Curlew and bogs vanishing
Anyone hearing the piercing cry of the curlew in boglands this summer can count themselves lucky. I walk through bogs from time to time and haven’t heard that call, or many other once familiar calls, for decades.
Years ago, while working in bogs with lyrical names like Tureenamult, Ballinahulla and Knocknageeha, we would hear the curlew throughout the day. Nowadays, wildlife has disappeared from many bogs, except perhaps the skylark.
And, of course, many bogs have also vanished, with a reminder coming from a recent event at the Bog of Allen Nature Centre, in Co Kildare, to celebrate International Bog Day as part of European Year of Cultural Heritage.
There, a team of experts, assembled by the Irish Peatland Conservation Council, highlighted an unusual connection between Ireland and the Netherlands in efforts to save the bogs of Ireland.
Dutch people started to buy Irish bogs in 1987. The inspiration came from Matthijs Schouten, a Dutch student who was studying our bogs as part of his doctoral thesis. The Netherlands were the first country in Europe to cut away all of their bogs. Like Ireland, they extracted peat for fuel.
Schouten, now a professor, was shocked when he started visiting Irish bogs to find machines were already removing wildlife and cutting peat industrially. He feared we were heading in the same direction the Dutch had — the road to peatland extinction.
To ring alarm bells here and to justify the Dutch people telling us to conserve our bogs, he launched a campaign to purchase three bogs in three years in Ireland. These bogs were handed over to the Irish Government so that they would be protected and were designated as national nature reserves.
Speaking at the Kildare event, Professor Schouten, from the Dutch Foundation for the Conservation of Irish Bogs, emphasised the importance of Ireland’s peatlands on a European level.
The last intact bogs were in Ireland; they would never be able to recreate a bog in Holland, bogs had disappeared all over western Europe and the last intact bogs were in Ireland, he said.
Boglands once covered 1.3 million hectares in this country. Due to turf cutting, the burning of milled peat to make electricity and the use of moss peat in gardening and horticulture, less than 18% of the original area of boglands remain, according to the council.
Curlew numbers, meanwhile, have dropped by 96% since the 1980s, but there are hopes a new conservation project at Lodge Bog, Co Kildare, will yield results. On project launch day, five curlew were recorded, havingn returned to the bog to breed.
Visitors had the rare chance to observe the curlew and hear its call. It was by far the highlight of the day.
