Collins New Naturalist Library. David Cabot

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      Praeger’s A Populous Solitude was less successful than The Way That I Went but nevertheless satisfied the public demand for such works,

      Father Patrick G. Kennedy (1881–1966), a Jesuit priest based in Dublin, emerged during the 1930s as a gifted bird watcher, writer and campaigner for bird conservation. He was invited to take on the preparation of the 1961 edition of the List of Irish Birds which had been published by the National Museum at infrequent intervals since the first issue was compiled by More in 1885. What had started life as a somewhat stark and lifeless catalogue of birds bearing the title A List of Irish Birds showing the species contained in the Science and Art Museum, Dublin¹¹⁷ became, under Kennedy’s pen, generous, excellent and the most fulsome of all the Museum lists. It still stands today as an exhaustive text.¹¹⁸ Kennedy also championed the conservation of North Bull Island, Dublin, an extensive sand dune system surrounded by intertidal mud flats in the northern part of Dublin Bay, one of the best places in the country to watch waders and wildfowl at unbelievably close quarters. Several mad schemes had been hatched to transform the area into a major recreation playground by damming the intertidal mud flats at either end of the landward side of the island, turning the impounded area into a massive permanent water lagoon. But it was obvious that the so-called ‘blue lagoon’ could turn into a putrefying mass of stagnating water laced with seaweed growth. Such a development would have destroyed the wader and wildfowl feeding habitats and driven the birds away. Kennedy fought all the schemes and eventually persuaded the authorities to declare the area Ireland’s first bird sanctuary under the Protection of Birds Act, 1930 – something Kennedy also had a hand in promoting through his friend Senator S. Brown. Kennedy’s An Irish Sanctuary (1953) tells of the ecology of the birds at North Bull as well as relating the story of the battles to save the area from development.¹¹⁹

      The impending Second World War had the effect of dampening down the growth of interest in natural history in Ireland although the country was not engaged in hostilities. One vitally important project fell as an unfortunate victim of this period of astringency. It was Praeger’s Natural History of Ireland: a Sketch of its Flora and Fauna, written in 1944 when Praeger was aged 79.¹²⁰ The War and consequent delays prevented the book’s publication until 1950 by which time its format, style and much of the information it contained was ‘dated’. Echoes of long species lists with little interpretation or analysis, as was customary in earlier works, reverberated throughout the book. In fact, Praeger admitted in his preface that only a limited amount of emendation to the 1944 text had been possible prior to its publication. The book also suffered greatly from the absence of any illustrations apart from three stark graphs.

      In the early 1950s Kennedy teamed up with Robert Francis Ruttledge (b.1899) and Charles F. Scroope (1876–1975) with assistance from George Rayner Humphreys (1886–1980) to produce The Birds of Ireland (1954), an updated version of Ussher and Warren’s 1900 exemplar.¹²¹ Each of the three primary authors undertook to write the entry for the species or group of species with which they were most familiar. They were helped by an extensive network of correspondents who diligently sent in information from the fastnesses of estate walls, rectories, or retiring cottages, for traditionally the amateur study of birds was favoured by the Protestant fringe of the population – something no longer true. The 1954 vintage of The Birds of Ireland maintained the high standards set in 1900. It was the third in a series of major national ornithological works, each appearing at almost 50 year intervals since 1850. When is the fourth due to hatch? Ruttledge’s Ireland’s Birds appeared in 1966 and was a somewhat abbreviated work, drawing heavily upon the many discoveries and observations made by an enthusiastic band of bird watchers during the late 1950s and early 1960s.¹²² Clive Hutchinson’s (1949–98) Birds in Ireland (1989) is a more comprehensive and satisfactory work, approximating the style, detail and grandness expected of an enduring national work.¹²³

      David Allardice Webb (1912–95), the doyen of modern Irish botanists, first published An Irish Flora in 1943 (now in its seventh revised edition 1996),¹²⁴ a small and innocuous-looking volume but full of plant identification tips as well as notes on the habitats and distribution of all Irish species, written in the author’s characteristic taut style. Webb was an outstanding field botanist as well as a brilliant conversationalist.

      John J. Moore was the doyen of the Irish school of plant sociologists following the vegetation description methods of Braun-Blanquet. He was also a champion of the conservation of Ireland’s vanishing peatlands, as well as an inspired field worker. Both Moore and Webb represented the finest scientific traditions of the two main cultural strands of Ireland.

      Integrated ecological studies of a region are now generally de rigueur, making it difficult СКАЧАТЬ