My work focuses on a aspect of Ireland that few guests ever see: the temperate rainforest of Killarney National Park, a 10,200-hectare reserve close to the southwest coast. The local weather right here — often damp and, by Irish requirements, comparatively heat, with temperatures in autumn afternoons usually edging past 10 °C — creates splendid rising circumstances for all types of mosses, ferns and easy moss-like crops known as liverworts.
Here, in an image taken final November, I’m taking a detailed take a look at a chunk of moss rising in a marshy spot subsequent to a holly tree. I’m an unbiased, freelance scientist, and the federal government usually hires me to survey the realm’s unbelievable biodiversity.
One sq. metre of floor right here can assist 30 species of moss and liverwort, and it usually takes a eager eye to inform one from one other. If I’m stumped, I’ll take a pattern again to my laboratory — really a spare room in my home — to look at the cell construction and different figuring out options beneath a microscope.
I grew up close to this park, and regardless of on a regular basis that I’ve spent right here, there are nonetheless surprises. In summer season 2019, I discovered a tiny tropical fern (Stenogrammitis myosuroides) that’s native to the mountains of Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and Cuba. The more than likely clarification for its look right here is that spores bought swept up into the environment, soared throughout the Atlantic and occurred to land in a spot the place the plant can survive. It makes you consider all of the spores and seeds floating round on the market that aren’t so fortunate.
Here, I’m a two-hour stroll away from the closest street. Sometimes, pink deer stroll by and white-tailed eagles fly overhead. When it’s pouring down with rain, I’m wondering what I’m doing out right here. But, in between storms, there’s no place I’d fairly be. It’s quiet however energetic, and when you’ve gotten a watch for moss, there’s at all times one thing to catch your consideration.
