Episode 2 Wild Ireland: The Edge of the World

The west coast of Ireland for millennia was really, I guess,

the edge of the known world.

Our ancestors had no idea what lay beyond the horizon.

The vast Atlantic was a place of complete mystery.

My name is Colin Stafford-Johnson.

I've spent 30 years working as a wildlife cameraman around the world

and I've seen some of the most beautiful places on Earth,

but somehow I'm always drawn back to the west coast of Ireland.

This is where I now call home.

Once you've lived by the sea for part of your life,

it's very hard to leave it behind.

I've always wanted to travel the length of Ireland's Atlantic coast,

seeking out its secret places and wild creatures.

And if my journey has any direction, I guess it's roughly north.

I began on the Skellig rocks off southwest Ireland before heading

north to reach Clew Bay, halfway up the west coast.

From here, I'll be exploring Galway and my homeland of Mayo,

before heading north for the wild country of Donegal

and my journey's end on the north coast.

And I think it's going to change my view

of the island that I've lived on for much of my life.

It's been a really tough winter this year.

On the west coast of Ireland,

you can get constant storms and, particularly the last two years,

they have become more prolonged and more frequent.

The west coast of Ireland is incredibly exposed to the Atlantic.

Here you have this enormous ocean, and in winter,

when it's really gathered power,

it unleashes its power against the coastline.

The first thing that it hits in Europe is the west coast of Ireland.

It's a wild coast,

because the Atlantic always almost seems permanently upset.

Sometimes, in the middle of winter,

you feel as if the spring is never going to come.

BIRD CALLS

BIRD CALLS

Those calls are really the soundscape

of the west of Ireland in winter.

At this time of year in County Mayo and these valleys,

there is almost total silence.

The whoopers are the only birds breaking that silence.

No wonder whoopers featured so much in Irish legends and mythology,

because they must have been really important

to the people who lived here.

They must have given them a great sense of season and time of year.

And they must have wondered where on earth they went to.

All Ireland's whooper swans actually nest in Iceland.

They just come here to escape the freezing temperatures up there.

Once they decide to leave Iceland, there is no going back.

All they're going to see is open ocean.

They've got to be very careful

that they've got their weather forecast right.

Anything kicks up along that journey, they won't make it.

There are over 1,000km of ocean.

For those chicks that have sort of been blindly following

their parents, they must have been thinking, "What is going on?

"Are we ever going to get there?"

The west coast of Ireland is the first thing that they will see.

Sometimes, you just hear them way, way, way in the distance.

WHOOPERS HONK

The sound of whoopers flying overhead

just makes you feel good.

They always strike me as happy birds.

And when they land in a sort of cacophony of honking and squawking,

they really bring life to a valley such as this.

WHOOPER SQUAWKS

Ireland is really their home away from home.

It's hard to sort of see Ireland as being a sort of

winter sunshine break

for anybody, but for whoopers, this has everything they need.

Lots of fuel to keep them going through the winter,

and they're constantly foraging.

It won't be long before the whoopers leave, but then,

just at that time, is when all the birds here start

proclaiming their territories.

And these valleys will be noisy with birdsong once again.

This is the bay I call home now.

Moving around the west coast of Ireland,

and I came to Clew Bay on an evening such as this...

..and I just felt that this would be a good place to settle,

and because I could explore both up and down the coast from here.

And now that's just what I'm doing.

If you have a look at a map of Ireland and you sort of look midway

down the west coast, you see a bay that looks like someone's

taken a bite out of it.

People say there's an island for every of the year.

Whoever said that wasn't very good at counting islands, but there's

quite a few of them!

Croagh Patrick dominating the bay.

That mountain looks different on every day of the year.

I'm very glad I made this my home,

and it's very much halfway on my journey.

If I was to pick one habitat I couldn't live without,

I think it would be woodlands.

And woodlands in spring, what could get better than this?

BIRDSONG

I spent a lot of time travelling around the world

and one thing I really missed

from Ireland was sort of the dawn chorus of birdsong

in an Irish woodland.

BIRDSONG

There is aggression in the air, but it doesn't sound like it at all.

It sounds wonderful.

A woodland doesn't have to be big to feel like a woodland.

When you walk into one,

it's not long before you sort of disappear

and really enter another world,

and all the little birds that you'd expect to find in a bigger

woodland are right there.

Just the smell and the sights, and every time you come into the woods

at this time of year, they change.

You know, you come one week and things are about to burst

into flower, and then the next week, you come,

and there's a carpet of bluebells or something stretching off

into the distance.

Just lovely.

But this is a great little wood.

You wouldn't really know that you were by the sea.

So few woodlands along the coast of Ireland these days.

We've almost lost our connection with woodlands.

It's a pity.

RAIN PATTERS

There is one animal I always wanted to see,

and people said it was in Ireland.

I've spent lots of time looking for it.

I remember the very first time I saw one.

I was walking through a little woodland...

..and I heard alarm calls.

You know that there is a predator on the move.

It's normally a fox.

Lo and behold, it was a pine marten.

Beautiful looking creature.

Shiny, with its lovely creamy chest.

I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing.

That was the sort of mythical creature from my childhood.

It was in all the books, you know,

that told you that pine martens are present in Ireland,

but they were incredibly rare.

But now they're making a really good comeback.

They're spreading out across Ireland.

They're very agile hunters.

They're almost as fast moving up the trees as they are on the ground.

Pretty adaptable, resourceful creatures.

It's great to have them back.

Days like these really stick out like rare jewels.

It's easy to forget how unstable the Atlantic is so much of the time.

Most of our interactions with the sea are very much on the surface.

So we rarely notice what's going on underneath.

But at this time of year, all sorts of creatures can turn up.

You never know where they're going to crop up next.

I think there are lots of them here today.

But if they're just ten feet below the surface,

you'd never know that they were here.

The warming waters bring in one of the most beautiful fish in the sea.

The blue shark.

They are found in every ocean in the world.

Sometimes you'll get them following each other...

..sort of nose to tail.

It seems that our blues follow the Gulf Stream

on a great tour of the Atlantic Ocean.

Millions of years of evolution

have honed this perfect travelling machine.

They appear almost like ghosts out of the very depths.

It's a very natural sort of boat and they don't seem to mind at all.

There's no engine noises.

Creatures don't seem to be scared of curraghs.

But they'll come and they'll go, for the most part unseen.

Sometimes, we just get to glimpse them, briefly.

Just for a few weeks every summer.

Halfway up the west coast,

there's a string of enchanting islands that lie off County Galway.

They give great shelter around here.

It's a wonderful quiet, isolated part of Ireland.

Places like this are just good for the soul.

Just the distant sort of roar of the sea.

And the birds.

You tend to instantly sort of relax.

BIRDS CALL

Winged plover alarm call.

Lots of them on the island at this time of year.

Keeping an eye on me.

They don't want me being here at all.

They'd prefer if I keep moving.

They love sort of open, rocky, stony patches like this.

This is where they build their little nest,

lay their eggs on the ground.

Good place to hide your eggs.

There's always something magical for me about finding a bird's nest.

I remember, as a kid, finding them

and it was just like finding treasure.

There's something about their construction

and the fact that they're so sort of delicate and vulnerable.

Sort of really got to appreciate the fact that you were...

..finding something that you weren't supposed to see.

There seems to be almost a truce at this time of year.

The gulls are sitting all around here.

They're nesting here, too.

I think they're so involved with their own nests,

they're not too bothered about the plovers at the moment, but once

the little chicks start moving around, they are very vulnerable.

They have the most adorable little chicks, lovely little things.

BIRD CRIES

They know they're going to lose several of them.

They have all sorts of little behaviours.

When they get upset, first of all, they whistle.

As soon as the sentry whistles,

its mate will sort of creep away from the nest.

It keeps its head down and sort of moves in a zigzag pattern,

away from the nest.

A predator moving along, they think it's an injured bird,

they follow it.

And little do they know that they're being led away from the nest.

Very clever.

Little did we realise, I guess,

that when these islands were being abandoned,

how important that they would become for wildlife.

One big empty coastline,

no creatures being disturbed as far as the eye can see.

Wouldn't it be nice if the world was ever thus?

So many of the creatures I encounter are really of no fixed abode.

But it's around about this time of year when there is an animal that

returns to our shores.

These are

Irish creatures that have spent the last year or more of their lives

travelling the ocean.

But now, they're picking up the scent of home once again.

And they've been on a pretty extraordinary journey.

For me, there's something very reassuring

about the return of the salmon.

The fact that a salmon can still leave a little stream in the west of

Ireland, go out to sea,

travel across the ocean and come all the way back

to complete its own life cycle,

the fact that that still takes place

fills me with a great deal of hope.

This is Connemara, the heart of Ireland's wild west.

And it's a place of bogs and mountains

and the salmon have been seeking out these streams

for maybe 10,000 years.

There are a lot of obstacles in the river

that they can only overcome after rain.

Once there's enough water in the river,

the salmon are able to find their way.

That's when all the sort of energy and power is needed.

Brief spurts of energy to get from one pool to another.

So the adults have finally made it back to where they were born.

Spawning cannot be far away.

Some of these animals have been in fresh water for the last six months

or so and they haven't eaten during that time.

It seems like each female now has a male by her side.

It's the female who will make the choice.

She will decide when spawning is going to happen,

but the male encourages her by shimmering, by shaking his body.

He's trying to stimulate her

by saying, "Look, I think everything's OK.

"Everything seems right to me."

And it is right. This is the shortest day of the year,

when there's the maximum amount of darkness,

and that seems to be a real trigger for salmon in the west of Ireland.

Fertilisation is instantaneous.

As soon as she starts to lay those eggs,

the male is in there instantly.

The eggs are going to develop in the gravels

for the next couple of months.

They should be relatively safe up here from predators.

They very much deserve to live.

But unfortunately for many,

they've actually come to the end of their lives.

A place that appears now so lifeless

is in fact full of life, but it's new life.

Amongst the gravels, life is just beginning.

And the cycle is going to start once more.

For me, wildlife and wild places very much go together.

The sort of whole experience of being in the wild

and seeing a place that seems so untamed in some way,

you can sort of hear it and sense it and feel it.

That's what adds to the experience.

This is Sheskinmore, a wonderfully quiet corner of Donegal.

It feels like I've sort of landed on some...

coral island or some tropical paradise.

Well, it may not be

the tropics, but it feels like paradise.

These dunes are really exceptional.

I've never seen anything quite like them in Ireland.

Sand dunes by their nature are really unstable.

The wind is constantly carving them into new shapes.

You can almost see them moving with the naked eye.

But here, the vegetation has gotten such a grip over time,

that these dunes do not appear to be moving any more,

and because of that,

a whole sort of range of wild flowers have established themselves.

I've never seen anything quite as good.

And there's nobody here.

And that's the great thing about the west coast of Ireland still.

In the middle of summer...

..you can have a place like this all to yourself.

I've been wandering around now for

a full day and I haven't seen a single person.

The sun doesn't shine every single day of the year,

but when it does...

..you're rewarded with something that's really very special.

BIRDS SING

I was literally up with the lark this morning,

and they must have started at five o'clock.

Absolutely alive with sound.

I think they say there's more poetry written about skylarks

than any other bird, and you can sort of see why.

SKYLARKS SING

I think when you hear that call,

it reminds you of all those summer's days you've ever had,

all sort of mixed up together

with the soundtrack, I think, of a lot of people's childhoods.

Busy, busy, busy, gathering as much food as they can.

And the parents take avoidance measures

to not draw attention to the nest.

They land and go running through the grasses to deliver the food.

The skylark chicks seem endlessly hungry.

They need to get in as much energy as they can.

They're born as tiny, naked little things.

If you're hidden in a little nest on the ground,

you are extremely vulnerable to predators,

so you want to eat as quickly as you can,

grow up nice and fast and get out of there and get to the air,

because that's where it's safe.

Skylark parents are absolutely fastidious

about keeping their little nests clean.

They're constantly removing the little faecal sacs

that the chicks produce.

And they pick them up with their mouths

and fly away and drop them some place else, and that way,

keeping the nest clean so there's no...

Predators won't be attracted to its scent.

It's all about disguising scent.

SKYLARKS SING

How they manage to sing and fly constantly -

it must be some feat, really.

There's a huge amount of growth in the ocean at this time of year.

Growth on land is sort of easy to see, you know -

the trees are bare and they come into leaf

and you can see everything growing,

but the very same thing happens in the ocean.

We're just not so aware of that.

It's when the temperatures start to rise, and the sun comes.

It's all down to the sun.

The sun powers the system.

As the temperature rises and there's lots of ultraviolet light around,

all the little plant plankton starts to grow.

And as soon as that grows, all the little grazer plankton come along.

And then, when you've all these little grazers,

the predators of those grazers turn up.

Real creatures of mystery.

Until recently, we knew almost nothing about basking sharks.

People used to say that they spent the winter sleeping on the bottom of

the ocean.

But now, we know they're just real ocean wanderers.

Oh, look at this!

Big white mouth.

You can see he's moving slowly.

What an extraordinary, beautiful creature that is.

There are some unseen changes in the sea.

Sometimes, the plankton seems to rise up to the very surface

and then they just appear.

They can smell it.

But that's how they know how to be here.

If I was to say to someone, like, if there's one thing you've got to

experience in Ireland,

it's being out with basking sharks on a fine day.

Look at this. Two of them swimming, one behind the other.

Three, three together!

Look! You can hear their tails,

swishing from side to side as they turn those bodies.

They're constantly turning and twisting their bodies

into the plankton.

I've never heard them before.

They look like they're socialising, but as far as I know, they're not.

Sometimes it's confusing when you see a couple on the surface,

because they have two fins on their backs so people often think there's

more sharks than there actually are,

but when they're right on the surface,

you can sometimes get the nose.

Right here!

(Look at that.)

The wonderful thing about Ireland is that when you get these conditions,

along the west coast, you can have a site like this all to yourself.

These are just gentle giants.

The second largest fish in the sea.

They spend all day

drifting along as casual as could be.

They move so slowly and steadily.

And in conditions like these,

there's no place better in the world to view basking sharks.

Tucked in the far northwest corner of the island,

Donegal often feels like a place apart.

I guess when I think of wildness,

I think about clinging on to visions of what the world was once like when

we weren't here, or when we were here in low numbers.

When creatures didn't have to worry about us.

When I make an appearance on to that scene,

the behaviour of nearly every creature changes.

And they're scared of us because they've learnt that they have to be.

It doesn't have to be that way.

For thousands of years, the greatest predator in Donegal

was an avian one,

a golden eagle.

They were here in an unbroken chain

until people decided that the only good eagle was a dead eagle...

..and killed every last one.

We were really missing something without these birds.

Perhaps 15 years ago or so,

an ambitious project was launched to bring them back once again and eagle

chicks were taken over from Scotland and they were released

in this place.

There's something special about seeing golden eagles

back in these skies.

EAGLE CALLS

And for me, the call of the eagle is somehow the bird equivalent to

the howling wolves.

There's something visceral,

and almost that sort of primeval connection with the wild,

when you hear that call.

It seems very much like they should be here.

They've brought a real sense of wildness back to Ireland again.

But they haven't thrived.

They have struggled to breed.

Perhaps things aren't as good as they once were here.

So these little guys are really important.

They're among the first golden eagle chicks born in Ireland

in over a century.

Very precious bundles of DNA.

If the project is to be successful,

these chicks must reach maturity and somehow start families of their own.

We need to be mindful of them.

It's hard to contemplate losing them once more.

There is a gathering here at this time,

and it's a gathering that's unseen by most people,

but if you look closely,

you can see these strange, eel-like shapes,

but they're not eels.

They're a creature that very few people ever encounter,

and that's because they have quite an extraordinary lifestyle.

Someone found this fossil not too long ago,

and in that fossil,

there were the remains of a lamprey which looked just like one that is

living today.

That fossil was 300 million years old.

That doesn't just mean that they were living here WITH the dinosaurs,

it means that they were here before most of them.

But when you go underwater,

that's when you see how extraordinary

these creatures really are.

They don't have proper gills,

they don't have jaws,

they don't have scales.

They're a totally different life form, really, altogether.

And in early summer, in May and June,

they come to places just like this.

These are sea lampreys.

Although they spend most of their lives living in the river,

they do go out to sea for a year or so.

And when they get out to the ocean,

they attach themselves to other fish.

They have these fierce-looking, prehistoric, round mouths

full of these rasping teeth.

And they use this process to latch themselves onto other fish.

So they go from these sort of harmless,

filter feeding, blind little creatures

into flesh-eating, vampire-type fish.

They grow very quickly, because when you're eating flesh like that,

you can put on weight very quickly.

And probably after about a year,

they make their way back into rivers again.

And as soon as they do, they get down to business.

But they have this extraordinary sucker-like mouth.

And they use that for shifting rocks.

What they're trying to do is clear an area of the river bed so that

the gravels are exposed.

Any rock or stone, no matter how big, they'll seem to tackle.

There's an otter about.

They must have a field day.

Can you imagine?

As soon as they enter the river system, they've stopped feeding.

They're going to have to clear the riverbed, mate,

and, unfortunately, death will soon follow,

so every lamprey that's here will be dead within days.

Every creature has its place.

That's what I think about lampreys.

I mean, their lifestyle isn't maybe very attractive to a lot of people,

but it's an important one. And I like them very much, I have to say.

Any creature that's been around for that long

has got life sorted!

Will humans be around for 300 million years, unchanged?

Doubt it!

This place has been the graveyard of many a ship,

even ones bigger than mine.

And if I was to try and row my curragh around here today,

I'd probably end up in Scotland.

It's not far away.

This is Malin Head, Ireland's northernmost point.

The little light shining out to sea,

and that's our northernmost island, Inishtrahull,

and that's where I was hoping to get today.

But in these conditions, it won't be possible.

Malin Head marks the northernmost point of my journey,

and it's also where I turn east.

This is where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Irish Sea.

It somehow feels a little gentler up here.

Autumn really is one of my favourite times of year, I think.

It's like the last burst of activity before winter kicks in -

everything is preparing.

Nature, it's great the way it works out.

Just when food is going to go short over winter,

there's this great explosion of high-energy foods

that's just waiting to be gathered.

Great to see the red squirrels around.

They know that there are lean times ahead.

And they're trying to gather as many nuts as they can,

and they find little places to hide them, to cache them.

But what they don't realise is that they're being watched.

There's a whole host of thieves hanging round the trees,

watching their every move.

As soon as they arrive with another nut,

it's not long before it disappears.

Earlier, I found some pine marten scat.

There's an extraordinary thing that's happening

that no-one could really have imagined.

Now, grey squirrels were introduced here a couple of hundred years ago,

and they've done incredibly well.

But as pine martens are moving across the country,

grey squirrels are disappearing.

And red squirrels are coming back.

Now, no-one can figure out exactly why.

When I stop and think about it, though, you know,

pine martens and red squirrels evolved together, so it would make

sense that red squirrels would have something

in their sort of behavioural repertoire

that allows them to escape pine martens,

otherwise there wouldn't be any left.

Whereas grey squirrels are a new arrival here,

and maybe they are lacking those escape mechanisms.

There must be something that they're not doing right.

As a result, the pine marten is really

the saviour of the red squirrel.

It's an extraordinary thing that the return of one native animal is

actually saving another one.

When you walk here during the day,

and it's full of the creatures that we are very familiar with.

But at night, when you come in,

you can hear all sorts of little creatures moving about.

It's not easy to see them, but you know they're here.

These are long-eared bats.

This is just the kind of place they like.

In times past,

you'd only ever have seen them just sort of flitting by,

and you must have wondered about them.

They are unique amongst bats in Ireland.

They have these enormous ears.

Their ears are as long as their bodies.

It is said that they can hear the sound of a caterpillar walking

across a leaf.

Pretty impressive!

People often refer to them as being flying mice, but actually,

they're much more closely related to us than they are to mice.

Busy time of year to be a bat.

They have to get all their feeding done.

Put on little bits of fat between their shoulder blades,

and they'll live off that for the winter.

They hunt by listening.

And they themselves are absolutely silent flyers.

They just go around at night, hoovering up insects.

Nice big moths, and they're perfect long-eared bat food.

I love bats.

The character of the sea has changed now at this time of year.

It's not the place to be in a small little boat any more.

It's a good time to end my journey.

I started a year ago on a remote Atlantic rock

off the southwest corner of Ireland

and I'm finishing on this wild headland,

overlooking Rathlin Island.

This is known as the Sea of Moyle,

and it featured in that ancient Irish story,

The Children Of Lir.

Now, Lir was the god of the sea and he had four children that he adored.

But his wife died, and when he remarried,

their stepmum cursed them

and turned them into swans.

Under the weight of this curse, they had to wander Ireland for 900 years.

They spent 300 years of their banishment here on the Sea of Moyle,

and that story has resonated on this coast.

To this day, you'll still see the whooper swans journeying here every

autumn, escaping from the grip of the Arctic cold.

The fact that those journeys are still happening

gives me a great sense of hope,

for our natural history and our natural world

gives us something to cling onto, a link with the past.

I think that's something I've learnt on my journey.

This place has been my back yard, but I now look at it in a new light.

Sometimes there's this wonderful mix between sort of human history and

natural history.

That is something that is almost the theme of any west coast journey.

You can't travel this coast without being aware

that humans have been here for a long time.

They were able to tread a little bit more lightly on the planet

than we do.

And that's the great thing about a journey.

You can sort of plan steps along the way, but often the greatest times

and the greatest places are ones that you happen upon by chance.

The west coast of Ireland is still pretty wild.

It's a special kind of place.