Cultivating a new conservation

ANOTHER LIFE: For those who would love to take farmers at their word as "guardians of the countryside", these are not encouraging times. The "Keep Out" signs put up before Christmas on farm gates around the Shannon callows were meant especially for Dúchas staff involved with the boundaries of a Special Area of Conservation.

Elsewhere, signs may confront walkers, bird-watchers and weekend townies in general. In the farmers' recent siege of Dublin, it was clear that compliance with city-bred ambitions for the countryside could be used to win a better deal for those who own the land.

In the macho brand of leadership that farmers favour, there seems to be little space for the common good in the conservation of nature. This obscures, very often, the personal goodwill and co-operation that often operates at local level. There are also real and vexing difficulties in conservation controls and compensation packages that work too inflexibly on the ground. Along the banks of the Shannon, for example, helping corncrakes and lapwings to breed in peace needs measures that fit some fields, but not others, and suit one year but not the next.

If any state agency has a hope of mediating the "decoupling" of farm support from production to conserving the environment, it is Teagasc, still a trusted presence at the rural kitchen table. After earlier decades of promotion of high-input, intensive farming, it is making amends through its backing for REPS, the Rural Environment Protection Scheme, and for research into farming that can co-exist with ecologically precious landscapes.

In the Burren, for example, Brendan Dunford has spent five years investigating the evolution of the landscape and how this has been shaped by successive generations of farmers. He tells the story in Farming and the Burren (Teagasc, €10), in which the occasional pie-charts and tables are quite overpowered by the beauty of his photographs.

Intensive farmers of the Bronze Age saw the cattle-trampled soil of the Burren washed down through the cracks in the rock, but the traditional winter grazing of the uplands is what helps to maintain today's exquisite diversity of wildflowers. The danger is that, as farming dwindles to the valleys, and off-farm employment takes over, the undergrazed, rocky, but species-rich heights will be swamped with hazel and blackthorn scrub.

The attitudes of Burren farmers are changing rapidly, says Dr Dunford. Few want to give up their land, but traditional skills are less relevant than "the ability to position the farm operation so as to optimally benefit from the range of compensatory schemes available". This, he suggests, actually makes it easier to swing farm management round to conservation, if Teagasc research can match the right measures to the Burren's infinite complexity.

The interpretative website he runs with his partner, Ann O'Connor - www.burrenbeo.com - supports his fine optimism that the Burren's heritage can be part of the farming future, especially with a reward system "through which farmers are proactively paid to deliver environmental goods, rather than reactively penalised for digressions from predetermined, standardised, and often inappropriate, criteria". His views find close echo in another new publication about the Burren, this time by Liam Lysaght, the Wildlife Officer with the Heritage Council.

An Atlas of the Breeding Birds of the Burren and the Aran Islands, published by BirdWatch Ireland at €20, is the fruit of four years of fieldwork by 50 BirdWatch members and of Dr Lysaght's own years as ranger in the Burren National Park. Its account of the region's 106 species notes the loss of birds such as corncrake, corn bunting and grey partridge, and decline of barn owl, curlew and yellowhammer - all birds associated with the mixed farming of the past.

The author assails a system of EU direct payments which has failed to recognise the distinctive character of different regions. Even REPS "urgently needs to be cranked up a gear, with a move away from the 'compensation' culture to one where positive measures for the natural heritage are identified, and farmers given incentives to achieve these objectives in a proactive manner".

Dr Lysaght is another optimist, seeing "a latent interest in natural heritage among the farming community" that Government departments and state agencies are neglecting.

What farmers will make of the new and colourful Dúchas guide to Special Protection Areas for Birds in Ireland(available from Dúchas sites this summer, approx €10) remains to be seen. The designation of SPAs has been queueing up behind that of Special Areas of Conservation under the 20-year-old Wild Birds Directive, with similar constraints on development and provision for compensation.

The guide describes 110 sites already designated, and another 26 added under the urging of the EU Commission. Most of them are wetlands, bays and estuaries that serve the migration of wildfowl and waders, along with islands, headlands (and the Cliffs of Moher) used by our important colonies of nesting seabirds. It's a bright, fistful of a booklet, packed with excellent maps and photographs and bound to appeal to bird-watchers in Ireland and from abroad.

In his county-by-county description of sites, Cóilin MacLochlainn lists the birds on view, season by season, and the plants, insects and animals that give each SPA extra interest. He also, thoughtfully, adds some notes on vantage points on the safe side of fences.