NATURE Angler and bird vie, but climate rules

REEL’S RIVAL The storms have driven more cormorants inland to fish for trout, and taken a deadly toll on auk, puffin, gannet, guillemot and razorbill.?Pic: Flickr.com/Joachim S Müller

Angler and bird vie, but climate rules


Country Sights and Sounds
John Shelley

Opening day 2014. I went for my trout, alone. Other anglers had been there for hours, even since daybreak, sitting in the cold with wintery showers breaking the monotony of a mostly fishless day. I stopped at my favourite bay, only to find it occupied. One man had a trout, a long, eel-like fish with gaunt features and a blackish belly, scarcely thicker than the worm it had been caught on. There can be no advantage in killing such a poor specimen.
Five cormorants flew low over the water in a ragged flock, moving from left to right before coming down a short distance from the shoreline. They, too, were there for the trout. How many would they take? Two or three each for every day they stay, and more besides. And if there were five in front of me there were surely another five around every corner, all the way from Cloon to Clonbur, and every one of them stuffing its gullet with the finest of fish: our fish. My fish.
These often unwelcome birds visit every year. The numbers of them vary – this year there are more, likely on account of the storms, which must have made living along the coastline most uncomfortable. As long as they find good feeding they will stay on the lake, although longer days will send the majority back to their rocky nesting places. I looked for lost feathers; a cormorant feather should make a fine fly.
An hour of angling brought no reward. I ate my sandwich hunched against a tree, searched fruitlessly for signs of gold along a vein of quartz and threw stones at a stick while dusk drew a gradual darkness over the water. If I had an hour a day to angle I would choose dawn; if not dawn then dusk, into the gloaming, for either end of the day gets fish on the feed.
How can it be that an angler knows when a fish will bite? As if in response to a telepathic signal the line pulled tight and the tip of the rod pulled gently down. I held the line between thumb and forefinger – yes, there it was again, that unmistakeable tap-tap that told me a fish had found the bait. A minute later it was lying on the grassy bank with cold earth and and wet winter leaves clinging to its sides, not as long nor as lank as the one I saw earlier but hardly in its prime either.
So that was it, then, mission accomplished. A trout to take home on the first day of the season. I can leave the lake alone now, at least until the middle of March.
The following day we went to look at our storm-ravaged coast, where there are no cormorants. A friend described the worst of the gales in a word. ‘Ferocious.’
‘The noise must have been terrific.’
‘Ferocious.’
I had imagined how fine it would have been to witness such a tempest as could scatter football-sized stones a hundred metres and more inland, that could tear slabs of land from the shore and batter and smash rocky promontories beyond recognition. And then, standing amid the resulting desolation I realised how foolish a notion I had entertained. Our small corner of the lake had been protected by trees. The noise of the wind had even lulled us to sleep while our friends had to endure a furious night.
There were heavy casualties among the seabird population. While the cormorants had gone to fish the lakes and the gulls found shelter inland, guillemot and razorbill had little option but to battle it out on the waves. Many perished, hundreds perhaps. We found their corpses at Carrowniskey and Doughmakeon, some on the shore and more beyond the broken dunes along with little auk, puffin, gannet and more.
For more than a decade we have dismissed the warnings of climatologists and continued on our way regardless. Now they tell us we should expect more of the same or maybe even something else – nobody really knows and we shall have to wait and see. World weather patterns do appear to be shifting considerably and there is little we can do about it, for we are locked into a system from which we cannot easily escape.
The velvet calls of a woodpigeon pair are reassuring. They carry sticks for each other and do their comical best to fashion a nest in the ivy. The morning sun fires the pink of their breast and sets my mind once more to Mask.