Cranes Return to Ireland, Encouraged by Peatland Restoration
September 18, 2026
Crane chick and parent, photo by James Crombie
My favorite place to get lost as a child was a brackish marsh in County Wexford, Ireland, where we vacationed in a caravan each summer. The sulfurous stink of the slimy, jet-black mud, that was so soft and sticky, warm and bottomless permeated my nostrils. The happiness of walking barefoot across the marsh surface with mud squeezing up, warm and wiggly, between my toes, is still tangible all these years later. It was a forgotten place on the back side of the dunes, on the far side of the fields, where the air was always very still, and yet it buzzed with life. Shore birds circled overhead — curlews, gulls, terns. Fish and eels teemed in the dark brown creeks. This marsh was a place where I was free to roam. It was my own private wilderness, and within it, I felt safe and free.
One day while leaving the marsh, I came face-to-face with what I thought was a great blue heron (Ardea herodias) standing sentinel at the water’s edge. The marsh bird was nearly as tall as me with gray, wrinkled skin on its neck and face. I was frozen to the spot watching this giant bird standing there spying fish to eat. Afterward, I told everyone I met about this amazing bird encounter. I was told it was probably a common crane (Grus grus). Colloquially, cranes and herons are both called “crane” in Ireland.
Common cranes are large birds that once inhabited Irish peatlands. Omnivorous and long-lived, they are known to be cooperative social birds, and in many cultures around the world they represent equality and harmony. They spend their winters in Spain or southwestern France, and they used to return north to Ireland, in flocks of hundreds, with the lengthening days of spring. Cranes went extinct in Ireland by the 1700s due to hunting and habitat destruction. Gray wolves also went extinct in Ireland around this same time period, their demise catalyzing the crane’s extinction through a rise in meso-predators — foxes and badgers — who are more prone to prey on ground-nesting birds. These included the cranes who built floating nests among emergent wetland vegetation.
Crane family of two adults and one juvenile, photo by James Crombie
Cranes were very important birds in pre-Christian Irish folklore, seen as guardians of the “otherworld,” and associates of death. Oddly, they were also common pets for nobility — the third most common pet after dogs and cats. I’m trying to picture nobility bringing their pet crane into the living room, to sit by the fire with them, to walk in the gardens with them. They were considered birds of liminal spaces existing between air and water, between the worlds of here and there. Crane art, stories, and artifacts illustrate the cultural connection to the more-than-human world that saturates Irish folklore. Irish people did not eat crane meat due to the bird’s revered status. King Henry II, as king of England, served cranes at a feast in 1171 CE in Ireland, breaking the Brehon Laws protecting cranes at that time. This was a statement of conquest and cultural change. The cranes thereafter shifted from beloved pets to prey as King Henry II claimed the title Lord of Ireland.
The Irish semi-state company, Bord na Mona, now rebranded as BnM, is one of Ireland’s largest landowners. Established in the wake of World War II to industrialize peat extraction for energy generation, BnM has been reaping energy from the peat stored in Irish wetland habitats, specifically in raised bogs, for the past 75 years. Raised bogs are wet, muddy places that lie gracefully across one-sixth of the Irish landscape. They are remnants of prior shallow lakes infilled slowly over time with plant communities based on sphagnum mosses. Natural change occurs very slowly in these places. Originally, Ireland had 740,000 acres of raised bogs, 92 percent of which have been destroyed due to drainage and peat extraction. When humans reap the surface layers of a bog, the peatland ecosystems remaining are mostly devoid of life.
Moors and peat bog, photo by K. Mitch Hodge / Unsplash
BnM recently turned its focus to renewable energy generation and peatland restoration. Climate change mandates from the E.U., based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Special Report on Climate Change and Land (IPCC, 2019), changed how peatlands were viewed by the Irish government. For the first time, peatland restoration became desirable. Since 2021, the largest peatland restoration project in Europe is being conducted by BnM in Ireland. Called the Peatland Climate Action Scheme (PCAS), this project involves rewetting peatlands by blocking the installed drainage ditches. PCAS initially drew criticism from many sectors — private landowners scared of flooding, botany enthusiasts doubtful of native plants’ return, soil specialists skeptical about rebuilding underground biodiversity — not least of which was that the restoration was being driven by the same energy-generating entity, BnM, that caused the destruction in the first place. These concerns have merit. With suspicions of greenwashing naturally applied to all corporate claims for ecological restoration, it still feels like a net positive to push the conversation about restoring peatland biodiversity out into the mainstream media.
Peatland restoration is fundamentally sphagnum moss restoration, as sphagnum mosses are the keystone species and ecosystem engineers of bogs. Bogs are a carbon sink, as decaying organic matter slowly accumulates over time under the sphagnum moss surface. Ironically though, anaerobic soil conditions emit methane, which is a stronger, more problematic greenhouse gas than carbon — by a magnitude of 28. Amazingly, the sphagnum mosses, of which there are 30 species in Ireland, function as a methane filter as well as a carbon sink. The cells of sphagnum mosses contain methanotrophic bacteria, which consume methane being released under anaerobic conditions from the bog. The carpet of sphagnum mosses also contains hundreds of microscopic organisms — amoebae, ciliates, desmids, and flagellates, to name a few — that form the base of the food web. By restoring the hydrology, we enable sphagnum mosses to proliferate, which in turn holds water on the land. Sphagnum mosses hold 20 times their weight in water, and raised bogs are considered 90 percent water by volume. Walking across a raised bog is the closest you can get to walking on water, so long as you do not punch through the sphagnum mat and sink into the depths.
Crane mated pair, photo by James Crombie
Cranes were noticed in numerous counties in Ireland in 2012 and 2014 — some solitary fly-bys and one presumed mated pair. In 2019, a mated pair of cranes built a nest but failed to fledge chicks on a restored peatland owned by BnM. The same happened again in 2020. Then in the fall of 2020, a juvenile was seen in flight with two adult cranes near Dublin, raising the question: Were they Irish-born? In 2021, the pair of cranes known from the restored bog mated again and fledged chicks — the first for Ireland in 300 years. Sources are hazy on the success of those chicks, as there were some mentions of predation and chick mortality. However, in every year since, this pair has nested and raised chicks on this restored peatland. As an ecologist, I cannot help but view their return and success as an emergent property of the restored peatland.
The PCAS originally had an implementation deadline of August 31, 2026, for rewetting peatlands across a total of 81,000 acres at 80 separate sites. BnM has been granted an extension until 2030 to complete the final 20,000 acres. Meanwhile, ecologists are assessing the bogs to ascertain the response of these ecosystems to restored hydrology and birders are hoping to catch a glimpse of the elusive cranes.
The success of the cranes represents an ecological and cultural rebirth for Ireland, returning a member of the extended Irish family to their rightful place on the landscape. The crane chicks stoked an innate Irish pride and made national news. The country rejoiced, even if most people hadn’t known the cranes were missing in the first place. This peatland restoration project is giving back some of what human society took from these ecosystems. The cranes’ return showed that all hope for the more-than-human world was not yet lost, and the Irish remembered how much this mattered to them. I still wonder if it was a crane or heron I saw on the Wexford marsh when I was a child. I’d like to believe it was a crane.
Photo by James Crombie
Nicola McGoff is an ecologist, an outdoor explorer, a mother, and a writer. She is from Ireland by birth and Virginia by tenure. Her writing has been published in Virginia Native Plant Society’s The Declaration and in the anthology Writing the Land: Virginia.
