Two other lesser known Irish natural history texts that combine similar concerns deal with the etymology of Plant Names (1923)103 by Thomas Somerville Lindsay (1854–1933), who was also Archdeacon of Dublin, and A Student’s Illustrated Irish Flora Being a Guide to the Indigenous Seed-plants of Ireland (1931)104 by John Adams (1872–1950). Adams also published several papers on algae, lichen and fungi. He left Ireland and became Dominion Botanist in Canada.
Following encouragement from Alexander Goodman More, Nathaniel Colgan (1851–1919) put together and published Flora of the County Dublin41 in 1904 – a botanical study considered by Praeger to be a model in its painstaking accuracy and careful detail. Much later on in the century the Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club prepared a supplement to it which came out under the aegis of the National Museum of Ireland in 1961. A new edition was prepared by the DNFC for publication in 1998. Provisions in More’s will made Colgan and Reginald W. Scully editors of the second edition of Cybele Hibernica, an enormous task which they completed within three years. Scully (1858–1935), a man of retiring disposition, not unlike Colgan, was also indebted to More for providing him with inspiration. His own endeavours came to fruition in The Flora of County Kerry (1916)105, an additional county flora noted for its fullness and accuracy. Scully passed the torch on to James Ponsonbv Brunker (1885–1970) who admitted that Flora of the County Wicklow (1950)106 was initiated by his ‘blundering’ upon some clovers growing near Wicklow town which he took to Scully for identification. Thereafter Scully ‘schooled’ him in field craft.
Cynthia Longfield (1896–1991) was a gifted entomologist whose landed family were from Cloyne, Co. Cork. She was a member of the St George Scientific Expedition to the Pacific in 1924 and undertook many other expeditions at a time when it was considered not quite correct for young women to be going off by themselves. She was a world authority on the Odonata — the damselflies and dragonflies. Her Dragonflies of the British Isles (1937)107 was the standard text for many years and she collaborated with Philip Corbet and Norman Moore to produce the New Naturalist volume on Dragonflies (1960).108
James Parsons Burkitt (1870–1959) made a major and generally unappreciated contribution to the science of ornithology.109 Working by himself in the 1920s he unravelled some previously misinterpreted behaviour of the robin as well as contributing new insights into the population dynamics of birds. He was the County Surveyor for Fermanagh between 1900 and 1940 but in his spare time, working alone in his back garden, he trapped robins and by marking them individually with metal bands of different shapes – colour rings were precluded as he was colour-blind – he followed the fortunes of each bird. Burkitt was probably the first to use this technique; he also introduced age identification through ring recovery, something which then became standard practice and an important aspect of ornithological field work.
Cecil Robert Vesey Stoney (1878–1952), ornithologist and Donegal squire, was one of the finest field ornithologists Ireland has ever produced. His greatest discovery in 1930, together with G.R. Humphreys, was the large breeding colony of black-necked grebes at Lough Funshinagh, Co. Roscommon. Stoney was known for his delightful sense of humour, puckish wit, buoyant enthusiasm and the gift of teaching and inspiring others. C.J. Carroll (fl. 1920), another squire from Co. Tipperary, shared Stoney’s enthusiasm for egg-collecting. Apart from contributing much information on the distribution of the peregrine falcon in Ireland, Carroll built up perhaps the best private collection of birds displaying albinism and melanism.
Another remarkable naturalist who worked mostly by himself in Northern Ireland for many years was the Rev. Edward Allworthy Armstrong (1900–78). He was born in Belfast, ordained a deacon in 1921 in Cambridge, England, and eventually returned to Cambridge in 1944 as vicar of St Mark’s, Newnham, until his retirement in 1966. He had a prodigious output of natural history works. His intensive study of the wren, based on his own careful and rigorous field work, chronicled the behaviour and breeding biology of this diminutive bird. The resultant treatise The Wren (1955) is one of the finest bird monographs ever published.110 His previous book The Birds of the Grey Wind (1940) is a prize-winning classic of regional natural history, mostly about birds, full of erudition and exuding a deep love for Northern Ireland’s countryside.111 He published many other original natural history classics, blending scholarship with his passion for nature. These include the Folklore of Birds (1952), still the best text today on this subject.112
Amongst other Northern Ireland naturalists of note, C. Douglas ‘Jimmy’ Deane played an important role in publicising natural history and conservation issues through his writings over 37 years in the Belfast Telegraph and then the Belfast Newsletter. He wrote several books, the most important being the Handbook of the Birds of Northern Ireland (1954).113 He was an accomplished film maker – Birds of the Grey Wind (1958) being his best – and was active in setting up the Ulster Society for the Protection of Birds.
Arnold Benington (1904–82) was another important Northern Ireland naturalist. His studies on peregrines and sparrowhawk populations in the 1940s–1960s provided important baseline information while he was, like Deane, a populariser of natural history through lecturing, writing and broadcasting. He was also instrumental in the founding of Ulster’s only bird observatory, on the Copeland Islands.
The 1930s was also the time for the birth of perhaps the finest and most accessible book on the Irish countryside. In Robert Lloyd Praeger’s The Way That I Went (1937) the richness of Ireland’s landscape and its flora and fauna are effortlessly intermingled with other strands of archaeology, folklore, etymology and history to form a complete narrative.114 The book could best be described as a prolonged love poem of the country, its landscape and its life. No text published since has rivalled it. Before embarking on this title, Praeger had a trial flight with Beyond Soundings (1930),115 also aimed at the general public, but it lacked the force and excitement of The Way That I Went. In 1941 he brought out A Populous Solitude but again it did not match up to his masterpiece.116 One of Praeger’s most important works for the natural history bibliographer was Some Irish Naturalists (1949), an indispensable source of information on earlier Irish naturalists.2
The Way That I Went, Praeger’s general natural history, topographical and cultural account of Ireland, remains the best account of the country for natural historians and the general reader.
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