'Everybody is listening to birdsong, which is incredible'

THEN: In 2017, Irish Country Living met Mary Bermingham, who came to Kinvara, Co Galway, on holidays 30 years previously with just a pair of jeans - and never left. She shared her story of how she turned a small organic suckler farm into the award-winning Burren Nature Sanctuary, featuring attractions such as trails highlighting the unique habitat of the Burren, nature-themed playgrounds, a 'Botany Bubble' showcasing the region’s unique flora and fauna and a café serving locally-sourced treats.

NOW: Mary made the difficult decision to close the Burren Nature Sanctuary on 7 March, after early cases of COVID-19 were identified in the community.

Biodiversity

Up until then, she and her team had been looking forward to a busy spring and summer. They would have been expecting up to 2,000 children to pass through their gates on school tours, not to mention all their other visitors, ranging from family day trippers to third-level students coming to study the biodiversity of the Burren.

Naturally, this has been both a personal and financial blow to the business, which employs five full-time staff and up to 15 part-timers in summer.

“The main thing is that our summer would pay for our previous winter,” says Mary.

“We stayed open all year and we’re only open for seven years now, so we’re still a young business. So now we don’t have those summer months to pay for last winter.”

To try to keep some sort of cashflow, Mary developed her online gift shop and also offered animal adoptions, where people pay a certain amount to 'adopt' one of the sanctuary’s resident animals and receive a family pass to visit at a later date.

However, right now the focus is on getting the gates open again for 1 July. Running a tourist attraction while adhering to social distancing guidelines means looking at logistics, such as coming up with safe queuing protocols, contactless payment options and one-way routes on the site itself, while also re-inventing their offering.

For example, instead of animal handling, they are going to trial safe and sanitised feeding stations and they will also cut back their extensive café menu to a pizza menu instead.

In spite of the stress of re-opening, there are positive things to look forward to post-lockdown. A planned partnership with the National Botanic Gardens to help develop the national seed bank is still due to go ahead.

Moreover, the time out during lockdown gave Mary the opportunity to launch a podcast called Nature Magic, which has featured many high-profile interviewees, including garden designer Mary Reynolds, Green Party leader Eamon Ryan and eco-tourism pioneer Costas Christ.

What it is is just talking about how people became nature lovers, and what can they suggest for people to do to help nature

“Really what it is is just talking about how people became nature lovers, and what can they suggest for people to do to help nature,” says Mary, adding that episodes are released each Monday and are available to listen to on iTunes and other podcast platforms.

The other initiative has been to write a book, also called Nature Magic, inspired by “all the ways we engage people in nature”, which is due to be released on Kindle on 28 July.

And if there is any silver lining to have come from the COVID-19 crisis, Mary believes that it has allowed people to reconnect with nature in a deeper way.

“The one theme that is kind of wonderful about COVID is that everybody is listening to birdsong,” she says, “which is incredible.”

For further information, visit www.burrennaturesanctuary.ie.

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