Scorched earth of the illegal wildfires
Species under threat after blazes ‘deliberately set’ despite ban on burning
IT MAY take years for some of the species and fragile ecosystems destroyed by recent gorse fires to recover, it is feared.
It comes as firefighters battled blazes this week on Howth Head in Dublin and on the Cooley peninsula, while hundreds of acres of the Blackstairs Mountains on the Wexford/Carlow border were also damaged.
Conservationists say some of the fires may have been set deliberately to clear land even though such burning is illegal from March to August.
Agriculture Minister Michael Creed appealed to farmers not to clear scrub or gorse by burning, and issued an orange fire risk after a long dry spell which makes conditions perfect for the spread of wildfires.
Niall Hatch, development officer at Birdwatch Ireland, said: ‘Some of these fires are in heathlands where there is heather and even though the heather may regrow in a few months it takes years for the area to return to what it was.
‘Birds like the red grouse, the meadow pipit, the stonechat, the skylark, the wheatear and the cuckoo nest in these areas, and their nests are destroyed by these fires.
‘The red grouse only lives in
‘It’s very, very rare these fires are accidental’
heather. They are the same colour as the heather and the heather is also their main food. Cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of the meadow pipit so if the meadow pipit nest is destroyed then the cuckoo cannot lay its eggs.
He added: ‘You also have birds like the merlin, which is a type of falcon and they are our smallest bird of prey.
‘They rely on all the creatures that land in these habitats as they feed on these other birds as their food source. There are a whole load of insects that are destroyed by these fires…. there could be hundreds of species of insects destroyed. And then there are bacteria and fungi. It’s very, very rare that these fires are accidental. They are usually started away from the beaten track. It’s terrible that this is happening.
‘Where landowners have broken the law there should be consequences,’ Mr Hatch said. ‘This should be looked at by the Department of Agriculture in terms of where people are in receipt of Single Farm
Payments…. these payments are made on the cultivatable land and not cultivated land and some people clear their lands to get these payments by starting fires. ‘Wildlife rangers enforce the Wildlife Act and I would speculate that, with Covid-19, enforcement is down because the movement of rangers is curtailed. ‘We need to ensure that laws are enforced and that people are not trying to take advantage.’
Farmers have used fires as a means of clearing lands for generations, but since 1976 it has been illegal to deliberately set landholdings ablaze between March 1 and August 31. This week it emerged that hundreds of acres of land were burned between the Wicklow Gap and Ballyknockan in west Wicklow.
The massive fire was only brought under control after the Air Corps, Fire Brigade, Garda and National
Parks and Wildlife Service intervened. It was the sixth fire to ravage the countryside since late last month and this prompted the NPWS to issue a public appeal to landowners to stop setting the land alight.
Wesley Atkinson from the NPWS told RTÉ recently that vast areas of land in the Wicklow uplands have been devastated.
‘You’ve got species like grouse that are ground-nesting with no cover. I saw queen bumble bees flying around looking for their nests, which are gone. I have seen lizards burned up,’ he said.
Mr Atkinson said there was ‘now nothing in these areas to support these species’, adding that the scale of the damage was ‘massive, huge areas of habitat have been sterilised for a number of years’.
Local Government Minister Eoghan Murphy has asked the public to be vigilant regarding wildland fires. ‘Such fires threaten lives, property and the environment of those in the local community and further afield,’ he said. valerie.hanley@mailonsunday.ie