Mayo has lots of examples of Irish nature's loss and rebirth

We live in an age of extinction. In the last 500 years or so, the world has lost roughly 181 species of bird, as well as 171 amphibians and 113 mammals. Up to half a million species of insect are thought to have gone extinct in just the last 150 years.

Ireland hasn’t been spared the tidal wave of extinction that has followed in the wake of human progress, and we are still counting the damage. Thankfully, many of the species we’ve lost can still be found elsewhere – but their absence here is still felt all the same. One such species is the corn bunting. A hundred years ago, this streaky farmland bird could be heard singing in small holdings all around County Mayo. However, changes in farming over the course of the twentieth century would take a terrible toll. Fields were enlarged, squeezing out the hedgerows the corn bunting needed. Insecticides and pesticides decimated the food supply for the chicks, and the gradual move away from cereal cultivation meant less food for the adults as well. The bird made its last stronghold on the Mullet Peninsula - but even here, its days were numbered. By the turn of the millennium, it was gone altogether.

Far larger creatures would also go into terminal decline in the last century. In the early 1900s, Mayo was the epicentre of Ireland’s nascent whaling industry. Norwegian whalers put out from the Inishkeas and Blacksod Bay into the whale-rich waters of the North Atlantic. Among their main targets was the North Atlantic right whale, a fifty-tonne colossus that is now all but extinct in Irish waters. Incredibly, the first right whale in over 100 years was confirmed in Irish waters in 2024. Could this herald a return for this gentle giant? Unlikely, but we can only live in hope.

Away from its stunning coast once patrolled by right whales, County Mayo’s most famous landmark is surely Croagh Patrick. It is, of course, most famous as a holy site, ascended by thousands of pilgrims on Reek Sunday. But it might also have been home to a more elusive resident: the remarkable mountain ringlet butterfly. Only a few specimens of this unusual insect – the only montane butterfly we may have ever had – are thought to have been collected in Ireland, including some on the slopes of Croagh Patrick. We can’t be sure where they were found, or what became of Ireland’s mountain ringlets after that. What we can be more certain of, though, is that our butterflies are now in freefall. Between 2008 and 2021, for example, 15 of our most common butterfly species saw their cumulative numbers fall by 35 per cent. If this continues, the mountain ringlet might not be the only butterfly lost to Ireland.

All is not doom and gloom however. County Mayo is also home to some remarkable conservation success stories. Among them is the lesser horseshoe bat, one of our most remarkable mammals. It weighs about as much as a €2 and can find its prey, even in near total darkness, with melodic echolocation that is lost to human ears. Abandoned houses in the countryside have been repurposed as special reserves for this species. Its numbers have grown as a result, making Ireland a vital outpost for a bat that is now in serious decline across much of the rest of Europe. With luck, a revived network of hedgerows, coupled with more roosts built on farms across their range, could help the bats spread, exchanging genes between isolated colonies and keeping the population healthy into the future.

It is to stories like these that we must turn for hope for a future in which man and nature can coexist and, with a little compromise, hopefully flourish together in modern Ireland. There remains much to be done; some would even call it an uphill road. One hundred and twenty-four of our insect species are now at risk of extinction according to the National Biodiversity Data Centre. The plight of some of our rarest breeding birds (including the curlew) and native mammals (such as the pine marten) are now well known. But nature is nothing if not resilient – across Ireland, dedicated people are working tirelessly to conserve the wildlife we have. It’s not too late. The future is still for us to write.

* Acclaimed wildlife author Conor W. O’Brien’s new book, The Living and The Dead - Tales of Loss and Rebirth from Irish Nature, has just been published and is available in all bookshops.