Another Life:It is some 25 years since a young English couple, the Chapmans, called to my door to talk about otters. They'd just spent months travelling the country in a camper van, checking under bridges or along river banks for the animals' spraints or footprints, writes Michael Viney.
The news was good: they'd stopped at 2,042 sites, spaced carefully on the map, and found otter signs at 88 per cent of them. In few countries in Europe was the animal, seldom seen but warmly valued, so widely secure.
Since that pioneer national survey (funded by the Vincent Wildlife Trust, an independent UK charity), the Irish otter has faced into general decline. In the latest survey - 525 sites in 2006 - the animal's presence was down to just over 70 per cent.
In Europe, where many otter populations crashed in the late 1900s, environmental improvements and focused conservation efforts have brought them back to healthy numbers in about one-third of the countries. Ireland now has to do more than give protection under the Wildlife Act, or hope that designating 40 Special Areas of Conservation for the otter is enough to take care of its future.
The Species Action Plan for the otter, just published by the National Parks and Wildlife Service (at www.npws.ie), is an analysis of all the threats to the animal and an agenda for its conservation. Such documents stand, alas, at the forensic edge of today's natural history.
In the loss and decline of Lutra lutra can be read a certain inevitability, as if, protected from hunting and direct human abuse, the species had found a new predator in the Celtic Tiger. Irish rivers were far less polluted when the Chapmans were on their way round. Road traffic - the major cause of recorded otter deaths - was infinitely less. There was much more peaceful countryside, less weekend touring and picknicking, and fewer new suburban housing estates with roaming dogs (most dead otter cubs found in Britain have bite wounds).
Whatever about dealing with pollution, Ireland seems likely to have less and less room for the parallel lives of otters. They are widespread, but living at low density, and where they are already under pressure the deaths of even a few can bring local extinction. What, then, can be done to halt their decline? The action plan aims to bring them back to the 88 per cent by 2020, at least in the SACs prescribed for their sanctuary.
Some of the grosser engineering sins against wildlife, as in the ruthless clawing back of river banks in the arterial drainage schemes of the last century, are unlikely to be repeated, and we must hope that new flood defence works will not sacrifice too many holts and hovers and bankside trees.
The National Roads Authority provides painstaking 20 pages of "Guidelines for the Treatment of Otters Prior to the Construction of National Road Schemes".
An initial environmental impact survey should have found their holts and foraging patterns; and cutting them off from half their habitat is recognised as not a good thing. They may need box culverts as underpasses, big enough not to flood, with a dry ledge on both sides (for badgers, too) and an encouraging glimpse of daylight at the end. Holts may, indeed, have to be evacuated and destroyed, but, among the "mitigation" procedures, "no works should be undertaken within 150m of any holts at which breeding females or cubs are present". (Sorry about the noise, ma'am.)
An action plan can make inspiring reading, peppered promisingly with the initials of government agencies charged with doing something about it.
"Ensure that all operations affecting watercourses, including 'bank improvement' for angling, take account of otters and retain features such as old trees, scrub, and overhanging tree root systems. Action: CFB, FS, LA's, NPWS, RFB's, OPW." Target dates are even better: "By 2009 have a system in place to address the need for compensation and the provision of otter-proof fencing for valuable vulnerable fish ponds. Action: MI, CFB, DAFF, IFA aquaculture, NPWS."
The LAs and NPWS have to get cracking by 2010 on finding the spots in national parks and SACs where "otter observation sites" might give visitors a chance if they keep the kids quiet. Landowner leaflets for building "log-pile holts" sounds promising, but "standardised artificial sprainting sites" for the benefit of otter census-takers might need a little more explaining.
And then those dogs . . . "By 2009 review the impact of mink hunting on otters." But also: "By 2009 examine the potential for important breeding sites to be designated as areas where dogs must be kept on a leash." That should go down well with Kerry county councillors.
EyeOnNature
Our bush attracts two male robins, who feed on the ground underneath the feeders and tolerate each others' presence most of the time. Recently, I noticed that both robins seemed to strain their heads and necks toward the sky. Was this some kind of ritual or fertility dance?
- Declan Carty, Sandymount, Dublin 4
It is impossible without a physical examination to tell the sex of a robin, and the two that tolerate each other may be a male and female pair. But the display of neck stretching took place between two males and was aggressive, the resident driving an interloper away.
When cleaning out a rain water drain I found a black frog under the silt. Was he hibernating and how did he get air?- Joy Simpson, Dún Laoghaire
Hibernating frogs get oxygen underwater by breathing through their skins.
Honey bees working on the heather in my garden in the last week in January. Can the first cuckoo be far behind?- G & G Kelly, Co Waterford
A peacock butterfly was on the wing here on January 27th. -Eugene Kelly, Lismore, Co Waterford