Nature on Con Smith’s doorstep
Anja Murray will help people gain a new appreciation for nature in Con Smith Park at this weekend’s Cavan Arts Festival.
While kids dangle from climbing frames, their parents sip coffees, teens glide and clatter about on skateboards, and students hang out on the green, the park’s virtues as a natural habitat could easily be overlooked. However, Anja will bring a group of festival goers on a free nature tour of the park, sharing her observations of its wildlife, plants and habitats.
A gifted presenter of RTÉ’s Eco Eye and author of the wonderful book ‘Wild Embrace’, she will also share her approach to giving authentic responses to nature as she encounters it.
“We will talk about observation as a key to understanding,” she tells the Celt of Saturday’s workshop. “How to observe natural phenomenon, combining knowledge with emotional responses and how to capture that through artistic work, whether that’s writing or drawing.”
Anja confesses to having to suppress her inner scientist.
“I will see plants and flowers and straight away the Latin name comes to mind and I’m going around listing off the Latin names - and that’s away of clocking the thing but not really looking at it, so I have to push myself not to classify it, not do the scientific cataloguing - where it’s growing, how tall it is, what time of year it is. And just look. Just look at the amazing colours in the middle of the petals, or the lines on the leaves.”
Anja’s inclusion on the Cavan Arts Festival bill is a real coup for organisers, but she was eager to help as it is also her local community focussed arts festival. Almost 20 years ago Anja bought a home in West Cavan and “fell in love with the place”, partly due to the array of wildflowers populating the fields that had yet to succumb to intensive farming practises.
“The landscape and the quality of the natural environment, as well as the people and the place,” she says.
Qualified as an environmental scientist, and having specialised in plant ecology, Anja has worked for decades in ecology and advocacy roles so her knowledge runs deep.
Voice of reason
Through her Nature File podcast series, she directs the listeners’ gaze to rest on a single animal or plant species, to appreciate its place in ecology’s complex jigsaw. Everything from the aristocratic Hen Harrier and deer down to the lowly ragwort and hairy molly enjoy time in Anja’s sun. Each bite-size episode always engages, and occasionally startles.
‘Here in Ireland we have dozens of different species of midge,’ she explains in one episode, ‘and only some are of the biting kind. Of these, only the pregnant females pester us, requiring a speck of blood for the eggs inside her to mature.’
In mitigation for the midges, Anja pleads they never set out to do harm as they extract a ‘dropeen of protein rich blood’.
‘They’re enjoying their life in the air with wings that beat faster than any other wings in the animal kingdom - one thousand times per second - this is the high pitch buzz I hear when midges are swarming around my ear.’
Anja’s voice has a way of slowing the Earth’s rotation, to permit time to take in and savour its natural wonders. Degraded habitats and collapsing species populations are often detailed, however in her delivery there’s always an implicit assurance that we can still act to improve our station. All is not yet lost.
She adopted this approach some years ago after receiving feedback from a talk she gave providing the unvarnished, science based facts of just how bad things are.
“That was a turning point for me,” she said recalling how she was approached by some who confessed they found it “overwhelming”.
“I was like - OK, there has to be another way to communicate this stuff,” she explains. “If you just give people this litany of depressing facts, it doesn’t promote them to take action, to have some bit of hope and to find that they can affect positive change.”
Anja admits she can become overwhelmed by the challenges facing our world too. It was the subject of a recent edition of her weekly column in the Examiner, and how it was getting outside to appreciate nature that replenished her.
“Sometimes I’m writing for myself as much as anybody else, reminding myself of how immersion in nature and observation of the patterns - such as waiting for the swallows to return - really can be soothing.”
Anja Murray’s tour of the park is free, register at cavanartsfestival.ie