FIRECREST TOURS : Guided Birdwatching & Wildlife Days

BirdWatch Ireland has warmly welcomed the recent announcement by Minister for Agriculture, Marine and Food Simon Coveney that farmers undertaking actions to conserve critically-threatened farmland birds will get priority access to substantial funding within Ireland's new Rural Development Programme. If properly implemented, this offers hope of halting declines and restoring bird populations in parts of their range. Ireland's biodiversity is facing very severe threats, as evidenced by declining populations of many farmland birds and losses in extent and quality of many semi-natural habitats in the mosaic of Ireland's farmed landscapes. There has been extensive research in the UK, in particular, which has related farmland bird declines to changes in agricultural practices since the 1970s. Specific causes for these changes included a variety of farming practices, including increased use of pesticides and fertilisers, increased mechanisation and losses of hedgerow extent an...

The recently-published  Bird Atlas 2007–11  has highlighted some very significant patterns and shifting trends in our bird populations over the past 20 years.  For all too many species these findings reveal declines and range contractions; however there are some positive stories too. One of the most remarkable of these has been the colonisation and subsequent spread of the  Little Egret .  As the atlas has shown, this elegant heron is now widespread and is frequently observed throughout the country both during the winter and breeding seasons.  It is therefore easy to forget that it was as recently as 1997 that the first ever nesting record was documented in Ireland, following the first British record the previous year!  These events followed on from a rapid expansion of the Iberian breeding population in the early nineties, and their arrival to these shores throws up all sorts of interesting questions, such as the speculation as to whether their colon...