Earlier this year RTE screened four episodes of Wild Cities a programme about the wealth of wildlife found in urban and suburban areas of four of our main cities. The episode about Dublin featured footage of those same peregrines in Dalkey Quarry in 2014 while they were feeding their chicks. The peregrine scenes were filmed under licence from the National Parks & Wildlife organisation with strict supervision by Birdwatch Ireland’s raptor expert John Lusby. The peregrine sections is fantastic although watching it now it’s tinged with sadness knowing the mother bird and two of the chicks are dead. That programme and the other three episodes featuring Cork, Galway and Belfast were filmed by wildlife cameraman Domenico Pontillo. Much of the camerawork in the series was spectacular, the Sand Martins caught turning mid-air being just one example, and the series can be watched on the RTÉ website.

   We’d briefly met Domenico and after watching two episodes online I sent him a text to say how impressive the camerawork was. He replied saying he was actually filming in a hide in a nature reserve on a beach in Donegal. He said it was a particularly beautiful area and a lovely evening and a few minutes later he sent another text saying a pair of cuckoos had just landed on the hide! We were fairly sure we’d spotted a female, possibly pregnant, red squirrel in April going into a dray but subsequent surveillance was disappointing and by June we were getting worried we hadn’t seen a sign of a red for weeks. So we were very happy when Lucy spotted a red in a Scots Pine towering above the densely leaved ash and oak. We were further delighted when we saw it didn’t have an earclip which meant it hadn’t been trapped and recorded and was almost certainly a young squirrel born this year. We saw one again a few weeks later but this time it wasn’t alone, there were two more reds without earclips as well. Watching them is often a mixture of joy and apprehension seeing them hurling from tree to tree and hanging precariously upside down stretching for a cone or seed. We’d been watching them awhile feeding on larch cones when a adult red squirrel, (we knew it was adult because of its earclip) appeared carrying a cone and proceeded very deliberately to a nearby squirrel nest box which it entered briefly then withdrew from without the cone, perhaps storing food for the winter.

Red Squirrel eating Larch cone on Dalkey Hill in July

Young Red Squirrel on Larch tree on Dalkey Hill in July