Mall mallard presents one of Dingle’s rarest sights
THE mallard duck pictured here is a common enough kind of bird. They can be seen in Dingle and Ventry harbours and in rivers and lakes all over the country. But what makes this duck special is that she seems to have taken up residence in the Mall River in Dingle and nobody can remember when the likes of that ever happened before.
When it comes to ducks, the Mall River is best known for the plastic variety that simply go with the flow in occasional fundraising events. This mallard, however, is a bird of a different feather and she has been spotted recently foraging among the weeds and discarded chip cartons, keeping a wary eye on anybody who stops to admire her.
There is general agreement on two points in relation to this duck. The first is that she probably isn’t the first wild duck to paddle the Mall River; the second is that nobody alive – at least nobody we could find – has ever actually seen a wild duck on the Mall River.
John Ashe reckons there must have been ducks on the Mall River at some time or other, but although the river flows past his front door he admits he’s never seen one. Dan Sheehy agrees with John on the possibility of ducks, but although he grew up beside the river as well, he never saw a duck that wasn’t plastic there either.
Sean Moran, who grew up at the bottom of John Street, only a stone’s throw from the river, says he never saw or heard of a wild duck in the Mall River but he remembers in perfect detail how it was a well used thoroughfare for domestic ducks and geese in his youth back in the 1930s and ’40s.
Sean’s family kept ducks in their backyard ( just below Doyle’s restaurant) and, in the morning, they would march out the front door and into the river by way of the steps beside what is now the Droichead Beag pub. Further up John Street, Patsy McLoughlin had a flock of 20 geese and these too would head for the river in the morning.
The ducks and geese were well fed on the grains of outs and barley left over from Houlihan’s threshing machine, which operated near the back of the Phoenix Cinema, and the adventurous geese were often to be seen paddling serenely in the harbour water behind The Tracks.
In the evenings, as the geese returned home via the Mall River, Seán and a cohort of youngsters would chase them up John Street, just to admire how they would take flight in perfect unison and touch down again - always at the same spot - at the top of the steep slope that divides upper and lower John Street.
Hopefully the duck now gracing the Mall River with her presence will be treated with the same kind of admiration and she will manage to thrive in an area where, as one local wit commented: there’s plenty of wild birds in high heels.