Taking a walk on the wild side in Northern Ireland

Aug 13 2010 By Mike Wood

Mike Wood finds his back-to-nature adventure weekend is much like a duck to water.

Explorer, my fellow traveller’s business card clearly stated.

What had I let myself in for?

I had rather rashly signed up for “a wild and wet weekend” in Northern Ireland, but this was ridiculous.

Especially as the bearer of the card, Antony Jinman, is listed on Wikipedia as a “polar adventurer”, who has walked (or rather skied and snow-shoed) to the North Pole, and who is even now organising an Antarctic expedition for 2012 to mark the centenary of Captain Scott’s ill-fated race to the South Pole.

Before I had a chance to get straight back on the plane, he explained that he was there to make a film for our hosts, the Wildfowl And Wetlands Trust – the idea being that you don’t have to travel to the frozen wastes to discover the wonders of the natural world.

The WWT, founded by Captain Scott’s son Sir Peter, was holding a weekend of events to show off the new £4 million visitor centre at its wetland nature reserve at Castle Espie on Strangford Lough, a short drive through pleasant rolling countryside from Belfast’s George Best City Airport. While the reserve’s avian stars – the thousands of dark-bellied brent geese and other rare wildfowl that flock to the reserve in winter time – were themselves away spending the summer in the Arctic, there were plenty of other things to see.

Not least, its 320 million years of history. Fossils of nautiloids (an ancestor of the giant squid) dug up during the building of the new centre are set into the floor of the building; a reconstructed Stone Age roundhouse sits on the site of a crannog (a prehistoric dwelling built on an artificial island in a lake); and the reserve’s spectacular new glass-sided bird observatory sits above lime kilns that provided many of the bricks that built Belfast. An actor, dressed in Victorian artisan’s clothing vividly described the working conditions for 19th century brick-makers.

The wetland centre also has a collection of 44 geese and ducks from around the world – including Hawaian geese, which Sir Peter saved from extinction, and the charismatic whistler ducks, which, because of the way they wander around and stop, stretch their necks up and stare off in different directions, are like the meercats of the bird world.

Visitors can buy a cup of grain and feed these delightful creatures.