Endangered species - Another victim of our lifestyle

IS it really possible that a bird once so commonplace, so recognisable in shape and sound in every estuary and bog, on virtually every mountainside and shoreline, is facing extinction in Ireland within a decade?

Yet that is what Birdwatch Ireland have warned. Population trends uncovered while compiling statistics for the forthcoming Bird Atlas for these islands have set alarm bells ringing. They have revealed a species-threatening collapse in curlew numbers.

Twenty years ago, there were more than 12,000 pairs nesting here but today there are no more than a few hundred. At this rate of decline, the population may not be able to sustain itself and could disappear from our countryside in a few short years. Our grandchildren may celebrate the reintroduction of the curlew as today we celebrate the reintroduction of so many raptors.

Like the corncrake, the red grouse and the grey partridge, they are approaching a tipping point – 19 species that breed in Ireland are on the critical list – because their natural habitat has been destroyed. Bogs have been relentlessly drained and have, relatively speaking, disappeared from our landscape – as the towns and villages hit by floods in recent years can attest.

Afforestation has turned a huge proportion of our hill country into dark, virtually lifeless, monocultures where curlews and grouse were once plentiful. The curlew’s situation is so critical that it has been added to the endangered list and Birdwatch Ireland have opened an emergency fund.

The most recent figures available for red grouse are equally disturbing. It was estimated in 2005 that there was barely more than 4,000 grouse in Ireland. To give that context each of the first division grouse moors in England or Scotland, because of proactive management, would support many multiples of that figure.

This decline seems an unavoidable spiral wherever intensive farming and wildlife meet. Invariably wildlife suffers and while there is no point in being dishonest and blaming farmers, we must do much more to protect wildlife threatened by the seemingly insatiable demands made by humanity on the planet’s resources.

This week’s Living Planet Report underlined this in stark terms. It warned that human demands on natural resources have doubled in 50 years and outstrip what the Earth can provide by more than half.

If we have been less vigilant in protecting wildlife than we might have been, politicians in Kent are not. Last month councillors in Paddock Wood, outside Tunbridge Wells, vetoed 600 new homes after deciding that it was “too dangerous” for the area’s native Hazel dormouse. They felt the pet cats that would inevitably come with the new homes would represent a lethal threat to the mice and vetoed the project.

We might scoff at such an intervention but the wildlife of Ireland, which depends on us changing our ways if they are to survive, might not.