Wild-looking birds at the ‘Phoenix’

A PAPER in the current edition of Irish Birds, The Birds of the Phoenix Park, County Dublin, gives the results of a survey carried out during the summer of 2007 and the following winter. The author is Olivia Crowe.

A stone wall, 11 kilometres long, surrounds 710 hectares of grassland woods and ponds, one of the largest enclosures of its kind in Europe. The Irish name Fionn uisce, clear water, became anglicised to Phoenix, although the lands granted to the Knights of St John of Jerusalem, 900 hundred years ago, have no connection to the mythical bird.

The park’s best known residents, apart from the President and the US Ambassador, are the fallow deer, the ancestors of which were introduced by the Duke of Ormond in 1662. Numbers reached 1,300 in the past but fell to 40 during the Emergency. Nowadays, there are about 450. The mammal list also includes foxes, otters and stoats. There are pipistrelle, leisler’s, daubenton’s and long-eared bats. I have seen hedgehogs there but they are said to be scarce. The list, however, has some notable omissions. In 1652 ‘measures were taken for the destruction of wolves in the barony of Castleknock’. Hares became extinct 50 years ago. The last red squirrel was recorded in 1987, nine years after its grey American cousin arrived.