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.
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 29-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.
AS you can see from this picture, wee Mac enjoys birdwatching as much as Dúlra.The Lakeland terrier is getting on a bit in years – he’s in double figures – and he’s eased into his twilight years like a pensioner slipping on a pair of slippers.
IT looks more like the Serengeti than Belfast. You can barely even see a house – and that’s in a city of three-quarters of a million people. This is the vista that lay before Dúlra on Tuesday morning when he went for a dander along Belfast Lough. It may have been halfway through October, but it was like midsummer. Dúlra had wrapped up as you must do at this time of year, but it wasn’t long before he was peeling off the layers. And he was amazed to see swarms of flies still filling the air – even if the birds that feed on them, the swallows, swifts and martins, are long gone. From the lough, you can gaze back across the sweeping Belfast Hills, with much of the housing out of sight in the valley. That glorious green view disguises a multitude of wrongs – this is a city to be proud of for many reasons, but our treatment of wildlife and the environment are not among them. Still, those concerns were for another day as Dúlra lapped up the sun and the sights.Some of the reclaimed land around Belfast Lough is off-limits to visitors, which means it’s a beacon for nature. And it’s a massive area – there are 340 acres in Giant’s Park. A film studio is the only building here, although two more are going up alongside it. But it still leaves 300 acres. Of course no city person has any idea what an acre is, so Dúlra used Google to convert it into something a bit more familiar – football pitches. And, incredibly, that land is the size of 227 pitches. Created over decades as bin lorries dumped the city’s waste here, it was eventually covered with a layer of soil. But the decomposing waste still produces dangerous gases, so nothing can be built here yet. Dúlra hopes it continues to produce those dangerous gases forever and so becomes an inner-city refuge for nature, one that our wildlife desperately needs. The area of grassland is so vast that it’s surely attracted the attention of rare birds of prey that still cling on to our hilltops in small numbers, like the hen harrier. Dúlra once spotted a brown female hen harrier – cromán na gcearc in Irish – on Divis, but has never to his knowledge set eyes on the male. And that is a bird that you’d have to see to believe. The male hen harrier seems to break the prevailing raptor colour rules of browns and russets. Instead, it’s all grey with black wingtips. A truly mesmerising bird. Dúlra often scans the Giant’s Park with his bins from a distance, imagining the massive bird hovering above the swaying grass.
EOGHAN Daltun is Dublin born and bred, but he got the call of the wild. He soon became convinced that he wanted to move his family out west, and during one family holiday in Cork’s Beara peninsula in 2009 he found what he’d been looking for. A farm clinging on to the Atlantic. “Within seconds, I knew with absolute clarity that this was where I wanted to spend the rest of my life. It was a case of love at first sight,” he writes in his acclaimed book published a fortnight ago, ‘An Irish Atlantic Rainforest. A Personal Journey into the Magic of Rewilding’. The farm in Bofickil was made up of 73 acres of largely forgotten land. But for Eoghan, it was a piece of heaven. Getting this for the price of a small house in Dublin felt like “a heist”. “I’d never before laid eyes on anything like this wild, verdant and primeval landscape, and had no idea that such places existed anywhere in Europe, never mind Ireland,” he says. He thought it belonged more in a tropical jungle than our own wind-blasted island. He felt like he was in the Mediterranean, with endless azure skies meeting wide-open sapphire seas. Even the rain that used to get him down in Dublin didn’t bother him here, where there’s much, much more. “All the forms the weather takes just seem part of the natural rhythm and essences of the place.” But although things looked good from afar, they were far from perfect up close. The land was in an awful state and the main culprits were goats and sika deer which roamed wild. It was, he admits, an ecological car crash. What trees existed were being eaten to death, they had tops but you could see through them because there was no growth to block your view. The goats were “walking streamers – desert makers”. And so the first job to recreate his forest was to fence it off. And then the metamorphosis began.
IT’S nothing short of torture. Imagine being born into a world of beauty and bounty, with food and fun and long, carefree days. You’re in paradise. And then someone makes it incrementally worse every day after that, turning it into a hell, like a real-life Squid Game
IT’S nothing short of torture. Imagine being born into a world of beauty and bounty, with food and fun and long, carefree days. You’re in paradise. And then someone makes it incrementally worse every day after that, turning it into a hell, like a real-life Squid Game
BEFORE mindfulness became a thing, we had it sorted – and we didn’t even realise it.
SOMETIMES when nature is pushed to the brink and the outlook appears bleak, something miraculous happens. Suddenly some imperceptible change of circumstances contrives to act in its favour. And it explodes back into life. That’s what seems to have happened to some of our birds of prey. Yes, Ireland has lost many, including all our glorious eagles, which we shot. In Belfast a few smaller species managed to cling on like shipwrecked survivors holding on to a life raft. Sparrowhawks that nested in the wooded crevices of our hills still occasionally went on raids in city gardens. And the kestrel would still hover above our motorway grass verges hunting for small mammals. But they too were under relentless pressure. Kestrels got all but wiped out when we poisoned our rodents. The tiny falcon disappeared from the city about a decade ago, another victim or people’s careless self-interest. But they didn’t vanish entirely, they just became reclusive and retreated to the hidden recesses of the hillsides. And on the quarry faces that still scar our mountains from Carnmoney to White Mountain, they bred. Last year, one even bred on an old forgotten quarry face just off the Antrim Road. Dúlra was able to sit in the car and watch the young leave the nest.
WHEN the old woman died and her family began to clear out the house, they never expected to find this: a dead swift snuggled neatly into a teacup in the bedroom. Bizarre certainly, but there was more – they were to find another dead bird in the same bedroom, this time inside a wardrobe. The big Victorian red-bricked house near Antrim is exactly the sort of place that swifts would be attracted to. If anyone would know what had happened, then Mark Smyth, swift expert beyond compare, would surely know. But even he was stumped this week. “I knew the lady who lived there for 40 years,” mark told Dúlra, “but she had dementia for a long time before she died and then her daughter found these two birds in one of her bedrooms. “We can only guess that the birds somehow found their way into the bedroom and flew around in a panic. One got into the wardrobe and couldn’t get out, while the other landed on the cup and couldn’t get back out.” The bird in the cup had been dead so long that it was mummified -– made up totally of feathers, the flesh long gone. When the bird was lifted out, it remained curved. It had obviously been there for many years. Swifts only touch land to breed, and that could be three years after they leave the nest as chicks. Touching down is riddled with danger as they’re so aerodynamic that they can’t get airborne from a standing start. One once came down in Dúlra’s garden when he was a lad and he had to fling it back into the air and it flew off unharmed.
WOULDN’T it be something if you could condense the essence of Ireland into a single object so small you could keep it with you to admire and take inspiration from? It’s hard to imagine if that would even be possible, but that was the challenge facing acclaimed West Belfast-based artist Farhad O’Neill. And it wasn’t as if he could choose his own materials. Because this was as unique and unusual a commission as he had ever been asked to undertake. The story began 40 years ago just after Jake Mac Siacais was released from prison. He was spending time down south and before returning he decided to take something as a reminder of that time and what had happened there. Dúlra might have bought a rock or even a snow globe, but Jake decided to pick up... a piece of turf! He brought it back to his Belfast home and there it sat, soon to be joined by another, and another. It took four decades, but he managed to get a piece of peat from every county in Ireland, and all at a time when something significant was happening in that county. “I didn’t quite know what I was going to do with them,” Jake said this week. But soon he thought: what if someone could make a single piece of art from all 32 pieces? And the perfect guy happened to have just recently opened a workshop in West Belfast’s Gaeltacht Quarter: Farhad O’Neill. Farhad returned to the city he loves after spending 17 years in Canada caring for his parents. Before that he had worked for years out of Conway Mill and his public art is scattered throughout West Belfast, including the bronze statue of Cú Chulainn at the Mill and stone sculptures at Aitnamona and Monagh Road. And so Jake asked Farhad if he would accept the challenge. This week Farhad unveiled the result of his toil: a beautiful black ‘statue’ that encases not just Irish mythology, but in some ways, through the turf, Ireland itself. “There are loads of stories in that piece, stories from every county,” Jake said as he unveiled the sculpture in his Gaeltacht Quarter office. “They were just small pieces of turf, but three of them were bigger than the others which I got from the places associated with the triple goddesses of Ireland – Banba, Fódhla and Ériu in Newgrange, Cruachán in Connacht and Emain Macha in Armagh. “The three sisters are one person, but they have different aspects. When she’s Ériu, she’s the Earth goddess, when she’s Fódhla, she’s the mother of the country and when she’s Banba, she’s the goddess of war. And Banba out of the three of them is particularly apt – she is able to shiftshape into different guises and her most famous representation is on Cú Chulainn’s shoulder as a raven on that statue at the GPO.” With those challenging criteria, Farhad set to work. He put the three ‘goddess’ pieces of turf to one side and ground the others into powder so they could be moulded into an ogham stone, a miniature version of those mysterious standing stones with messages in an ancient script which still dot our countryside. “I worked the three bigger pieces into three faces,” Farhad said. “The face of Ériu was more of a mother figure, Fódhla was the only sort of feminine piece, and Banba was more like Cú Chulainn.” He added: “It’s Gaelic, it’s also modernist and it’s cubist,” he said, referring to the early 20th century movement where objects are broken up and reassembled in abstract form.The ogham script on the side of the sculpture reads ‘Éigse’, which has various meanings, said Jake. “It means a learned assembly, which is the three goddesses. It also means wisdom and poetry.”
THESE are images of creatures so beautiful that they seem magical. If you were to invent an insect to grace a magical kingdom, you couldn’t come up with a more brilliant one. Hovering on almost invisible wings, brightly coloured yet somehow translucent at the same time. Completely unperturbed by people – they’ll buzz around your head like mini-fairies.
