Kim Eierman's excellent EcoBeneficial! enterprise prompts gardeners to think about new ways of looking at the relationships between what they plant, how they plant and how they treat their land to wider environment issues. She kindly asked me to do an interview for her very lively blog, after my presentation on invasive alien plants at New York Botanical Garden in November (see below). The interview covers a range of conservation issues -- ecological restoration, the challenge of climate change, my critique of the very problematic 'novel' ecosystems approach. Kim liked it enough -- or perhaps I was just so garrulous! -- that she split it into two parts. The first part I published here last week, see below. You can listen to the second part here.
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Kim Eierman's excellent EcoBeneficial! enterprise prompts gardeners to think about new ways of looking at the relationships between what they plant, how they plant and how they treat their land to wider environment issues. She kindly asked me to do an interview for her very lively blog, after my presentation on invasive alien plants at New York Botanical Garden in November (see below). The interview covers a range of conservation issues -- ecological restoration, the challenge of climate change, my critique of the very problematic 'novel' ecosystems approach. Kim liked it enough -- or perhaps I was just so garrulous! -- that she split it into two parts. Here is the first part, and the other will come in the next few days...
A rainy day in Stoneybatter, enjoyed by juvenile herring gulls: probably raised locally, the birds take advantage of temporary pools on a flat roof to bathe and preen, just a couple of metres from my bathroom, in this video There is not a blade of grass, nor a square inch of soil, let alone a tree, on the street where I live in Dublin’s Stoneybatter. Our sturdy redbrick terraces open directly on to concrete pavements, and the small back yards are also concrete. The natural world was not high on the agenda of the Victorians who created such housing projects for the skilled working classes. Gardens and tree-lined streets were a luxury, reserved for the new middle-class suburbs.
Nevertheless, nature has found footholds here, though I didn’t notice some of them for a long time. You tend to see only what you already know about. I had long been interested in birds, so I watched herring gulls beginning to nest on our rooftops. I heard the robin that sometimes seemed to sing right through the night from a patch of garden lovingly created by a neighbour on nearby “waste” land. Only when I became interested in plants about 15 years ago did I start to notice the diversity of species exploiting tiny niches on the street. This article appeared in The Irish Times on 20 January, 2018. Read the whole piece here One of the great pleasures, for me at least, of looking for birds and plants in unfamiliar places is finding familiar species in contexts where you wouldn't find them so easily at home; seeing them better, in better light.
So the most exciting find of my first hike in Morocco this year was not seeing some exotic species for the first time, but getting great views of common snipe. I've seen snipe since childhood inn Ireland. But with few exceptions, the experience is a fleeting one: a sudden rush upwards from my feet as these beautiful waders launch from snipe-grass (what else?) into a rapid zig-zag flight, before towering high above and disappearing to somewhere any gun I might be carrying cannot reach them. But here, in the unromantic but species-rich context of water treatment ponds near Diabat, where Jimi Hendrix is supposed to have composed his second album, I saw a dozen snipe out in the open on water, in brilliant sunlight. They kept feeding away with their oversized beaks, mostly ignoring me, though not letting me close enough to take good pictures. They gave me great pleasure, as did black-winged stilt, half a dozen other wader species, and a juvenile marsh harrier that caused a commotion every ten minutes or so by making a leisurely pass in search of unwary prey. However, I have to admit that the biggest nature moment so far came a couple of days later, and did not involve a species I could have seen at home. I was hiking in the blissfully silent, empty-full landscape of adjacent argan and juniper forests in the vast dune system around the Oued Ksob. A slight movement in a wolfberry bush caught my eye. Brilliant green, twisted round a twig, I thought it was a small tree snake of some sort. Then it began to move slowly down the branch, turning brown as it did so, and I realised it was a chameleon. It allowed me approach very close, and demonstrated its remarkably facility for turning its eye through 360 degrees...a moment to treasure. |
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