succumbing to an invasion of Japanese knotweed, enlarging by 10% of its area each year and now covering, perhaps, half an acre.

It’s a great shame rabbits don’t eat knotweed. They do, of course, eat the grass and, for a short period, will eat corn as it begins to sprout. Big grain farmers don’t like this.

Rabbit poison is an answer, a potent poison which a reader of this column, himself a farmer, was rightly concerned to see being sold by his local co-op in west Cork.

Scattered widely, it kills indiscriminately. Hedgehogs, voles, wood mice, badgers, foxes and numerous bird species are all in danger of falling victim. Rare species, such as choughs, and those high in the food chain, such as hawks and barn owls (almost gone from our countryside), are threatened, while re-introduced species such as golden and sea eagles are endangered by contaminated prey.

On the one hand, we legislate and spend to preserve Ireland’s wild creatures, while, with the other, we scatter poison.

The farmer who alerted me says that, in his experience, the rabbits do little eventual damage to the corn. They nibble the young stalks, but it soon “gets beyond them” and, indeed, it’s said by some that if they “top” it, it gets stronger.

The immense importance of nature’s humble creatures was brought home to me once again the other night on a walk along my local beach, where sand-hoppers in their millions, perhaps trillions, were busy disposing of the sea-lettuce that had washed in.

They could feel my footsteps two metres away and it sent them leaping knee high in front of me, a haze of leaping bodies frantically trying to get out of the way of the giant with his monstrous boots.

When I’d suddenly stop and stand stock-still, they would rain onto my toecaps for 30 seconds, and then, all activity would cease. Many had flung themselves suicidally sideways and ended up who knows where but many had found the burrows which they’d already made and had disappeared down then, pulling a lid of sand behind.

How myriad and how useful the sand-hopper beach-cleaners are! They feed the birds and the sea bass; and the bass and the birds feed our digestive systems and our imaginations. Emily Dickinson, the poet, said, “Hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul”; and for flights of hope and glory it’s hard to beat that of “E7”, a female bar-tailed godwit, a wading bird commonly seen dining on sand hoppers on Irish estuaries.

Last year, scientists tracked E7 on her migratory round — an eight-day, 6,300-mile flight from New Zealand to China in March; a five-day, 4,500-mile flight from there to Alaska breeding grounds in May; and, finally, her eight-day, 7,200-mile return to New Zealand in autumn. Godwits undertake the longest single-flight over-water migration in the world. E7, weighing eight ounces, flew almost 1,000 miles a day. Unlike seabirds, godwits make their journeys without feeding or drinking. They cover the 11,000 miles without a compass.

When chicks are only two months old, they fly this route alone, in a seven-month period, E7 flew 18,000 miles; she will fly 300,000 miles during her lifetime. She does not need oil or aviation fuel; all she needs are protected sites to rest and breed.