Dr. Fionn Ó Marcaigh

There's a rookery in here.

Terry will stop and take a look at it.

I think by kind of turning around here, I think there's slightly more.

I think there's about, I think there's 16 I can count, yeah.

That sounds right, yes, I think so.

That's right.

With the National Parks and Wildlife Service, we're doing a survey across about 12% of the area of County Kildare in squares that were first randomly sampled just under 10 years ago in 2017.

And a survey was done to count how many rookeries there were and how many occupied nests in each rookery.

And we're returning to those same areas now to see, are they in the same places?

What are the trends of the numbers, you know, increases and decreases and so on?

Well, it's an interesting one, yeah.

I think sometimes animals that live in such close proximity to us, sometimes it seems a bit like familiarity can breed contempt, I suppose, and it is true that they have been known to cause issues when they're at large numbers.

In Ireland, the Irish landscape seems to have suited them quite well.

I mean, rookeries are something that are kind of almost ubiquitous part of the Irish countryside, really.

It's not always the case in every other European country, though, so...

The most recent version of the European red list of birds came out in 2021 and it actually bumped the ruck down from being least concerned to being vulnerable in terms of its conservation status because its population was declining across more than 50% of its range in Europe.

That's right, and it means that the Irish population, which is large, could end up representing a more and more significant portion of the European population.

It's been highlighted now at the EU level that Ireland holds, I think, nearly 25% of the EU population.

One of the factors there, of course, is that a very large RUC population in the UK is no longer counted as part of the EU population, but it just goes to show that something that's very familiar and common to us

might not always be so familiar and common everywhere and for all time.