Wildlife is something children look at on television

I SPENT a good bit of last week taking groups of school kids for nature walks along the River Barrow.

We used a mini-bus to visit a lovely place called Milford in Co Carlow.

There is a weir at Milford and below it the river is split into three channels.

The eastern channel is a mill race which was driving a small hydro-electric turbine which is privately-owned and feeds power into the national grid.

In the late 19th century Irish engineers and physicists did some pioneering work on practical ways of generating electricity. As a result in 1891 Carlow became the first town in Britain or Ireland to have electric street lighting. The power came from the predecessor of the current turbine, operating in the same mill house.

The western channel is what is called a lateral canal. It’s an artificial cut that allows boats to bypass a shallow and rocky section of the river and it ends in a lock. In between these two channels the river runs its original course in a sweeping bend.

One of the things that makes Milford a good spot for the sort of work I was doing is that it has a remarkably variety of different tree species.

At this time of year there’s also a good show of wild flowers and a wide range of fern species. There’s a lot of old masonry in the area — bridges, walls and the mill buildings — and, for some reason, I’ve always had a particular interest in the plants that grow on old walls.

Of course, there are birds and animals too but groups of school kids tend to intimidate them a bit. We did see water-hens and swans and a heron and we kept hoping to spot one of the kingfishers that I know nest in the area.

School kids love being taken out of school, which makes this kind of exercise a winner from the word go. But most of them did show a genuine interest in wildlife and environmental matters. Quizzing them a bit more deeply I found that in many cases wildlife was something they looked at on television — an indoor rather that an outdoor activity.

A notable exception was two boys who were keen anglers. They got outdoors a lot and had a very impressive knowledge of the wildlife along the river. So we started to talk about fish and I asked them what species were to be found in the Barrow.

Their answers were accurate and they even knew what parts of the river and canal were likely to hold the different species. They were a bit vague about salmon. They thought they might exist but they’d never seen one.

THIS WAS also good observation. There still is a small run of salmon in the Barrow and the weirs have fish passes. But these days few if any fish make it as far upstream as Milford.

Then one of them surprised me by adding: “Oh, and there’s gudgeon.”

Gudgeon are little fish given to skulking on the bottom of rivers and canals and rather patchily distributed in Ireland. Very few people even know they exist.

They’re a silvery colour with darker blotches and spots on the tail. The head is wedge-shaped with a flat chin for hugging the bottom and a barbel at each corner of the mouth. They really are small, a maximum length of 15 centimetres and, though there doesn’t appear to be an Irish rod-caught record for gudgeon the British one, for a fish caught in Wales, is a massive 120 grams.

Although they are small they’re said to be good to eat. In Victorian times young ladies and gentlemen used to go on gudgeon picnics, catching the fish on delicate tackle and frying them on the river bank.

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