Eoghan Murphy

speaker

214 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

Eoghan Murphy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Mooney Goes Wild · Headstarting Chicks Helps Ireland's Curlew Numbers · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

Headstarting has been undertaken in Ireland.

I think this is maybe the fifth year, possibly the sixth year, one of those early years Kendra was involved in, as was one of the Nest Protection Officers working for the Cardio Conservation Programme.

So we have been building, gradually building, I suppose, expertise and knowledge in relation to Headstarting.

What's limiting us in Ireland at the moment is our ability to find eggs because we only have 100 pairs, 120 pairs of curlew left and they're a very cryptic species.

So it's really difficult to actually find eggs in the wild.

And head starting as a conservation measure is directly linked to how many eggs can you head start.

We've done the modelling, NPWS and the RSPB were involved in a model in relation to head starting for curlew.

and it shows that quantity invariably brings back more birds into a breeding population.

So head starting itself is an emergency measure.

We're taking eggs from the wild, we're incubating and rearing those chicks and releasing them as fledglings.

And the reason we're doing that is because we know the life cycle of a lot of our ground nesting birds is failing in that egg and chick stage.

They're just not getting

chicks away and recruited into the adult populations.

Adults are surviving year on year quite well, same as we would expect them to do in any European country.

So it's our ability to be productive, to have productive breeding populations of some of these ground-listing boroughs that's so problematic.

And this is one of the things that sometimes people look at me and they think, this lad is, you know, he's ranting and raving.

He's off the wall, yeah.

Yeah.

And there's a couple of hundred birds in my little bay and on the East Coast or the West Coast.

We get a big influx, as we do with an awful lot of our waders.

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