Collins New Naturalist Library. David Cabot

the birds, Cambrensis noted that sparrowhawks and peregrine falcons were abundant, together with ospreys. He pondered why the hawks and falcons never increased their numbers as he observed that many young were born each year but few seemed to survive to adulthood, perhaps a hasty observation as he was hardly there long enough to pay close attention to population dynamics: ‘There is one remarkable thing about these birds, and that is, that no more of them build nests now than did many generations ago. And although their offspring increases every year, nevertheless the number of nest-builders does not increase; but if one pair of birds is destroyed, another takes its place.’ Eagles were as numerous as kites (harriers were often called ‘kites’ in ancient times), quail were plentiful, corncrakes innumerable, capercaillie nested in the woods (by 1800 they had become extinct) and only a few red grouse occupied the hills. ‘Cranes’ were recorded as being so numerous that one flock would contain a ‘hundred or about that number’. Barnacle geese were seen on the coastline while rivers had dippers, described by Cambrensis as a kind of kingfisher: ‘they are smaller than the blackbird, and are found on rivers. They are short like quails.’ True kingfishers were also present on the waterways. Swans (almost certainly whooper or Bewick’s) were very plentiful in the northern part of Ireland. Storks were seldom observed and were the ‘black kind’, but were in fact almost certainly the white or common stork, in view of the extreme scarcity of the black stork in Ireland. There were no black (carrion) crows, or ‘very few’. Crows that were present were ‘of different colours’ – i.e. hooded crows – and were seen dropping shells from the air onto stones, a behaviour often witnessed today. Partridges and pheasants (introduced during Elizabethan times) were absent, as were nightingales (the first Irish record was a migrant at Great Saltee, Co. Wexford, in 1953) and magpies. The historian Richard Stanihurst also observed in 1577 that ‘They lack the Bird called the Pye.’¹⁶ All magpies in Ireland today have descended from a ‘parcel of magpies’ that suddenly appeared in Co. Wexford about 1676.¹⁷

      Floral motifs on cross (c. twelfth century) at Glendalough, Co. Wicklow. From F. Henry (1970) Irish Art in the Romanesque Period 1020–1170 AD. Methuen & Co. Ltd., London

      Corroborative evidence for some of Cambrensis’s bird records comes from the remains of bird bones found in a lake dwelling, or crannóg, on a small island in the middle of a shallow lake at Lagore, near Dunshaughlin, Co. Meath. The crannóg dates from ad 700–900 with no evidence of occupancy after the Norman invasion of the twelfth century. Over one thousand bird bones were found during an excavation of the site and most were identified by Stelfox of the Natural History Museum, Dublin.¹⁸ The following species, relevant to Cambrensis’s text, were recorded: sea-eagle (four bones), barnacle goose (202 bones or fragments), whooper swan (19 bones), Bewick’s swan (9 bones), corncrake (one bone), crane (25 bones or portions of bones representing cranes of three different sizes) and heron (one skull and one beak). From these last two findings it might be concluded that Cambrensis was right about the abundance of cranes in Ireland, and that he was not confusing them with herons.

      While now long extinct, cranes abounded in Ireland during the fourteenth century according to the text Polychronicon written by Ranulphus Higden (c.1299–c.1364), a monk from Chester, England.¹⁹ Their bones have been found in the Catacomb (five bones in the lower stratum of cave material, indicating the antiquity of the material) and Newhall Caves (one bone in the upper stratum), Co. Clare, dating back to prehistoric times.²⁰ They were also a dietary item for the Late Bronze Age people of Ballycotton, Co. Cork.²¹

      Animal bone evidence from earlier human settlement sites has shown wild boar, pigeons, duck, grouse, capercaillie and goshawk – another woodland species – at Mount Sandel, over looking the lower reaches of the River Bann, Co. Derry, and dating from some 9,000 years ago. Goshawk bones have also been found at a later Mesolithic site on Dalkey Island, Co. Dublin, and at the Early Bronze age site of Newgrange, Co. Meath. Further south at Boora Bog, near Tullamore, Co. Offaly, human food remains, contemporary with Mount Sandel, included pig, red deer and hare.²²

      Red deer stags were noted by Cambrensis as ‘not able to escape because of their too great fatness’ whereas the wild boars ‘were small, badly formed and inclined to run away’. Hares were present: ‘but rather small, and very like rabbits both in size and in the softness of their fur’. When put up by dogs ‘they always try to make their escape in cover, as does the fox – in hidden country, and not in the open’. However, when talking about ‘hares’, Cambrensis may have been describing wild rabbits – the behaviour reported is more typical of rabbits than hares – which were introduced by the Normans at about the time of Cambrensis’s visits. Pine martens occurred commonly in the woods, where they were hunted day and night, and badgers, according to the Welshman, frequented ‘rocky and mountainous places’. Cambrensis states that the following were absent from Ireland: moles, wild goats, deer, hedgehogs (later recorded by the historian Roderic O’Flaherty in 1684), beavers and polecats. Mice, on the other hand, were ‘infinite in numbers and consume much more grain than anywhere else’. There were no ‘poisonous reptiles’, nor ‘snakes, toads or frogs, tortoises or scorpions’.

      This last statement has repeatedly been taken by naturalists as evidence that there were no native frogs in Ireland, leading to much debate about the status of the species. The controversy concerning the history of the frog is discussed in Chapter 2. Cambrensis also came across lizards, presumably viviparous lizards, the only lizard in Ireland. This was a politically injudicious observation, for St Patrick was supposed to have done a thorough job in banishing not only all snakes but also all reptiles. Cambrensis was, in fact, blunt in dismissing St Patrick’s alleged role. ‘Some indulge in the pleasant conjecture that St Patrick and other saints of the land purged the island of all harmful animals. But it is more probable that from the earliest times, and long before the laying of the foundations of the Faith, the island was naturally without these as well as other things.’ Already in the third century, before St Patrick is supposed to have wielded the crozier, Caius Julius Solinus, the Roman compiler of the early third century, had commented in Polyhistor – which drew from the work of Pliny the Elder – on the absence of snakes:²³

      ‘Illic [in Hibernia] nullus anguis, avis rara, gens inhospita et bellicosa.’

      ‘In that land there are no snakes, birds are few and the people are inhospitable and war-like.’

      Gerard Boate: Irelands Naturall History 1652

      Irelands Naturall History was the first regional natural history in the English language, written essentially for the benefit of adventurers and planters who were thinking of settling in Ireland during the mid-seventeenth century. Its compiler and author was a Dutchman by the name of Gerald Boate (1604–49). He and his brother Arnold were involved with the formation in the summer of 1646 of the Invisible College, a body of Anglo-Irish intellectuals revolving around the Boyle family of Lismore Castle, Co. Cork. The formation of the College was initiated in London by the scientist Benjamin Worsley and his brilliant 19 year-old intellectual friend Robert Boyle as a means to propagate their conception of experimental philosophy amongst their immediate friends and colleagues. These included the Boates and Samuel Hartlib, a Pole and puritan intellectual resident in London – later the publisher of Irelands Naturall History,²⁴ Gerard Boate was a physician and he attended to the health of Robert Boyle and his sister Katherine, later Lady Ranelagh, herself a patron and driving force behind the Invisible College.²⁴ The Boates were anti-authoritarian both in natural philosophy and medicine (they had several conflicts with the College of Physicians) and were keen supporters of Baconian natural history – both good recommendations for membership of the Invisible College.

      Title page of the first edition of Boate’s Irelands Naturall History (1652).

      The College played an important role in ushering into Ireland the new natural philosophy that was arising in Europe in the wake of work by Galileo, Mersenne and Descartes.²⁵