Bird brain scheme aims to expand foul species
The mind boggles.
At a time when our health service is imposing cutbacks which strike hardest against the most vulnerable sections of humans the Government spent that much (borrowed) money on a scheme which increased the corncrake population of Ireland by just one hoarse male corncrake. There now is an expensive bird. The mind boggles again.
I would not open my mouth on this subject had it not been for the fact the money was spent by the Department of Arts and Heritage, the wing of State responsible for the encouragement of sweet music and beauty. They, above any other agency, should know that one of the most beautiful improvements in our aural landscale over the past quarter-century has been the virtual disappearance of bloody corncrakes. Their voices sound like a hybrid of Tom Waites and a rusty saw.
They are an aural abomination. I pity the people of West Connacht and Donegal and the Shannon Callows who still have to listen to their harsh discordancy, especially in the dead of night.
At a time when a good sleep after a hard day is about the only luxury we can afford the last thing in the world we need is more corncrakes.
Especially half-million euro corncrakes! One of the wastards almost blinded me when I was about 10 years old and trying to grow up amongst thousands of them in the meadows around home.
If you were walking in the meadows then you would almost trip over them.
When they flushed up from just in front of your sandal they invariably bombed you with a squirt of white dung, hot as quicklime, and this boyo got me full in the face. He was probably the same sonofabitch that kept me awake half the night with his unending harsh crek-crek. It was awful at 10 to have to go abed in the broad daylight of high summer listening to the fearful din of two or three corncrakes. The old people used say that corncrakes were ventriloquists, they could throw their voices hither and thither at will. Voices like those should have been thrown away altogether and nobody should know that better than the Department of Arts. Shame on them.
In my view one of the positive consequences of farmers beginning to forsake haymaking for silage was the fact the machines went into the meadows earlier and disrupted the corncrakes’ breeding habitat. The farmers got superior fodder for stock and their families were able to sleep at night. The dreadful nocturnal sounds ceased for the overwhelming majority of us. The corncrake was dispatched to the bogs and remote islands and swampy reachers of the Shannon. Thank God for that. We can very well do without them. If they disappeared altogether here is one who would not complain.
And on the same discordant frequency the Department of Arts and Heritage could spend their funds far more effectively by launching a national cull against the owners of the second most annoying voices of Birdland. The whole country is now overun by a huge population of magpies. Not alone do they sound like machine-gunners on a spree, they are also predators who rob the eggs from the nests of countless thousands of songbirds who really know how to delight us at dawn and through the day.
Forget about the corncrakes, I say, thin out the magpie population, and introduce a few thousand more larks. All of that would probably cost less than one additional bloody corncrake!
