ANOTHER LIFE: Little by little, we are finding out what we really think about wind farms in the countryside, not just in generally-approving, green theory, but in their very potent presence. Travelling inland, I found a whole new regiment lined up on a distant ridge and silvered by a sudden flare of sun. Since the ridge in question was in someone else's back yard and not part of any grand, inviolable set-piece of scenery, I could sit back and grant a certain beauty to the turbines' stately statuary, writes Michael Viney.
There are a good many stretches of the Irish uplands where loneliness of road, hopelessness of livelihood, the bleak but undramatic profile of the hills, suggest a safely unobtrusive location for wind farm sites (or, indeed, county council waste dumps). But this is to ignore the pace at which open hill country is dwindling, and its crucial value to wildlife at particular locations.
For example, in the hills that stretch for 40 kilometres east of Tralee and into Co Limerick - Stack's Mountains and the Mullaghareirks - breed about one-third of the Republic's hen harriers. These large, slow-flying, graceful birds of prey are now even rarer in Ireland than the corncrake: my own few sightings have been confined to the forests of the Slieve Blooms and one or two winter encounters along the open shore.
Dúchas is duly trying to conserve the birds by drawing up nine Special Protection Areas (SPAs) for their breeding habitats in the hills of the south and southwest, together with surrounding open land they need for hunting. At an agitated meeting of landowners in Tralee earlier this month, it was clear that few people had much idea of the bird in question, except that, reputedly, the "hen carrier" could lift a turkey. There was also some heartfelt rhetoric, directed at the local Dúchas conservation rangers, to suggest that if the harrier got in the way of selling land for more wind farms or forestry, it was likely to come to a premature end.
Would it have helped at all, at this end of Kerry, if someone had pointed out the role of the grouse-shooting Brits, West Brits and their gamekeepers in bringing the hen harrier close to extinction in these islands? By the start of the 20th century, it had been forced to retreat to the Hebrides and the Orkneys, with only a few pairs of "blue hawks" (the males; the females are bigger and brown) surviving in Irish uplands. By the middle of the last century, the harrier was still classed as "a rare straggler".
What served its revival, along with the end of Big House gamekeepers, was the spread of State conifer forestry in the hills. Ungrazed, secluded stands of heather and moorgrass between the young trees make a cover for nesting that has now quite vanished from the open moor. A recent Dúchas survey of our hen harrier population, led by Dr David Norriss, found that replanted, second-rotation forest, with trees up to 10 years old, is the favourite breeding habitat of the 120 or so pairs of harriers that now survive here. They nest perhaps two kilometres apart, and move around within the forests as young trees close in and new plantings grow up.
The real constraint is food. Harriers do best when their nest and young are beside a stretch of low moorland that they can quarter methodically for prey, flying low in the hunt for young hares and rabbits, rats and woodmice and small birds such as meadow pipits. Thus, in long-term planning of Special Protection Areas, Dúchas feels bound to include not just the relevant tracts of forest, but adequate stretches of nearby bog and heath.
Already, in the key areas, forestry has spread hugely to cover some three-quarters of the hills. The first wind farm has appeared in Stack's Mountains, to widespread local pride and satisfaction. Surely, it was argued in Tralee, birds learn not to fly into the whirling blades of the turbines? They do, indeed, but chorus-lines of machines beating the air with a whomp-whomp-whomp! scarcely make an inviting hunting ground for harriers, as they fly, peering beneath lifted wings in their methodical search for prey. Dúchas, with interested partners in the UK, is looking for answers to the impact of wind farms on harrier foraging.
Meanwhile, in Co Limerick, the county council has rejected a proposal for a wind farm on Knockastanna Hill, its planners concluding that "given the rarity of the hen harrier, even the remote possibility of this development having a negative effect . . . must take precedence over the benefits of wind energy". Decision on an appeal, which argues a "negligible impact" on the birds and the benefits of conserving 150 acres of moorland vegetation, is expected in May.
The issue tests Ireland's commitment to protecting a threatened species. Dúchas clearly believes that unless it acts now to bring some open country within the boundaries of SPAs, the hen harrier is doomed. Many birding interests, on the other hand, including the Irish Raptor Study Group, think that designating SPAs in a way that prompts retaliatory persecution of the birds would be "the worst possible outcome".
Dúchas is suggesting special payments to farmers under the Rural Environment Protection Scheme as a bonus for benevolence towards the foraging harriers. BirdWatch Ireland is adding a special, voluntary effort to make the case for conservation just as, in Donegal, it was necessary to prepare hill farmers for reintroduction of the golden eagle. But while their opposite numbers in Kerry can be promised that turkeys may indeed sleep safely in their beds, concerns about their control of the land will need some deeper reassurance.