 online on Facebook with the Angus Kennedy of Nature Northwest. Angus good afternoon to you. Good afternoon John, happy Christmas. And happy Christmas to you and yours. Now at this time of the year one of the things I suppose that's synonymous with Christmas is pines and pine cones and they come from obviously from pine trees but interesting to note that there's only the only native there's only one strand of native pine tree because all the rest were wiped out am I right in saying that? Yeah 100% yeah and evergreen I suppose evergreen plants back in ancient times it always held a bit of a mystery to people why is it that so many plants dropped their leaves and seemed to shut down for winter and then some of them just kept going like the ivy or the holly or the pine tree the conifer trees in general all the conifer trees and in fact they're associated a lot of the different evergreen plants are associated with all sorts of festivities that happened forever at this time of year this morning I was watching the live stream on the Heritage Island website of the Salstice and the Salstice is coming into Newgrange and it was very cloudy so I don't think they were able to see a huge amount but it's the I think tonight's the longest night and today tomorrow kind of thing or the shortest days and then the hour or the the the minutes start to add on again our days start to build and build but of course back in the ancient times incredibly dark time incredibly worrying time for them so they treasured their evergreen trees and any tree that's a conifer is a cone bearing tree and most of them are evergreen and there's a few exceptions I had the large being one that famous that famous Celtic cross that is planted in the woodlands when you're on the way out to Derry that's all large and it changes color which makes it jump out but usually conifer trees are evergreen most of them are evergreen they're like the fir trees which are your typical Christmas tree now most of us if we have a real Christmas tree in the house it's probably a fir tree but it's not native our only native conifers are juniper you trees and then the big scott's pine okay and people might think when they hear scott's pine well that's not a native tree but it but well one strand of it is native Ireland yeah it is indeed and scott's pine have been in Ireland for thousands and thousands of years and they like they can tolerate a certain amount of wet not too wet but they don't need very new nutrient rich soil so they will grow up the mountains they'll grow in the kind of rougher places on the west and the north and so on and and and they would have covered our mountains in places where where oak wouldn't have been able to do so well the likes of birch there would have been bits of willow maybe bits of hazel and scott's pine would have been there as well and they still have some of those big scott's pine forests in scottland but we have managed to to wipe all of them out of course we've only about two percent little less than two percent of native woodland in Ireland anymore that and what i mean by that is over 90 percent of all of Ireland was covered in some kind of forest at one stage and now that's less than two percent is the native trees that are there but scott's pine we knew that it was growing here because it's preserved in the bog and they thought it was completely wiped out from the landscape in Ireland about one and a half thousand years ago but recently only about three or four years ago they discovered a little stand on a private estate in the burrin a limestone area that probably because of its estate it was protected more recent times and it probably wouldn't have been farmed much anyway back in the day because the limestone and they discovered that the scott's pine there is genetically the exact same as the scott's pine that they dig out of the bog that might be one two three four thousand years old okay so so that's how they'd be able to make the connection and it's easy enough easy enough to spot because um because there's no lower branches for some reason no lower branches they're an amazing tree the way they adapt so as they mature and they get older when they're younger they've lots of lower branches but as they mature and get older um you get this big kind of nearly cathedral effect these beautiful very very tall straight um trunks but they shed their lower branches unlike say the likes of sitka spruce you go into one of those big plantations the comfort plantations they're quite often sitka spruce very fast growing as um as well but they will keep their lower branches the lower branches will die because the the the top branches the canopy branches chop off all the light and they stop any light coming down into the forest whereas the scott's pine it's adapted to know that so it sheds its lower branches it doesn't need them anymore and that means no a lot less windage so it's able to tolerate the storms a little bit better because of course they're often growing in the kind of places that they grow with the kind of places that they do well it's often very thin soils and so the roots aren't able to go very deep so they need to be able to shed those branches so they don't tumble over in the storms uh two things that we i would associate with pine trees would be the the cones and there's a very distinctive cone on the scott's pine and also the the the needles and i think there's there when it comes to scott's pine their little pairs yeah little pairs so all the so there's about 600 different conifers and about half of those are pines and all the pines have those kind of slightly longer needles most of the species are in pairs and the scott's pines they'll be as long as your little finger or sometimes longer again so you can identify them quite quickly by looking at the pines on the ground because of course all evergreen trees they still shed about a third of their leaves every year but then they grow a little more than a third and keep growing that way whereas the likes of the fir tree that might be in your your living room or your wherever you have your christmas tree right now and they have the much shorter and softer needles and then the sitka spruce trees which aren't used those christmas trees because they dry out too quickly they'll drop their their needles too quickly they're very spiky if you grab them will be sore because they're tough and spiky because the scott's pine they're long which gives a little bit more elegance as well and also that bark that those trunks you refer to they have the beautiful orangey color and then the leaves themselves when you get a little bit of sun on them they have a kind of bluish tinge so when you look at scott's pine from any bit of distance high up in the tree and mature trees you'll see beautiful orange especially if it's catching a bit of sunlight and then that kind of metallicy blue tinge and to the needles very graceful things they're a very majestic tree the the scott's pine and as you mentioned earlier glenn vay national park a great place to to to see them and there's a there's a new booklet out in glenn vay there is glenn vay of course it's our own national park up here and we should be so proud of it and they do they do an awful lot of preservation work when it comes to nature all sorts of different nature and habitats they've cleared one area specifically to propagate that native species of scott's pine we mentioned because seeds are being collected from that tiny little stand in kanamara and places like glenn vay now are going to start propagate and start growing that tree so in time to come my children will be able to go and get saplings from them which will be the pure genetic one they won't be mixed with any others but there's um uh shawna gweehan the head gardener there has an amazing knowledge of of all sorts of things wild and naturey and of course gardens as well but he takes great interest in a lot of the native plants in there and he produced this lovely little bookish i got my hands in one there a while ago and you can pick them up i believe in the visitor center in glenn vay and the ancient woodlands at glenn vay and it's got a map in it and it maps out all of the different little patches of woodland some you can see some you don't know are there at all and tells you a bit about the history the species that are there and it's fascinating because each one it's very um it's very accessibly written and each one gives you a little snapshot into what all of Ireland used to look like and the different types of trees be it low in the valley be it high up in the mountains or wherever it is so well worth looking at for yeah absolutely i would pass a great day for the family maybe over the course of the holidays and um something else that's been produced recently and uh you've an involvement in this and that is a video produced by a people's out of Skolwara in Remelton and it's all about the Lennon it's all about the Lennon and it finally it ties into scott's pines it ties into you think of the lovely holly trees that people are looking out for and all the rest of it this is the very type of thing these students were doing it was funded by the local authority water program uh and the Donegal branch of on uh of on Tashka they went and applied for this funding and then I went and um and did a three-day project with the school we spent a day learning in the school and then a day exploring the Lennon at three different sites from high in the mountains to halfway down past Garden Lake to just downstream of Kilmachrenn and they tested the water quality and they looked at the amount of vegetation on the side and they looked at the amount of bugs in the vegetation that they could find at each site and then the third day was their findings and the rest and we made a little movie it was Charlie Joe Doherty the talented filmmaker made a gorgeous little movie um and it's uh it's an interesting thing it's a new departure for for all of us really filming uh children and young people but they they were fantastic and what's different to this nature movie to other ones that I've done before um it's not my voice or anybody else's voice or any of the colleagues that were working with me it's all it's narrated by the students and they explore from the beginning right down the Lennon there's some beautiful footage of the Lennon going all the way down and then they explore why the Lennon is good as a nature corridor and crucially how it could be improved by all of us um so it's a it's a lovely thing the whole idea was for young people to engage the community to engage with the river um but by goodness they took it in their ram on it you know it was uh it's impressive now absolutely and give us an insight to into one of the most important rivers in the county and and how how healthy it is and what it means to the the environment and that that nature corridor yeah completely and we saw and the students were able to figure out for themselves very much the more trees the more riverside habitat that there is uh also it helps with the flooding and holding the river banks together and filtering the water for anything that might be coming down but also it acts as a corridor as a nature corridor because we need to have our our more productive land and we need to have our built land and our towns etc but um but if we planted up more areas and if we fill the gaps that are there we'd have a pure nature corridor for the squirrel or the bird or the the the parrot on the run from Ballybuffet or whoever it is to go all the way from the mountains right down through Trenta and through Kilmachran and through Remelton and then on to Luxwilly and of course all of our rivers have the potential to act as nature corridors like that if we look after the um we look after voices but if you listen to the the children talking about it it's very compelling and they just get straight to the the knob of the issues which is great well let's hope that part hasn't made it over as far as the linen and finally Angus you know seeing as we're we're almost at Christmas there's a question about holly and people will be out you know this is the one time of the year when people take take note of holly and also the berries and someone says we have holly near our house but there's not many berries how come are they unlucky is this a good year for berries or yeah it's it's very interesting people and we've often talked before um about how our berries a sign of the winter to come uh and it's really more they're a sign of of the spring or the summer past and holly um flowers come out a little bit later than say the likes of Hawthorne or certainly Blackthorn and late in spring and summer our weather was very good so the flowers didn't get blown off and the pollinating insects had a good warm chance to pollinate them so quite a few of our holly trees are actually doing pretty well this year however what can throw people about holly is that there's male and female trees a lot of trees have both male and female parts and but the holly trees they're separate and if it's a male tree it'll have those little white flowers in spring but it won't have the berries um and that it's producing the pollen with them and then the female trees they're the ones that'll have the little round berries so bear that in mind if you're out looking for holly if you're out looking for berries first of all they're hugely important as a source of food for the birds um and second as well a only half of the trees out there are able to produce berries in the first place and holly ran into trouble outside of protected place like a like our nature reserves in recent years because people were so enthusiastically collecting um the the red berries didn't know they were doing it wrong they thought there's a lovely thing which it is however if you do go and you have something growing in your own place make sure you leave some for the birds and some just generally for nature because those birds will spread the seeds then the the following year all right okay then Angus um informative as always and uh you have a great Christmas and and uh no doubt we'll be chatting to you in the new year thanks somebody brilliant thanks John you'll find those videos by the way uh that that video of the Lennon on naturenorthwest.ie there's a video page there now of all of that um and and also the video that i looked about scott's pines that featured you in it where's where can that be seen that's on the same as well naturenorthwest.ie and there's the whole page uh that nature video page there's a series of six short videos each one five or six minutes long um uh on a different type of native tree and they were all produced a bit earlier earlier this year as well and i've got to say that the footage it's easy for me i can talk and i like to talk um but uh Charlie Joe Daherty and then some of his colleagues that have added some drone footage into it their work at editing and bringing these together and makes them very lovely pieces i think yeah they look great okay Angus thank you take care have a Christmas happy Christmas and see you in the new year your mental health is important and now it's easier than ever to find the supports and serve