Remembering the best introduction to the wild west

ANOTHER LIFE:Six new marine sanctuaries have been announced, and one is close to my heart, and my home

One crisp winter’s morning in the late 1970s, with the mountains from Achill to Renvyle in a gleaming rim of snow around the bay, I was walking the strand at Carrowniskey in excited exploration of our – territory, domain, terrain . . . what word was big enough for somewhere so magically new?

The strand had a bright hem of foam and long lines of slow breakers, almost the size that draw today’s Carrowniskey surfers. And then suddenly, beyond the curling crests, there were half a dozen bottlenose dolphins, not just surfing but leaping clear vertically, and scattering spray in the sun.

For 10 whole minutes they played, just for me, and then melted away in the waves. As a welcome to life in the west, it took some beating.

It was also my first close encounter with such animals, and so crude, then, was my knowledge that I wrote about them as “porpoises” – a word I seem to have borrowed from Melville’s Moby-Dick, whose riotous “huzza” porpoises must have seemed to fit the mood. But it’s as proper bottlenoses that our friendly neighbourhood dolphins have now earned official sanctuary.

In the list of six new marine Special Areas of Protection (SACs), announced last month by the Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht Jimmy Deenihan, harbour porpoises get a new SAC across Dublin Bay, from Rockabill to Dalkey Island, while our dolphins inherit, more grandly, the “West Connacht Coast”.

Just where this starts and ends is by no means clear, but it certainly includes the waters around the islands and reefs of Slyne Head, at the wildest, craggiest end of Connemara. Here, a solar-powered lighthouse blinks its warning for 20 nautical miles, sometimes lighting a cloud on our own horizon.

This awesome archipelago has already been acknowledged as a marine SAC, notably for its value to some 300 grey seals, which breed and rest there, and the rich marine life of its reefs.

Repeated surveys over the past decade by a team from University College Cork have found schools of bottlenose dolphins spending time close to the coast from Killary Harbour, round the corner of Slyne Head, to Mannin in Galway Bay. Almost 90 of the dolphins have been photo-identified (including three with congenital twists in their backs), and they seem to form a highly mobile community, perhaps of some 170 animals, that use these waters in the summer months. This is many more than all previous estimates of those using the Shannon Estuary and already protected with an SAC.

This led the survey team to recommend an SAC consisting of a coastal strip of water less than 5 km wide between Slyne Head and Roonagh, on the Mayo coast north of Thallabawn (almost exactly where my initiation took place in 1978). This protects the dolphins on at least part of their journeying up and down the west coast, and gives them Killary Harbour, Cleggan Bay and Ballynakill Bay to hang around in.

There had, however, been pressure from the European Commission in 2009 to protect a more representative share of certain marine habitats – sandbanks and deep rocky reefs, for example, both of which are often hot-spots of marine life. The deadline for proposing them was the end of 2012, which explains the rush to announce Ireland’s six choices before Christmas.

The two sandbanks proposed for SACs are at opposite ends of the island. Hempton’s Turbot Bank is off the Inishowen peninsula on the coast of Donegal, at a depth of less than 20 metres.

Apart from the obvious promise of its name, this sandbank’s qualification seems to lie mainly in its location as Ireland’s most northerly specimen.

The Blackwater Bank, off Co Wexford, is one of the big sandbanks off our Irish Sea coast, originally shaped from sediments ground up by the Ice Age. They have all been well surveyed, given the prospect of offshore wind farms or dredging for construction material (the latter a threat dissolving just in time), and the Blackwater was found less fauna-rich than the Kish Bank but a good enough example to satisfy the Habitats Directive.

The deep-water reefs are “geogenic” – hard bedrock habitats deep under the sea that make homes for organisms such as corals, sponges, hydrozoans and anemones. The rock projects from the walls of the great canyon system in the western Porcupine Bank, stretching more than 90km to its mouth in the Rockall Trough, some 600 metres deep. There are more reefs in two deep-seated canyons on the far side of the trough, at the southeastern end of the Rockall Bank.

None of the SACs can match the scale of the protection areas that the world’s oceans demand, but, like those already covering our best deep-water corals, they are taking the right course.

Eye on Nature Your observations and questions

I was watching a blue tit enjoying breakfast on the peanut feeder when suddenly a large shadow swooped by my kitchen window. The sparrowhawk caught it by the wing and smashed it on the ground. In the next second, it had grabbed it in its beak and flown off, hotly pursued by a magpie. It was all over in the blink of an eye. I have since moved the feeder to a safer place.

Joan Roberts, Belgooly, Co Cork

Nature red in tooth and claw. Spare a thought for the sparrowhawk, which also has to eat.

A newcomer to my garden is smaller than a sparrow, about the size of a tit. It has a totally black head and the rest of the body is grey.

Jim Harding, Blackrock, Co Dublin

It is a blackcap, a warbler with a beautiful song in spring.

On December 16 I watched two birds on a green area off the Raheny road. At first I thought they were large thrushes or mistle thrushes. Could they have been fieldfares?

Mary Lalor, Raheny, Dublin 5

They could have been. Drimnagh Birdwatch saw large flocks in November.

There have been sightings of waxwings from Lifford, Co Donegal; Tuam, Co Galway; Blackrock and Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin.

Michael Viney

welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. Email : viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address.