Thread by @IrelandsFarmers

Hi everyone, today I'll be talking about something very close to my own heart, as revealed my twitter handle: @IrishRainforest.

It's something many - or even most - people are still totally unaware of: the natural ecosystem of much of Ireland is actually rainforest.

When we first came to the farm in 2009, I was blown away by the wild forest that had developed naturally over much of the land.

The trees were full of plants living on the trunks and branches, like ferns, mosses, and a host of other types of plants.

It soon dawned on me that these were what are called epiphytes: plants that grow on trees without being rooted in the ground, so excluding ivy and honeysuckle, for eg.

They can only live where there are high levels of rainfall and other precipitation. Beara sure fits that bill.

Across the world, epiphytes are the primary indicator of any sort of rainforest.

A single tree in a New Zealand temperate rainforest was found to have 28 different species of vascular epiphytic plants growing on it (ie not incl. mosses or lichens).

Irish rainforests are extremely special places. Everything is mantled in thick spongy carpets of mosses and other moisture-loving plants.

We have three species of filmy ferns in Ireland, all of which grow in our place. Below are Killarney fern and Tunbridge filmy fern.

As you might imagine, I was both thrilled and amazed in equal measure to realise that the native woodland covering much of the farm was actually rainforest.

None of it was planted; it all grew because the land was barely farmed for around a century, allowing wild nature back in.

Hear the word 'rainforest', and you naturally tend to think of the tropics.

But there's another type: *temperate* rainforest, and like NZ, that's what we have in Ireland.

Tragically, it was nearly all erased in the past, and that’s still going on.

Only about 1% of Ireland is now covered by native forest, virtually the lowest in Europe, and down from an estimated original of around 80%.

But, bad as that sounds, the situation is actually FAR worse, because most of those tiny surviving bits are utterly trashed ecologically.

Our forest here was no different. Firstly, it was very severely overgrazed by feral goats and sika deer.

By eating every last tree seedling, they were preventing the trees from reproducing, causing the woods to begin to die out. All the native wildflowers etc. were missing too.

As grazers go, goats win top prize as killers of native ecosystems across the planet.

Nothing else, not even sheep, comes close. Called 'desert makers' by ecologists, goats are an invasive species *par excellence*.

This video is funny, but the annihilation of life is not.

By eating all the native vegetation, the goats and sika had also opened the way for a whole host of non-native invasive plant species to start taking over.

And the very worst of the lot was rhododendron, of which there were already mature stands of plants in many areas.

A single rhodo can send out a million tiny airborne seeds per year.
If conditions are right, ie overgrazed, many germinate and in 10 years can be flowering and setting seed themselves.

The result is that huge areas can very quickly become choked if it's not dealt with urgently.

In fact, most surviving pockets of Irish rainforest are in exactly the same wrecked state: overgrazed and infested by rhodo.

Ireland's biggest, for example, Killarney National Park, is totally overrun by sika deer, feral goats, sheep, and rhodo.

Our last rainforests are dying.

Back in my own place, I set to work straight away eliminating the rhodo - pretty tough work.

The best plan is to start by killing the bigger plants, to cut off the flow of seeds. The stumps must be treated with Roundup, or they just regrow. The small ones can then be pulled out.

To resolve the overgrazing by goats and deer, I applied for the Native Woodland Scheme, which funded the erection of a 2m high fence to keep them out of 21.5 acres where most of the rainforest is.

The scheme also paid me a modest grant for 7 years.
teagasc.ie/crops/forestry…

The results of removing invasive plants and grazers have been nothing short of spectacular.

Everywhere, wild native self-seeded tree seedlings started sprouting: oak, birch, hazel, rowan, holly, sally, crab, ash, and others, creating new woodland.

This image of a boundary with neighbours gives some idea of the transformation.

When the fence went up less than a decade before the pic was taken, our place behind was the same as the foreground where the sheep are: just grass.

The forest came back by itself, full throttle.

Equally, an insane variety of native woodland wildflowers emerged, carpets of them. To witness the forest come to life was exhilarating in the extreme.

And it wasn't just the trees and plants: the whole place began to increasingly buzz with flying insects and ring with birdsong.

But seeing that magical rebirth unfold has made visits to places like Killarney NP, Uragh Woods (Beara), and other rainforests ever more painful and maddening.

They continue to languish and die of the very same issues resolved years ago in my own place.

And these aren't exceptional either, on the contrary: only 19% of Atlantic woodland is classed as being in a decent state.

Given that these are the last tiny remnants of an immensely rich and unique biome that once covered much of Ireland, that’s simply unforgivable.

These places are an important part of the heritage of every Irish citizen, indeed every citizen of the world, and we are abjectly failing to fulfill our responsibility, not just to protect them, but to allow them to expand back out.

That needs to change, *right now*.

The context to this thread, and all those I'm posting during my week on @IrelandsFarmers, is the fact that we're undeniably in the midst of a dire ecological emergency, as declared by the Dáil in 2019.

Yet we're letting our last few bits of rainforest just die out?

Shame on us.

So that's it for today.

Now there's no more excuses for not knowing that Ireland is - or least should be - a rainforest nation!

I'll be back tomorrow to talk about something else. I very much hope to see you back here too.