Gearóid Ó Muilleoir, pen name Dúlra, is a wildlife buff who was brought up on the slopes of Belfast’s Black Mountain where he spent almost every waking moment hillwalking, birdwatching and fishing.
He’s witnessed massive changes in the local environment, with fields disappearing and nature retreating. “When I was young we had corncrakes breeding in the heart of west Belfast and a barn owl used to swoop down over the street as we played in the evening," he says.
“All that’s gone - but the one thing that has given me heart is the rewilding movement. Nature just needs to be given the space to do its thing without human interference and it can return from the brink.”
Gearóid has spent a lifetime in journalism, working with all the main newspapers here and he’s now production editor of the Sunday World. Outside of the environment, his other passion is the Irish language and he’s a regular on award-winning Belfast station Raidió Failte.
WHEN the girls returned from Strictly Come Dancing Live at the Odyssey a few weeks ago, they were buzzing. The show was beyond their expectations and the dancers were all phenomenal – especially the Glitterball winner.
BE afraid. Be very afraid. This spider is taking over the world. And it could be on a wall or under a sofa near you.
IT’S not quite at the level of St Francis of Assisi. The famous saint used to preach to the birds in the forest, who would fall silent and gather around him, intrigued by his powerful voice.
IT was the biggest, heaviest book Dúlra had ever seen – and with an equally impressive name – The Migration Atlas: Movements of the Birds of Britain and Ireland (right).
GOOD company can help you get through deep winter. And this week, when you can see your breath and there’s frost and snow on the ground, Dúlra’s had the best of company. Not from people – but from a wee bird that stands out from the crowd.He first noticed the blackcap in the garden sitting on top of a bramble stem sticking out of a wee section of hedge that hadn’t been tended as well as all the others.The bird was the size of a sparrow, but it held itself with a lot more aplomb. This was a bird that was worldly wise and immaculately turned out – blackcaps are all-over grey with that stand-out cap – black for male, brown for female. And their bill is thin and delicate – certainly not the jack-of-all-trades beak of the sparrow. And it’s from that bill that, come spring, a wonderful song will emerge. As members of the warbler family, they are unlike any other bird that you might find in your garden at this time of year. Insect-eating warblers are forced to head thousands of miles south to find food when summer ends here. But obviously not that blackcap in Dúlra’s garden, sitting on that half-frozen bramble stem.
THERE’S a revolution coming – and it will transform our lives like the industrial revolution did to our ancestors. It will involve something so basic in our lives that we barely question it – food. And according to one expert, if we don’t embrace this change, we could all be doomed.
You’ll find plenty to celebrate in this half-century supplement championing not only this great community paper, but the community that it served. It’s a half-century journey of triumph over adversity in so many areas of life.
WHY are some birds more nervous than others? Some, like the thrushes Dúlra watched this week, seem to be absolutely terrified.
OF all the jobs that Dúlra has turned his hand to over the years, there was one money-spinner that beat all the rest hands down. In fact, not a single potential customer refused to put their hands in their pockets for what was on offer – and things were just as tight on families all those decades ago as they are today.
OF all the jobs that Dúlra has turned his hand to over the years, there was one money-spinner that beat all the rest hands down. In fact, not a single potential customer refused to put their hands in their pockets for what was on offer – and things were just as tight on families all those decades ago as they are today.
FUTURE generations of local people will thank Aaron Kelly every day – and that’s not something you can say about many people. The work the 25-year-old has done and continues to do on our mountains is nothing short of phenomenal. This week he was leading a class from Coláiste Feirste in planting native trees on the bald, windswept slopes of Black Mountain, trees that will take hundreds of years to fully mature. What a legacy to leave.
CAROLINE Finlay knows dogs are special – and she’s on a mission to tell the world. They 'see' things differently to us – by using their nose. “A massive proportion of their brain is devoted to scent,” Caroline told Dúlra.“We are a visual species, but dogs can pretty much find anything. In Africa, one dog has been trained to find this individual rhino, going out each morning to help the rangers keep track of this single endangered animal.” We all know dogs are great at some things – like finding people in collapsed buildings, or detecting drugs at airports – but Caroline, who has a doctorate in conservation and has spent the last 10 years working with nature including studying monkeys in the Honduran rainforest, says we don’t know the half of it. Dogs can help not just us, but endangered species all around us. Take curlews, which are on the verge of extinction as breeding birds in Ireland, a tragedy we must take the blame for because it happened under our watch, in our lifetimes. Trying to conserve what few curlews remain requires finding their nests among the grass so we can make sure they are not disturbed. Caroline had a fair idea dogs would do a better job at this than people – and put her theory to the test in real-life statistical competition. A curlew expert was pitted against one of her conservation detection dogs searching for ‘nests’, which had been hidden in fields. Over five days, the findings were stark – the expert found 53 per cent of the nests, while the dog got 94 per cent. Caroline, who’s from Bangor, set up an environmental consultancy firm and soon she and her detection dogs were being hired to help with various environmental projects, like discovering the effect wind turbines have on bird and bat populations. Research shows that people find 20 per cent of the birds killed by turbines, while dogs will find 80 per cent. With nine-year-old springer spaniel Rufus and an ever-increasing number of other highly trained dogs, she was able to help ecologists measure the effect turbines have on these populations with increased accuracy and speed. Recently, Caroline has been helping find Manx shearwaters which breed in old rabbit warrens on Copeland Island in County Down and Inistrahull off Donegal. Where people had to search each hole individually to ring chicks, Caroline’s dogs will check all the burrows in no time, sitting still outside those which contain chicks. “They’re trained to give passive indications,” she said. “They stop and never touch or bark at whatever they are trained to find, so there’s minimum disturbance.” Caroline’s second springer, two-year-old Monty, has been trained in rodent detection and he too is brought onto islands to passively detect any incursions. “If one female rat makes it onto one of these islands, in just a few months they will multiply and devastate the population of the breeding birds,” she said. Caroline knows she has the perfect job for someone who loves both nature and dogs. Recently she tweeted: “In school they asked us to imagine our dream job, and a picture of me driving a Land Rover with three dogs in the back was what popped into my head. Caroline said: “I didn't know what the job was, and I might not be in a Land Rover, but I think I've got as close to the dream as I possibly can.” • If you’ve seen or photographed anything interesting, or have any nature questions, you can text Dúlra on 07801 414804.
IT’S not just on the nightly news that we are seeing the terrible effects of climate change, but right on our doorstep. Just ask conservationist Laura Shiels. Laura, environmental engagement officer for the Belfast Hills Partnership, says that the biggest problem this year is that they can’t plant the tree saplings as planned this month – because the trees haven’t lost their leaves yet. “It’s best that trees are dormant for replanting, they have to be ‘asleep’ and we would usually plant from November to March. But if you look at all these wee trees here, every one of them is still in leaf,” she said, showing Dúlra around the 2,500 saplings in the charity’s native tree and wildflower nursery in West Belfast. “We’ve having to tell people and companies who are waiting for these trees that we can’t provide them yet, they’ll have to wait until late December. Climate change has pushed everything back a month.” The tree and wildflower nursery has been built on a forgotten slope of land below the Partnership’s Hannahstown office and the incredible thing is that every young tree here comes from seeds found on our hills – collected by expert volunteers during walks. A tree’s ‘provenance’ is vital in conservation, it’s believed that every Irish native tree has developed local adaptations over thousands of years, making each one particularly suitable to its own local soil and climate. The native trees of the Belfast Hills – what’s left of them – are unique. At the nursery, each species of tree – from oaks to rowans to willow to oak – are all labelled according to the hill the seed was recovered from. And most of those trees will be replanted on their original hill. It’s an incredible attention to detail that takes years of care, mainly by people who volunteer to help the charity. Laura herself knows exactly what’s required to do this work, and not just because of her Masters degree in conservation – she was a volunteer with the Belfast Hills Partnership for three years before becoming full-time. “The volunteers meet twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays and they’re the real shining stars here,” she tells me. “Every week, whatever the weather they come out. They collected all these seeds and carefully tended them for years until they are ready to be returned. “Some saplings go to schools but most will end up back on the mountain as healthy young trees. We’re collaborating with Belfast City Council to help deliver their One Million Trees project, which aims to plant a million trees across Belfast by 2035. “We have 2,500 native trees here and about 3,000 in another nursery near Slievenacloy.” Laura also visits schools to spread the environmental message and the importance of the Belfast Hills, which run from Carnmoney to Lisburn. “I work with the landowners to enhance the trees on the hills, perhaps helping farmers replace bordering hedges that used to be there. “In the winter months as well as tree planting we have litter lifts and path clearing, and it’s a good time to cut back invasive species, like Himalayan balsam, laurel and snowberry, which all grow on the hills. “Summertime is more for bird and bat surveys – and last year was a good one for newts when their numbers went up.” The one native tree you won’t find in Laura’s nursery is the ash, fuinseog in Irish. The famous tree that provides wood for hurls is being killed off by ash dieback, a mysterious fungal disease that was first reported in Ireland just 10 years ago. Since then, almost every ash across the Belfast hills – including many hundreds in Colin Glen – has died or is dying. The future looks bleak for the species that holds such a central role in Irish culture. But Laura says the Belfast Hills Partnership hasn’t completely given up on it.“Next year, we’re talking about trying to find an established ash on the hills that hasn’t been affected and take cuttings. It’ll be a case of trial and error, but you never know,” she said. After visiting the charity’s tree and wildflower nursery, Dúlra knows one thing – if anyone can save the famous ash tree, it’ll be Laura and the volunteers of the Belfast Hills Partnership. • A WEST Belfast reader got up close personal this week with a stunning bird – the sparrowhawk. It pounced on an unfortunate pigeon on the street in Colinbrook in Poleglass and spent 10 minutes devouring it before flying off, giving the reader plenty of time to get pictures. Its yellow eyes mean it's a female. Female raptors are always bigger than males and only the female sparrowhawk is normally big enough to take on a pigeon. The red/orange-eyed male makes do with a smaller meal – blackbirds and robins, perhaps. • If you’ve seen or photographed anything interesting, or have any nature questions, you can text Dúlra on 07801 414804.
THERE are plenty of people who devote their spare time to studying birdlife, but Kez Armstrong has gone one better. She’s become the first person in Ireland to be awarded a PhD for her work on one of our most loved birds: the kestrel. The 36-year-old Belfast ecologist – who can now call herself Doctor – spent four years at Queen’s University studying the beautiful falcon, and it was a labour of love. “The kestrel is my favourite bird – raptors were always special to me,” she told Dúlra this week. “From the data that I have collected there are probably 300 to 500 nests across the whole island. “That’s why it was so important for me to do the PhD at the time that I did it, the kestrel and indeed the merlin as well are two completely overlooked, under-the-radar birds that we haven’t got enough information on. So to collect any information on kestrels was exceptionally important because we’re on the most westerly part of their range.” Kez’s work meant she spent years travelling the countryside, liaising with farmers and quarry companies, where kestrels like to nest on cliff-faces. And one company in County Fermanagh organised for Kez to set up a live cam inside one of the nests which can be viewed online at www.mannokbuild.com/kestrel-cam – it was the first such camera in Ireland and you can still view the amazing footage of the birds rearing their five chicks. “It was the first insight we got into a breeding pair in Ireland in a typical habitat,” said Kez. “It was a really intimate glance into what is going on between the pairs, the different roles the male and female had when rearing the young. “Kestrels are unique among most raptor species because they rear their young for eight to ten weeks, a lot of other raptors will leave as soon as the young are fledged, but kestrels will carry on looking after them for several more weeks.
IT looks like a speck of dirt on Dúlra’s finger, right, but this is a living, breathing creature that’s just set off on what will be an exciting and possibly short life.
