A walk on the wildside
FROM OUT OF THE PAST
Recently a friend loaned me a few copies of some old wildlife magazines and what treasures they proved to be, stories of the old gamekeepers and fishing ghillies and of a way of life that has now almost disappeared.
Looking through the letter pages of one of the magazines, I was interested to come across a query from a reader, who was enquiring about how rare black rabbits were. The editors reply was to assure the reader that black rabbits were not such a rarity and indeed anyone who has spent time in the countryside would agree with him, even as recently as last September I saw one grazing quiet contentedly in the Western Field near the Old Wood at Knockananig. There was a certain amount of superstition about black rabbits and some people felt that they were better left alone, in some parts of rural England, strangely they were for some reason called parsons.
Another article in one of the magazines was a very balanced story about a species of bird which even then was the subject of much controversy, the cormorant. The writer gave a wonderful description of a wood overlooking a river, which was a roost for cormorants and I quote some of his article here.; The treetops were merging darkly in the sullen sky, when a grand fleet of over sixty cormorants, like black witches, swooped in to rest for the night.; I wish I could write like that. The writer goes on to describe the ways of these sinister looking birds, a mature cormorant weighs over eight pounds and has a wingspan of four foot six inches. It is estimated that a single cormorant can eat between seven and ten pounds of fish every day. One cormorant that the writer shot had a three pound pike in its throat. They are far-ranging birds and a cormorant can in the same day catch eels and trout in the Upper Blackwater and thirty miles downriver catch flatfish in Youghal Bay.
In 1945, a survey carried out by the British Freshwater Biological Association revealed that cormorants seek fish deeper underwater than any other winged predator. While carrying out a survey on Lake Windermere, they were conducting netting operations when they found a cormorant caught in a gill net at a depth of 43 feet. They have a voracious appetite and sometimes cram themselves so full of fish that they can hardly take off to fly. Some years ago while working near the Old Water Works in Glenseskin Wood in Kilworth, I saw a cormorant which had been fishing in the River Douglas after a heavy flood. It was absolutely stuffed up with fish, so much so that it could not take flight, it ran along the forestry road in front of me, finally disgorging a half-pound trout.
Despite being marked by the birds vicious curved beak the trout was still alive. Cormorants now seem to have adapted themselves to inland waters, records kept by Miss Marjorie Garrett, a leading authority on the birds of Lake Windermere reveal that it was only in the early 1900s that they first began to appear in numbers on the Lake. These birds can hardly be described as the fisherman’s friend, but in a piece about them by a writer called R.D. Humber, in the same magazine, he describes how one was found to have four yards of fishing nylon hanging from its beak, two large treble hooks were attached to the nylon, one hook was embedded in the birds throat, the second was in its stomach, no creature deserves to die in that manner.
On the bank of the River Blackwater, upstream from Cregg there is a wood which similar to the one described earlier provides a roost for cormorants. Before they go to roost in the evenings they cackle to each other loudly, probably like all fishermen, bragging about the days catch and where the best spots are. Back in the mid-1950s, the late Betty Lucas, whose land the wood was on established it as a game reserve, hoping to protect the ducks and pheasants, but it was the wily cormorants who realised that this could be a sanctuary for them.
They are now well established there and are a protected species; they can be seen now every day on the little spit of gravel below Fermoy Bridge drying their wings. One of the best descriptions of them can be heard in Synge’s play, Riders to the Sea in which Cathleen mourns for the little boy who is drowned at sea; Ah, Norah, isn’t it a bitter thing now to think of him floating that way to the far north and no one to keep him but the black hags that do be flying on the sea. The Irish name for a cormorant is Broigheall, but they are very well described, as by Synge, as being black hags.