Connemara - some proposed sites for the DePaul Study Abroad trip 2012

1. Roadside vegetation, 2 Angler near Ashleigh falls, 3. Galway hookers coming in to Roundstone, 4. Boats on Inisnee, 5 The road less traveled, 6. Inishnee in the evening, 7. View from Diamond Hill (Connemara National Park)>.

Eamonn's Woods, Killarney

A Rhamnus cathartica sighting in Killarney, Co Kerry? Turns out to be spindle!

Euonymus europaeus

Quite unexpectedly after my first morning botanizing in Killarney National Park I found, I believe, a nice specimen of common buckthorn [update: though.it turned out to be spindle (Euonymus europaeus), see below].  I found it right beside Mucross Abbey, a deserted monastic site in the national park.  It is known to be a calcicole species here (though it can be found on quite acidic soils in the US Midwest) so it is not surprising to find it in the limestone region of the park..

Euonymus europaeus

The species is an old friend.  Because it is a problematic species from a management perspective in the US, it is hunted down and controlled (cut, poisoned and burned!) when it interferes with conservation plans for a preserve.  And rightly so, I would say.  However, it is attractive, hardy, and a great success in the US - my relationship with it has always been that of pupil and master, or perhaps merely envy on my part.  For whatever reason, I have spent the better part of a decade interested in this shrub, though truthfully we still don't know enough about it.

Those of you who know this plant well take a look a see if you agree with me that it is, in fact, buckthorn.  If it is not, I will be back in the field in the coming days.  The finely toothed leaves are almost opposite.  Though it is not fruiting yet the fruits are developing in clusters.  Also the bark is much grayer than I am used to seeing in the Midwest.

UPDATE 22nd July 2012: - There were enough differences between this specimen and R cathartica I am used to seeing in the midwest that I spend a little time working on it with some keys later that day.  With the assistance of old pals Helena Twomey and Bill Quirke (of Conservation Services) it was a much better fit for  spindle (Euonymus europaeus).  Fortunately I found buckthorn a few days later in Co Mayo.

Rhamnus cathartica in Ireland

A very helpful note from Dr Daniel Kelly from the Botany Department at Trinity College on the location of R cathartica in Ireland.  This otherwise very attractive shrub/small tree is a management nuisance in the Midwest, especially prevalent in the Chicago Wilderness region.

Dr Kelly reports from the 'Flora of Connemara & the Burren': "Woods, scrub, river-banks, rocky lake-shores and the margins of turloughs. Locally frequent on the limestone; very rare elsewhere..." "... Very frequent ... from near Oughterard to 3 km N. of Galway ... Locally abundant by the S. shore of L. Mask. Sparingly on the shore of L. Corrib in the grounds of Ashford Castle, and frequent on several of the islands."

It will be nice to see this plant in circumstances that do not provoke indignation and death-threats!

Ireland 2012 in preparation for Ireland 2013

Many of the posts for the coming weeks will be about the National Parks and environs of Killarney, Connemara, and Wicklow.  I will travelling there in preparation for a study abroad trip scheduled there for DePaul students.  The program is co-directed by me and Randall Honold, a colleague at DePaul.  Randall's training is in philosophy, mine is in ecology: what could possibly go wrong. For more information on the trip see here.

I will be rereading and commenting on Robert Lloyd Praeger’s book The Way That I Went as I go.  Another book that will travel the circuit with me is Tim Robinson’s Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom (Penguin Ireland, 2011), the third in his trilogy of Connemara books.  

The way that we will go - following R L Praeger in the Irish National Parks

What follows is a crude draft of a planned trip to Ireland with our students in June 2013...suggestions etc welcome...nothing is set in stone but generally this is what we'll be doing....

“The way that I went,” wrote Robert Lloyd Praeger in 1937 “was an Irish way, with extraorbital aberrations, especially in later years, to the extent of a thousand or fifteen hundred miles.  It was from the beginning a way of flowers and stones and beasts.”  Seventy-five years after the publication of his classic account of Irish natural history we are proposing to follow after Praeger in a study abroad trip to Ireland’s wildest places.

 

We will follow Praeger to four distinct regions: the Wicklow Highlands, Connemara, the Burren, and the Kerry Highlands.  Each area is ecologically distinct exemplifying a particular aspect of Ireland’s natural legacy, and each is the location of a National Park which form the focal points of the study-abroad trip.  In addition to their unique natural history, the three regions are also culturally distinct, presenting opportunities for students to appreciate both the history and the contemporary situation of Ireland. 

The overarching theme for our study will be an examination of the Irish landscape as a co-production of nature and culture.  Drawing upon the long tradition of Irish archaeology, landscape interpretation, and historical botany in which Ireland’s ecosystems have been investigated in order to understand both the ecological and human-historical factors that shaped them, we will create case studies assessing issues pertinent to each location we visit.  The theme of co-production is, in turn, relevant, for an assessment of environmental issues elsewhere in the world: how does one think ecologically about cultural landscapes, and how does one manage a relationship with environments which have historically been influenced by cultural factors?  Ireland has not been a wilderness in the sense used in the writings of the American tradition for almost 10,000 years.  As ecologists increasingly appreciate that we live on a humanized globe, well characterized case studies of ecologically valuable cultural landscapes, such as are found in the Irish National Parks, will be helpful in developing sustainability models.  That being said, many problems beset Irish landscapes: tensions stemming from very recent economic development as well as from the range of ecological pressures arising from global change: modified climates, invasive species, atmospheric pollution, and so forth.  We shall comprehensively analyze and learn from these.  Students will be explicitly invited to apply what they learn in Ireland to the situation in the American Midwest.