Why our only native Irish cherry, is of vital environmental importance
Channel: Zwartbles Ireland Suzanna Crampton
Date: 2022-06-09

Bird cherry trees are often ignored in hedgerow plantings or heavily sprayed with insecticide. This, due to what seems to be a leaf stripping, infestation of caterpillars. The Bird cherry moth a small white moth with black spots and its larva caterpillar are a vital biodiversity link between the bird cherry and bat weanlings. The timings have been worked out naturally through thousands of years. They have developed so that each is interdependent on the other in a unique way. Bird cherry trees have developed over many multiple generations to regrow their leaves after they have been stripped by this tiny caterpillar of the bird cherry moth. When the caterpillars pupate in their webbed nests they stay protected from predation. When they emerge as tiny moths they are a feast for all bats, particularly newly weaned young who swarm around the bird cherry tree for their fill of an easy to catch high protein food. While bats feed on this explosion of emerging moths, they also shit their very rich fecal matter around the trees base. This gives the tree extra nutrient rich food to grow their second crop of leaves. This also helps them to fatten their cherries into nutrient rich fruit which birds love. Hence they are called bird cherry trees as the fruit is not palatable to humans.

Bird cherry moth a small white moth with black spots who's main food source is the native Irish bird cherry tree. They can eat other foliage but the bird cherry tree has developed to regenerate its leaves.


Zwartbles Ireland is a small company run from a farm in County Kilkenny in Ireland. We are a regenerative farm which means restoring soils health and regenerating its natural carbon and nutrient cycle with biodiversity of pasture sward with grasses, legumes, forbs and herbs. This also means we farm with nature. Healthy soils are important for healthy environment. So we encourage all life from the microbial to dung beetles, ants, pollinators to flora biodiversity, birds, hare, hedgehogs, rabbits, fox, badger as well as our livestock. This mean we farm in a style of mob grazing and giving fields long rest times between grazings. We have seen a huge increase and return of wildlife including woodcock and snipe in winter months foraging for dung beetle larvae, red squirrel, wood peckers and pine martens. We also have the rare natter bat and previously thought extinct Tawny Mining bees.
We sell, Zwartbles sheep, Zwartbles blankets and yarn made from the sheep, and calendars featuring Inca the World's Smallest Sheepdog and her coworkers. We also sell alpaca yarn spun for our own alpaca. Our yarns are 100 percent natural, grown by our sheep which grazing our small green Irish fields. This wool is naturally sequestered carbon which you can then knit into warm environmental friendly clothing.