ACTIVITY UPDATE

ACTIVITY UPDATE By Kieran Flood, IWT Coordinator

The IWT reserve at Boora c. K. Flood inset: Sprawler moth

Update from Lough Boora

This winter there were interesting developments at our IWT Lough Boora nature reserve in County Offaly. New species were found on site with help from volunteer surveyor effort and Moths Ireland, and we met Bord na Mona to discuss re-wetting of this peatland site.

Our Lough Boora nature reserve is located within the Lough Boora Parkland, a public nature parkland created by Bord na Mona in an area of cutover bog located just outside Tullamore, Co. Offaly. Our IWT nature reserve is found in a quiet corner of the parkland beside a Mesolithic archaeological site and just off the Offaly Way. The reserve is on the site of a former lake, called Lough Boora, which was drained in the 1950s. At the Mesolithic site adjacent to our reserve the remains of ancient human presence were found at a location thought to be the shoreline of the ancient lake.

While the site was never mined for peat, it was significantly drained and thus the peatland habitat is drying out and most likely emitting carbon in the process. The site today supports a mosaic of habitats including birch dominated bog woodland, scrub, poor fen and flush and pioneer Molinia (purple moor-grass) grassland. We have previously recorded beautiful orchids, marsh fritillary butterfly, smooth newts and pine marten at this secluded reserve.

Earlier this winter we met with Bord na Mona ecologists at Boora who talked us through a proposal to block a number of the drains on and around our site as part of their greater Peatlands Climate Action Scheme at Boora Bog. The scheme involves rewetting thousands of acres of Bord na Mona peatlands in order to capture carbon and they offered to include our site in the scheme. The blocking of drains in strategic locations will slow down the drying out of our site and hopefully allow the peatland habitats to recover somewhat. We agreed to go ahead with the drain blocking work in order to preserve the peatland habitats and do our bit to contribute to carbon sequestration. We are at the early stages of this process and will report back with details in this magazine.

As well as the habitat restoration we also increased our knowledge of the wildlife of our Lough Boora nature reserve in 2021. Thanks to the efforts of a dedicated volunteer we began moth monitoring on site. With such a diverse range of habitats it was hoped that an interesting array of moth species would be found, and we were not disappointed! Our volunteer worked with support from Moths Ireland to identify the species found. Moths were surveyed on site with the use of moth traps. These are simple traps placed out at dusk and opened in the morning at which point the surveyor records the moths inside and then lets them go unharmed. Traps were placed within the woodland and the open habitats on site. 53 different species of moth were detected within a few months including some rare finds.

Sprawler Asteroscopus sphinx moths were found at Lough Boora in November 2021. Sprawlers are rare in Ireland and near threatened globally. Due to their rarity they are a priority species of conservation concern. The loss of broad-leaf woodland threatens the species. The species is on the 2016 Irish red list for macro-moths. Red lists are used to evaluate the conservation status of species and determine which species need urgent action. Sprawler moths have experienced an 85% decline in abundance in Britain (1970 - 2016) and a 34% decline in distribution during the same time period.

Treble-bar moth

The sprawler inhabits broad-leaf woodland. Adult moths occur from late October to early December. They have furry bodies and distinctive streaking. This distinguishes them from other moths flying during this time. After mating the females lay their eggs in the crevices of tree bark to overwinter. In spring, caterpillars emerge to feed on the leaves of deciduous trees. Caterpillars pupate in a cocoon underground. The name ‘sprawler’ comes from the defensive posture of the caterpillar.

As well as the rare sprawlers, four nationally scarce moth species were recorded on site in 2021. Three of these species (blue-bordered carpet Plemyria rubiginata, bordered beauty Epione repandaria and sallow Cirrhia icteritia) are associated with damp woodland habitat. Caterpillar food plants for these species include alder, willow and birch, which grow in abundance at Lough Boora. Monitoring data from Britain has shown an increase in abundance (1970 - 2016) in both bluebordered carpet and bordered beauty populations. Sallow has experienced a decline of 81% (1970 - 2016). Treble-bar Aplocera plagiata was the other scarce species recorded. This species is often found in open drier habitats and feeds on St. John's-wort.

We will continue exploring the biodiversity of our Lough Boora nature reserve and document the habitat restoration that comes about with the rewetting project.

Enjoy IWT Events Online and In-person this year

By now I’m sure many of you will be familiar with the fantastic webinars we have been running every month. These webinars evolved as a response to the pandemic restricting our ability to run in person events. Our webinars are hosted by our campaign officer Pádraic Fogarty and feature Irish and international conservation specialists and practitioners speaking on a variety of topics from rewilding to marine protected areas to regenerative farming. If you have missed them you can watch back on our YouTube channel (www. youtube.com/irishwildlifetrust) or check out the webpage (https://iwt.ie/whatwe-do/communication/webinars).

We are happy to inform you that we will be continuing our webinar series throughout 2022 but with the lifting of restrictions we are delighted that inperson events are returning. The majority of our events are free of charge and involve getting outside for walking tours and nature watching. With many of our local branches planning great events for the year ahead it seemed like a good time to remind everyone how to find out about our old-fashioned inperson events and how to contact your local IWT branch.

Our events are listed on our webpage here https://iwt.ie/events/ but you can also follow your local branch on social media or join their mailing list to find out about events near you. You can email a branch near you to ask to be put on their mailing list.

See their contact details below;

Dublin Branch

Branch email dublinbranch@iwt.ie

Galway Branch

Branch email iwtgalway@gmail.com

Kerry Branch

Branch email iwtkerry@gmail.com

Laois/Offaly Branch

Branch email iwtlaoisoffaly@gmail.com

Limerick Branch

Branch email limerickbranch@iwt.ie

Monaghan Branch

Branch email monaghanbranch@iwt.ie

Waterford Branch

Branch email iwtwaterfordbranch@gmail.com

 IWT Dublin branch outing

CAMPAIGN UPDATE By Pádraic Fogarty

PLANTING TREES IS NO WAY TO CREATE A FOREST

The lack of forest cover in Ireland is now recognised as a major land use problem that must be addressed if we are to confront the multiple crises of biodiversity, climate and water. With this realisation brings growing support for drastically increasing tree cover to average European levels of 30-40%, a tripling or quadrupling of what it is today. The default response to this issue has been: ‘we must plant more trees’. However this would be a mistake. Trees are only the most obvious component of a forest to human eyes and trees alone, such as those planted from

single species, do not make a forest. A real forest is composed not only of a diversity of tree species, but a diversity of ages (young, old and dead) as well as the animals, other forest plants, fungi and innumerable bugs and insects, including those in the soil. If we are to create areas for nature, water and carbon storage, as well as a resilient timber growing sector, we will need vast new areas of real forests and move away from plantations of monocultures. But how?

Over the course of the 20th century Norway went from 5% forest cover to 38%

A self-seeded oak sapling

while, even more impressively, Costa Rica went from 21% in the 1980s to nearly 60% today. This scale of forest restoration was not achieved by tree planting but through rewilding – giving the land the time and space to naturally regenerate the forest. The enormous advantage of rewilding is that it allows nature to lead the way, knitting together the infinite connections in the web of life that create diversity, complexity and resilience in a way that humans with their spades and saplings simply can’t.

Rewilding has been accused of being merely land abandonment but that is incorrect. Land degradation in Ireland is so severe in many instances that much work will be needed to control invasive species, reintroduce missing species, reduce grazing pressure from sheep and deer or to block drains in bogs to restore hydrology. But the idea behind rewilding is that over time less and less of this type of intervention is needed so that natural systems become selfsustaining.

Some places, like wet bogs, are not suited for dense forests and nature knows exactly where those places are. Rewilding can harness that wisdom so that human interventions do not inadvertently damage natural processes. Some tree planting schemes, including some of those being sanctioned today, are exacerbating the environmental crises, putting the wrong trees in the wrong places – such as on sites with rare groundnesting birds or on biodiverse meadows. The current system is resulting in bad decisions that will have to be undone, along with the enormous legacy of poorly located plantations that have been planted since the 1950s.

Tree planting projects can come with thousands of pieces of plastic, from cable ties to guard tubes which stop the saplings being eaten, and which are difficult to retrieve. It can also be hard to be sure of the provenance of tree saplings, even those of native species, and this is a problem as local genetic stock provides greater resilience than imported seedlings. And we’re going to need a lot of resilience in the face of the rapidly changing climate

and more intense weather events. Tree planting has its place. Sometimes there are simply not enough parent trees in the landscape to colonise new ground in the kind of time we have available to us. It is also popular and if people want to get out and about and do practical projects for nature this should be encouraged. But if we are serious about the scale of ambition then we simply must put rewilding first and foremost in forest and land use policy. This starts with identifying the areas of native or seminatural woodlands that still exist. These areas are treasure troves of biodiversity and it’s a continuing scandal that they are so poorly protected. But with the right measures they can be restored and then allowed to expand. A study found that jays (a colourful member of the crow family) can ‘plant’ 7,500 thousand acorns in a month. With the THE BUREAUCRACY NEEDS TO help of the jays, the remnants of our native forests could expand ACCOMMODATE and we should then be NOT ONLY THE helping to join them DIVERSITY IN together so that instead NATURE BUT THE DIVERSITY IN OUR COMMUNITIES. of hundreds of isolated pockets of woodland we have fewer, larger and healthier forests. Misconceptions about what rewilding entails has led to a reluctance to even use the word in official circles. However, we cannot afford to maintain this taboo. We absolutely need a system that works with landowners and rewards them for switching from farming to forest regeneration and, paradoxically, a way of doing this is to encourage high nature value farming schemes. Rewilding need not eliminate farming from a given landscape so long as farmers have a range of options available to them. Some farmers will want to rewild all of their land, some none at all, while others may be happy to have a mix of both. The bureaucracy needs to accommodate not only the diversity in nature but the diversity in our communities. Giving nature the time and space to get on with healing our damaged landscapes will be a challenge to the accepted wisdom that humans know best and that we need to be in control. But we cannot and should not ignore the fantastic power of rewilding.

CAMPAIGN UPDATE By Pádraic Fogarty

LEGAL ACTION ON OVERFISHING

c. Cory Arnold

Much of environmental campaigning is trying to find new ways of saying the same thing over and over. The fight against overfishing has been a case in point. Campaign groups have worn themselves out urging politicians to respect the science on fishing quotas to stop the overexploitation of sea life. In 2013, we thought we had won a victory when the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) was reformed and the EU committed to ending overfishing. Specifically, Article 2(2) of the CFP provides that “in order to reach the objective of progressively restoring and maintaining populations of fish stock above biomass levels capable of producing maximum sustainable yield, the maximum sustainable yield exploitation rate shall be achieved by 2015 where possible and, on a progressive, incremental basis at the latest by 2020 for all stocks”. However, 2020 has come and gone and still 15% of commercially exploited fish populations (commonly referred to as ‘stocks’) in the North East Atlantic remain overfished (47% are fished within sustainable limits while 37% are unknown). While we have seen some admirable push back from the European Commission on the allocation of quotas, clearly fisheries ministers, including Ireland’s Charlie McConalogue, have no intention of complying with the law in this regard. However, a recent High Court ruling may signal that change is in the air. With the support of Client Earth (see www.clientearth.org) THERE IS A FUTURE Irish NGO Friends of the Irish Environment (FIE) took a legal case FOR FISHING against the Minister for COMMUNITIES Agriculture, Food and BUT ONLY IF WE SERIOUSLY CHANGE HOW WE FISH. the Marine and the Attorney General. The purpose of the case was to ask the Irish High Court to refer the application of Article 2(2) of the CFP to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU, as the CFP is European rather than Irish law). In what is seen as a hugely significant ruling, the court found in favour of FIE. It means the CJEU will now adjudicate on the topic within the next 18 months or so.

The ruling from the Irish judges contains some interesting statements. The Irish state had argued that the requirement to end overfishing entirely was only one among a number of stipulations and that it was the job of the fisheries managers (i.e. the member states) to find the right balance between competing social, economic and environmental interests. In particular, they made the case that where fish are caught using indiscriminate methods, particularly bottom trawling, it is not possible to catch one fish species while avoiding others. These are commonly referred to as ‘mixed fisheries’. The state acknowledged that following zero catch advice for a species in a mixed fishery (as had been the case for a number of species, including cod and whiting) this would shut the fishery down completely. This, they maintain would be an unacceptable outcome. However, the Irish High Court clearly found against them. They stated that the requirement to end all overfishing “is more than just an aspirational objective of the CFP” and that the court “has serious doubts about the legality” around the annual regulations that allow for quotas to be issued over and above the scientific advice.

The application of scientific advice, particularly when it is advised that zero fish in a mixed fishery be caught, would indeed result in the closure of whole chunks of the EU fishing fleet, particularly those dependent upon bottom trawling and dredging. However, we also know that due to the ecological destruction caused by these fishing methods, including greenhouse gas emissions and enormous levels of ‘by catch’, that ending these fisheries is indeed what needs to happen. In a way, it should be looked at in the same bracket as the fossil fuel industry or peat mining. Continuation of bottom trawling is simply not compatible with protecting the ocean. There is a future for fishing communities but only if we seriously change how we fish. This will mean short term pain for some, but it is the only way a healthy future can be secured for both nature and people.