Rabbits blend into ecology of rural Ireland

A COUPLE of weeks ago I wrote on this page about great spotted woodpeckers and how they’re re-colonising Ireland.

I said that they were more or less confined to eastern and northern counties. Then the emails started to come in, and they suggest that this is not entirely true. There were, for example, four reports of sightings in different parts of Co Cork.

So maybe they have become more widespread than we thought. I can see how this might happen. Most of the data is collected and sorted by BirdWatch Ireland. This organisation does magnificent work but has limited resources. BirdWatch has its headquarters in Co Wicklow so it’s not surprising that their research efforts have been concentrated on the eastern part of the country.

The fact that the woodpeckers may have spread further than we realised and may be present in greater numbers is good news. It also shows that amateur birdwatchers play an important role when it comes to adding to our knowledge of Irish ornithology.

I was filming recently in the graveyard of a ruined abbey. I noticed scrapes in the grass and, looking more closely, the rather macabre spectacle of holes in some of the graves. I asked someone who lived locally and they said the graveyard was suffering from a plague of rabbits. Although the place was still in use as a burial ground nobody could put flowers on the graves of their loved ones because the rabbits ate the flowers overnight.

I went back to investigate and discovered the headquarters of the grave-robbing rabbits. About 200 metres away there was a fine Norman motte. It was a great earthen mound surrounded by a ditch and crowned by a magnificent old ash tree. The rabbit warren was drilled into the sides of the motte and they sallied out every night to invade the tempting mown grass of the graveyard.

I found this very appropriate because it was the Normans who first brought rabbits to Ireland. They brought them in as domestic animals providing fur and meat. Rabbits are only native to Spain, Portugal and a bit of northwest Africa. They called them conies or coneys, which became in Irish ‘coinín’, the places they kept them in were called conygarths or warrens and the men who looked after them were warreners. Warren crops up in many Irish place names and warrener is probably the origin of my surname.

Because rabbits are very good at escaping, but dislike swimming, warrens were often on islands or on the tips of peninsulas. The first record of a warren in Ireland (or Britain) is on Lambay Island, off the Dublin coast, in 1191. By 1204, during the first expansionist phase of the Norman invasion, there were warrens in Connacht and there are other 13th century records from Ballysax in Co Kildare, Ardmayle in Co Tipperary and Rosslare in Co Wexford.

We don’t know exactly when the first domestic rabbit escaped from its warren and went feral but there are indications that it happened quite soon after their introduction. My ancestors the warreners don’t seem to have been very good at their job.

They certainly found the Irish countryside to their liking and even formed the basis of a substantial export trade in meat and fur. Over the centuries what was originally an invasive species has blended in to the ecology of the Irish countryside.

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