Eoin Warner possesses what he calls a “nature lens” – when he is in the natural world, the moment imprints on his brain. He can still hear the snipe’s mating call as he picked wildflowers to romance his wife 25 years ago, and he can still see the sunlight reflected on the scales of a salmon as he watched the fish leap from the river as a 14-year-old boy.
Nearly half a century of details are now “stencilled into his mind”, there for him to recall at will. “As a child I suddenly realised that I had been gifted this thing by nature. I could see things that other people weren’t seeing, and that was because I spent so much time watching and looking,” Warner says, speaking on a video call from his home in Galway. This gift has given him an abundance of patience and a great capacity for observation – both useful skills for a wildlife documentary presenter.
Since his breakout show Éire Fhiáin aired on TG4 in 2017, Warner has presented nature documentaries in Irish and English, winning awards and acclaim along the way. Notably, Ireland’s Wild Islands, where Warner sailed a 140-year-old Galway hooker around the Irish coast, won Best Series at the 2025 International Wildlife Film Festival in the US, praised by the jury for its “enchanting blend of history, folklore, and rare wildlife behaviour”, “delivered with an especially distinctive voice”.
But where did that voice come from? When Warner stepped in front of the camera on the first day of shooting for Éire Fhiáin, he had almost no broadcast experience, and he also had the added challenge of presenting in Irish, his second language.
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“I fell into it really,” he says. Warner was working in business consulting when he got a call from television producer John Murray asking him to meet. Murray had heard from a friend that Warner was passionate about wildlife and could speak Irish, having spontaneously taken a year out in his 20s to live in the west Kerry Gaeltacht village of Ballyferriter and devote himself to learning the language. “I had come from a meeting so I was there in a full suit and tie, and John asked me to do a quick piece to camera. We were down behind the sea wall in Dún Laoghaire, and he asked me: ‘What would it mean to you to work in nature? To showcase Irish nature?’ And I remember just saying, as Gaeilge, ‘It would mean the world to me.’”
His answer won Murray over as a wildcard choice for the documentary, but as he recounts in his new book Through the Long Grass, the first day of shooting at Skellig Michael did not go well. Warner’s Irish was rehearsed, his speech perfect, but he felt the words were insincere and that this showed on camera. The next morning at sunrise, the team tried again, and this time Murray simply asked Warner to describe what he was seeing and feeling. It was the turning point, Warner says now. “I was so overwhelmed by the beauty of that moment. I was back in my nature bubble as a child, and I didn’t see the camera or the boom. I just spoke. There’s no script on these documentaries. It’s a conversation, and it allows for emotion. Because I have a huge interest in Irish culture and language and folklore, that just happens to come out too.”
Éire Fhiáin and all the documentaries that Warner has made with Murray’s production company Crossing the Line since, including Wild Conamara and Oileán Glas, Fásach Bán and Ireland’s Wild Islands, are highly produced, taking two to three years to make, and are sold around the world, opening up Irish wildlife to domestic and international audiences.
“It’s important for Irish people to see these shows produced to the same standard as anything on the BBC, because when we think of nature, or we think of wildlife documentaries, we think of David Attenborough, of Africa, of Antarctica. It’s a postcolonial thing. But our wildlife is just as beautiful and just as exotic as anything else you’ll find in the world,” Warner says. His hope is that the documentaries inspire more people to spend time in nature, to value it and to try to protect it.
One of the most extraordinary encounters he has experienced across all his documentaries comes in the second season of Ireland’s Wild Islands. Warner and the production crew spent three days looking for a rare display of basking sharks’ courtship, known as “torus”, off the coast of Co Clare. When they found them, the basking sharks were grouped and swimming in large circles, checking each other out in a form of slow-paced shark speed-dating. Warner, who had learned to freedive just for moments like this, slipped into the water unencumbered by scuba gear.
In the footage, he looks completely at ease as the 10-metre-long sharks come towards him, swim over him, and brush their fins off him. What did it feel like to be there? “That was deathbed stuff, the kind of thing you look back on and can’t believe it happened. I still watch the footage back and think, ‘Wow, was that me?’ It’s feckin’ brilliant.”
No relation to the environmentalist Dick Warner, but a fan of his “mellifluous voice and his beautiful use of language”, Warner has his own soothing style of speech. It’s the same over the phone as when he’s narrating a sequence of dolphins playing on the Dingle Peninsula, or explaining how basking sharks feed on microscopic plankton. He is calm and never rushed, even when he talks about the climate crisis and everyday destruction of the environment.
[ Patrick Freyne: Nature programmes don’t tell you animals are duplicitous bastardsOpens in new window ]
The other side of Warner’s intense connection to the natural world is that it causes him extreme distress when he sees the daily acts of “slow violence” being committed against it. When a biodiverse meadow he loved in Kerry was turned into a homogeneous grass field, he experienced solastalgia, a term coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, to describe the emotional or existential distress caused by negative changes to a home environment.
How does he deal with the grief? “Sometimes I feel we are f**ked, like completely. It really frustrates me that we will tinker around the edges of change, whether with overfishing or the draining of our bogs or deforestation. But we are not happy to upset the status quo.” For anything to change for the better, Warner hopes a two-pronged approach will work: policy changes that will force behavioural change, and a bottom-up approach in which people learn to love the natural world through books and documentaries, and will work to protect it.
It’s partly why he wrote his memoir Through the Long Grass, to share how nature has given him a sense of belonging in the world, no matter how turbulent human life can be. A lyrical writer, he describes the “opening scene” of his life’s memory from the vantage point of his father’s shoulders in the Glengarriff Woods, underneath a canopy of oak trees. The air, he remembers from when he was aged two, was perfumed by the scent of wet moss after summer rain.
This is also his only memory of his father, Captain David Warner, who died when the French oil tanker Betelgeuse exploded at an offshore oil terminal jetty in Bantry Bay on January 8th, 1979. Fifty people were killed that night. It became known locally as the “accident”, but the Whiddy Island disaster tribunal later found that the explosion could have been prevented.
“It angered me a lot growing up because it was a tragedy, it was horrendous, but there were lies told and shortcuts taken. Not only that, but it was torturous for those men to be on that boat for 20 minutes, trying to get help and no one answering their calls. They had two choices: either burn to death or jump into a sea that’s covered with half a mile of burning oil.”
Warner is clear that the loss of his father never defined him. While there was a void growing up, he had a happy childhood pursuing his interests. “I could spend hours just watching cows in the back field, chewing the cud. I was fascinated because they were these other beings that we were sharing space with.”
His mother, Mary, kept him at home rather than sending him to boarding school with his two older brothers, and recognising his need to be outside, she gave him the freedom to roam the fields and forests around Bantry. When he developed a fascination as a teenager with going night fishing for sea trout in the Coomhola River, she would park in a lay-by to read her book under the car’s dome light while her youngest son scrambled down the riverbank to where he needed to be to fish. She died in 2022.
“We were close,” Warner says. It becomes harder for him to speak and so he takes a sip of water before continuing. “We were great buddies. She was a very strong, very happy person, great craic. I don’t think she realised how strong she was. She was 33 when my father died, and she never met anyone again. Every night she went to bed by herself, and every morning she’d wake up by herself. It was very lonely, not to share the rest of her life.” Not a man to linger on his own loss, Warner repeats something his mother used to say – that grief came to her door early, but that it will come to everyone’s door. In his own words, “everyone has s**t”.
Having become comfortable in front of the camera, the idea of writing a book had initially terrified him when the late Manchán Magan first suggested it to him over a breakfast of shakshuka. The two were friends, and Magan used to urge Warner to use his voice more. “He was always trying to bring out the best in people.” Warner was doubtful over the idea. He’d never written anything other than a few poems to woo his wife – but he followed Magan’s urging and started his first draft the next day.
Keen to get his friend’s opinion, he sent over some early chapters. Magan didn’t hold back. Did he get out the red pen?
“He was a good critic,” Warner laughs. “He was fairly hard, but I am delighted he was.”
Magan apologised the next day and wrote Warner a line that became his narrative north star. “We, the readers, want to be in your company, we want to walk with your intimate self.”
Warner returned to this sentence over and over, keeping it on a notepad beside his desk.
A relatively private person with no social media presence, is he worried now about so much of his personal life being out there for people to read?
“It would have been part of my thinking, being too open, too deep in the writing, except for what Manchán wrote to me. Deep down, we have this social facade that sees us through the normal world, and when someone drops that facade, I think it resonates with people.”
The cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth is a key motif in Warner’s book and in his conversation. It is a pattern he has witnessed repeatedly in nature, and it has helped him come to terms with beginnings and endings, the wonder of life and its limitations. Insistent that there is nothing special about him, he believes that every child and every adult can access the same extraordinary nature lens he possesses. “That spark is in all of us when we start off. There is this great forgetting where we get busy, and we don’t see it any more. But I believe it’s still there for all of us.”
Through the Long Grass by Eoin Warner is published by Gill
