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.

The BirdWatch survey, however, shows that the park’s birds are thriving. Seventy-two varieties were recorded, ‘roughly 35% of all species regularly occurring in Ireland’ the author notes. Sixty-eight were present in the breeding season. Twenty-five definitely bred, while a further 10 probably did so. One further species, the long-eared owl, is known to breed but it was not recorded during the census. Using old crow nests and hiding in trees by day, this owl is almost impossible to find, although regurgitated pellets may be found at roosts and the ‘rusty-gate’ calls of chicks can be heard even in daylight. Barn owls may also go unnoticed. These have declined so much that their continued presence in the park is far from certain. Brent geese, which visit short-cropped grasslands around Dublin, fly over the park but census workers didn’t see them on the ground, so they aren’t listed. Kingfishers turn up occasionally at ponds but none obliged during the survey. Olivia thought it ‘surprising’ that reed buntings weren’t found as suitable habitat is available.

Not surprisingly, the park’s commonest residents are crows. Magpies and rooks are not much loved by the public but this is the best place in Dublin at which to see their colourful cousin, the jay.

Phoenix Park was opened to the public in 1747. In those days, attitudes to nature were very different from those of today. Wilderness and wild creatures were seen as the external equivalents of our unruly passions; they were to be suppressed and controlled at all costs. Forests were places of danger and terror. The desirable landscapes were cultivated ordered ones, metaphors for virtue and restraint.

However, attitudes were changing in the decades leading up to the French Revolution. With the ‘cult of the sublime’, encounters with wild places untouched by human presence, though still terrifying, appealed to the new Romantic mindset. Poets, painters and musicians celebrated a new vision of nature. This would, in time, lead to the national park movement. Yellowstone, the first of these great reserves, was to be preserved as an uncontaminated wilderness, into which rich tourists could be led, in carriages, to contemplate the landscape and its animals. The unfortunate tribes-people, who had lived there from millennia, were evicted and sent to reservations. Next, it was the turn of the predators; wolves and birds of prey were persecuted to extinction.

With the rise of the ecology movement, the role of predators was reassessed and wolves were reintroduced. More recently, the part played by the tribes banished from Yellowstone has been recognised. Hunter-gathers had changed the landscape profoundly with their impact on plants and animals. The presence of people in national parks is no longer seen as alien.

The Phoenix Park, with a huge human presence, and great national parks, where our role is less obvious, are at opposite ends of a spectrum.