Would you know where to find our rarest heather?

ANOTHER LIFE:ON THE OTHER side of Mweelrea, where the steep side of the mountain slopes into Killary Harbour, the remains of a pre-Famine clachan perch above the shore.

The clachan is called Derry, for the clump of gnarled sessile oaks that crouch among the rocks, but its real botanical distinction is the thicket of chest-high heather growing along the clachan's old lazy beds. While the oak buds still clench on bare twigs, the pink flowers of Erica erigena,now called Irish heath, are crowding into early bloom.

I lift this picture from memory, as too many fences and too much rough terrain now stand in my way, but a new book from Charles Nelson, long an energetic student of Ireland’s flora, reminds me that the Killary thickets are “one of the most remarkable colonies” of this particular plant, unique among our heathers for blooming in late winter and spring.

Dr Nelson's weighty and gorgeous Hardy Heathers from the Northern Hemisphere(Kew Publishing, £60) persuades me to surrender the term "Mediterranean heather" by which the shrub is still more commonly known in Connacht. But the "Irish" in its name raises questions, as do other rare heathers of the west.

Erica erigenadoes, indeed, touch the Mediterranean at Malaga and Cadiz, but its disconnected populations, some of only a few hundred plants, are dotted across Spain and Portugal and extend even to Bordeaux, in western France. It is still more than 1,100km from Ireland's southernmost plants in a hollow on Errisbeg, above Roundstone in Connemara.

In the first book of his Connemara trilogy, Listening to the Wind, Tim Robinson described visiting the plants on Errisbeg on a sunny day in February, when "the heather was a vivid pale green against the wintry grey of the surrounding slopes, and a few mounds of it were already covered in tiny pale-lilac flowers. The tubular blossoms are only a few millimetres long, and with a hand lens one can see the chocolate-coloured anthers just showing in their mouths like the tips of velvet-gloved fingers . . ."

A visiting Welsh naturalist first took note of the plant in 1700, but credit for finding and collecting it generally goes to the work of the Trinity botanist James Mackay in 1829. He traced its scattered colonies northwards, to Claggan Mountain beyond Mayo’s Mulrany, where wild goats of ancient lineage still browse upon it, and on through the hills and bogs to the Mullet Peninsula. Dr Nelson shows a great sweep of the heather blooming with bright spring gorse on the windswept shore of Lough Carrowmore.

Its origins, like those of our other rare heathers with southern homelands, formed part of the great – and continuing – debate on the arrival in Ireland after the Ice Age of “Lusitanian” species. Even a few decades ago, Irish natural scientists as eminent as David Webb, WA Watts and Frank Mitchell were ready to think that the “disjunct” heathers of the west (Irish heath, Mackay’s heath and St Dabeoc’s heath) might have survived in some mild refuge on the offshore seabed, dried out as the Atlantic fell back in the Ice Age.

Where Irish heath is concerned, however, the absence of any fossil pollen before the last Ice Age threw its native credentials into question. Work with an electron microscope on deep peat cores from Claggan Mountain found its pollen appearing first in 1431, at the height of maritime contact between western Ireland, western France and northwest Spain.

At any of these addresses, the bushy and pliable branches of the plant could have seemed an ideal packing around wooden casks of wine.

The rarest Lusitanian heather in Ireland is Erica ciliaris, a mainly Pyrenean plant with little fringes at the ends of its leaves, and usually called the Dorset heath for its sparse presence in that English county. But its one known colony in Connemara is now, says Dr Nelson, "regarded as dubious, the result of a deliberate introduction". In the days before its disgrace, Tim Robinson led me to the precious clump, growing quite unprotected beside the narrow road that crosses Roundstone Bog. (Tim, in his writings, still keeps its location vague.)

Found there in 1965, its credentials as a native plant were supported by the known discovery of its fossil flowers and seeds beneath glacial gravel near Gort, Co Galway, together with those of Mackay's and St Dabeoc's heaths. Since then, the early 19th-century activities of William McAlla, a dedicated but erratic local botanist dealing with English plant collectors, have come under suspicion. As Tim Robinson wonders in Listening to the Wind: "Does the guilty shade of Roundstone's great botanist haunt the crags, planting heathers in the night?" Charles Nelson himself still has heretical doubts. "I tend to the view," he writes casually, "that Nature alone has been at work."

Eye on nature

I have three bird feeders in my garden, and I thought the birds were eating me out of house and home, but I’ve discovered that a pair of grey squirrels are the culprits. What should I do?

Patricia Roantree, Rathfarnham, Dublin

[ birdwatchireland.ie ]

Recently my wife and I came across a badger in the middle of our housing estate. There is no green area of any significance near us.

Martin Murphy, Palmerstown, Dublin

Badgers can have a territory of up to one square kilometre with a sett anywhere within that area.

Walking beside the Grand Canal near Ballyleague Castle, in Co Longford, I saw a bird about the size of a duck. It had a speckled breast, longish neck and yellow hooked beak and was flapping its extended wings, which had a two-foot span. Could it have been a cormorant?

Dermot MacDermott, Prosperous, Co Kildare

Yes, it was.

Last year we had three pairs of tree sparrows visiting our garden. This year one arrived on February 7th.

Kieran Fitzpatrick, Greystones, Co Wicklow

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