`The hind turns clockwise, rapidly and tightly within her own length. In effect, she pivots on her hind legs, using her forelegs to spin around . . . Once, a hind with calf, who had spun six times in her first bout, then went deliberately to the top of a hillock, and twirled again, 13 times. This time she revolved so rapidly, and in such tight clockwise circles, that she leaned inwards, towards her right, and at an angle of about 30 degrees from the vertical. On stopping, she appeared quite normal, neither confused nor dizzy, and cantered away, followed by her calf."
The "twirling" of red deer mothers on the mountains above Killarney seems to be a deliberately weird piece of behaviour, meant to distract a predator's attention from the calves (like the "broken wing" act of some ground-nesting birds). It has never been described before, and certainly not with Sean Ryan's taut precision. Such a standard of observation puts The Wild Red Deer of Killarney (Mount Eagle, £25) into the front rank of natural history writing.
As Prof James Fairley says in his foreword, this is an original - the first serious book about just one species of Irish wild animal. It is the fruit of an obsession carried through with enormous stamina and skill. In a vivid narrative of red deer life through the seasons, we are at the author's shoulder to watch not only twirling, but the threshing, wallowing and fighting of rutting stags, and to learn the language of their roaring. The book's many long-lens photographs are the pick of more than 4,000 transparencies and among the best red deer pictures ever taken.
The author, a retired accountant, has been stalking and watching the deer for 30 years, his camera wrapped in two plastic bags against the mountain rain. When he began, the animals were not far from extinction. Today, thanks to changed attitudes and active conservation, the red deer of the National Park have reached a stable level of 200-300, but are still having to compete with some 500 sika deer and about 2,000 trespassing sheep: a shocking figure.
An appendix to the book gives the first report on the success of the red deer transferred from Killarney in 1980 to establish a small, pure-blooded reservoir on Inishvicillaun, Charles Haughey's stormswept but fertile island. Inured to helicopters but still alertly wild, some 40 deer are now thriving on the 200 acres of rock, lichens and surprisingly rich grass.
Botany in Ireland has had a curious, hybrid history: plenty of outstanding names, but not very many native accents among the churchmen, doctors and gentlemen naturalists. Robert Lloyd Praeger did great things but also left Irish botany a bit awestruck in his wake, and for too much of this century, Irish field studies tended to serve plant-mapping schemes initiated in Britain.
But things have changed, as this island finds its own value and relevance in a monitoring of its wild plant-life and the dangers pressing upon it. A new generation of regional floras encourages Donal Synnott, director of the National Botanic Gardens, to feel that "a new heyday of Irish botany has arrived which rivals that begun by Stewart and Corry, More and Barrington, Hart and Praeger, Colgan and Scully . . ."
A weighty contribution, in every sense, is the handsome new, 560-page Flora of County Dublin, published by the Dublin Naturalists' Field Club (at £25, with support from the Heritage Council). It is the outcome of a 10-year survey by the club's members and was compiled and edited by five of them: Declan Doogue, David Nash, John Parnell, Sylvia Reynolds and Peter Wyse Jackson.
This is the first complete survey since the work of Nathaniel Colgan, the diffident Dublin court clerk who published a careful Flora in 1904. In his day, Finglas and Blanchardstown were still small villages, quite isolated from the city, and not the least of the new book's merits is as a guide to the un-built-on corners of the county still available for exploration.
Fragments of woodland in the Liffey valley and elsewhere still hold rare or at least unusual wildflowers, but the serious botanist looks beyond mere scenery to read the landscape for plant history and potential. Quarries, marshes, and ruined eskers can all be botanically rich and rewarding, and a sparse human population is not essential. Killiney Hill has more than 200 native plant species, and even the gravel car-park at Leopardstown race course can offer the rue-leaved saxifrage. New road construction, stirring old seed banks, brings flushes of forgotten arable "weeds" - cornflowers, poppies and the like.
This is not an illustrated field-guide: its target reader has those already. It describes the county's main habitats and then gives systematic information for more than 1,300 plants - historical records, current sites, frequency, and so on. For the serious amateur botanist, in and around Dublin, it's a book for life.
In Walking Ireland (Gill and Macmillan, £20) a well-regarded British author of walking guides, Tom Lawton, offers 25 routes, mainly in the south of the island and including some relatively untrodden heights. His Nire Valley walks, for example, explore the surrounding Comeragh, Knockmealdown and Galty Mountains, and there are some interesting personal choices on the Beara and Iveragh Peninsulas of Kerry and in the Burren.
Lawton is writing for walkers, not mountaineers (his hike along Kerry's Inch Strand is a pleasant amble). The loftier routes were often explored in company with local walking guides, some of them farmers tuning in to new opportunities in tourism: the hotel and B & B lists are painstaking. Yet the book may ultimately defeat its purpose. Dressed up with Lawton's landscape photographs, computer-generated diagrams and walking-time profiles, it's a glossy A4 hardback weighing a kilo, when what one needs is something waterproof to carry in an anorak pocket.
Michael Viney's diary of country life, A Year's Turning, originally published by Blackstaff, is now a Penguin paperback, price £6.99 in UK.
The Dublin Naturalists' Field Club is at 35, Nutley Park, Dublin 4.
Over the past several years the sand of Bertra beach, on the southern shore of Clew Bay, has virtually disappeared. The level of the beach has been dropping year by year, and I reckon by eye that it is now a good four feet below what it was some four or five years ago. What has caused this scouring phenomenon? There have been no man-made breakwaters or artificial works built which might have interfered with normal tidal movement. There certainly have been periods of storm at all seasons over the past few years.
Michael Murphy, Westport, Co Mayo
In general terms a bay or stretch of coast has a sand cell or budget which is removed from the shore by storms and deposited as a sand bar out from the shore. This sand is returned to the beach in calmer weather. If the budget of sand is reduced by any means, say for farm or building use, then the sea will replace it from some source such as sandhills. Where storms are concerned, if their number or duration exceed the calm periods, for a specific length of time, the sand may take longer to return to the beach. Sand may not have been removed from Bertra beach but large quantities were taken from nearby Old Head beach.
Francis Ledwidge wrote of Thomas McDonagh: "He shall not hear the bittern cry/ in the wild sky where he is lain". The only bittern to be seen in Ireland now is the odd one in a glass showcase, with no call. When did the bittern (an bunan buidhe) become extinct in Ireland. Is it still found elsewhere?
Jim Sutton, New Ross, Co Wexford
The bittern stopped breeding in Ireland around 1840, but birds from Britain have visited here since then, particularly in winter. In more recent times it has become a rare visitor. It became extinct as a breeding bird in Britain around 1900, but was later re-introduced. Another decline set in the middle of this century and there are very few bitterns breeding there at present. However in hard weather, winter visitors still arrive in Britain, and occasionally here, from continental Europe. A European bittern was seen at the end of November flying low over Bray, and being mobbed by gulls, corvids and starlings.
Edited by Michael Viney, Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. e-mail: viney@anu.ie. Please include postal address.
