I’VE SPENT THE last few years meeting people quietly doing brilliant things for Irish biodiversity, but few of them take as hands-on an approach to saving nature as Pearse Stokes.

Pearse is rescue coordinator with Kildare Wildlife Rescue (KWR), where he trains Wildlife First Responders and takes on the rescues that are too high, too fast, too wet or too awkward for anyone else.

He has been rescuing wildlife for over a decade, was one of KWR’s founders, and once worked as an anti-poaching ranger in South Africa. Recently he won the Science Communication & Public Engagement category at the Working with Nature Awards at Powerscourt Estate, for his social media videos that show how rescues are done safely and what wildlife faces every day.

Pearse rescuing a duckling in Dublin City Centre. Pearse Stokes Pearse Stokes

KWR deserves a story of its own, and I’ll be writing it separately soon. There are many amazing people running the organisation fuelled by pure passion for Irish animals. Pearse is just one of those individuals. And he has quite a story: how he ended up on a roof with a yellow umbrella, what the work is really like, and what he wants every one of us to know.

From the boxing ring to a Dublin rooftop

Most people I interview on this subject are like me: grew up with a love for nature, watching nature documentaries and searching for bugs in the garden. This was the first time that the person I was talking to wasn’t nature obsessed from the start.

Pearse didn’t grow up wanting to save wildlife. He came to it, by his own telling, from martial arts and combat sports, and what he calls a very adversarial view of the world. Then, roughly 15 years ago, he spotted a request on social media about a fox in south Dublin that needed help.

He saw a chance to impress a girl. “Do you want to go on a date?” he asked her. “We can go rescue a fox.” This is how he discovered catching a fox is far from straightforward.

After some advice from a man in Kildare and an hours-long, patient stint coaxing the fox into a carrier borrowed from a local dog walker, they drove it down that evening. The man in Kildare was Dan Donoher, now KWR’s manager, and Pearse remembers how calmly and easily he handled the animal. He remembers thinking “I’m a fighter, but this guy is genuinely tough!”

A week or two later, Dan rang about a herring gull chick that had fallen into a back garden near Croke Park. Dan had said that unless Pearse could get the gull back in the nest, he’d have to drive it all the way to Kildare. Determined, Pearse put the chick in a shoebox, the shoebox in a backpack, grabbed a yellow umbrella to ward off swooping parents, and climbed a wall, a ladder and three roofs, gripping the tiles with his fingernails.

Below him, the neighbours gathered to watch “this lunatic with the umbrella”. While he got the chick back in the nest, the parents and what he calls the aunties and uncle gulls circled in protest. He had never given a gull a second thought.

They’re now some of his favourite animals.

But it was what he felt holding that tiny chick that stuck. “Our world is so hostile to it,” he told me, and when you’re the only person who can help, “you start to realise that there is very, very little help out there for wildlife, and that seemed like a great injustice to me.”

Pearse catches a fox in need of help in Dublin 8. Pearse Stokes........

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