Baitfish arrival masks worrying signs

Damien Enright hears alarm bells ringing for fish stocks.

ONE dry evening last week, I watched a heron fishing in the shallows as the sun set far up the local bay. The evening was as still as those long-ago evenings in Kensington Gardens and the heron was as still as the prince. Motionless, it waited for a passing fish.

As the sun sank lower, its light spread over the mirror-calm surface and soon engulfed the heron, standing like an angular bronze statue in a stream of gold. I wondered how it wasn’t blinded by the light. However, seconds later, it lowered its head and stood with its neck bunched like a coiled spring. Then, stab! The head plunged into the water and emerged with a sand eel wriggling against the light.

Like a practiced drinker would fire back a drink, it threw back its head and swallowed its victim. Then back to perfect stillness as it waited for another meal.

Meanwhile, in mid channel, terns passed with lazy wing beats patrolling the bay. Spotting small fish, they would pause of a sudden and then dive vertically into the sea. Sprat and sand eel were plentiful that golden evening.

Apparently Broad Strand Bay on the Seven Heads in west Cork was also alive with fish a couple of weeks ago and a school of 12 dolphins spent the day there, hunting and cavorting close inshore, much to the delight of onlookers.

It’s heartening to learn that, along these coasts, the sprat shoals arrived as usual this year. In Scotland and other parts of Britain a shortage of sprat and sand eels is causing nesting guillemots to kill their neighbours’ chicks.

At nesting time, guillemots, normally sociable birds, gather in huge colonies as protection against predatory gulls and skuas that threaten their eggs and chicks. The RSPB suggests birds are killing their neighbours’ chicks so as to reduce competition for limited food sources.

Common guillemots rear only one chick during the breeding season. Usually, one parent stays at a nest when the other is foraging at sea but food shortages have forced both parents to hunt, leaving the nest unattended.

Tim Birkhead of Sheffield University said of the killing: “It is extraordinary behaviour and it really flags up that something monumental is happening out at sea.”

As fish stocks are threatened internationally, an Australian university study has found that the world’s domestic cats are fed nearly 2.5 million tonnes of tinned fish annually. In my view, this is a disgrace.

The European cat food market consumes 870,000 tonnes consisting mainly of anchovies, sardines, pilchards and herrings; the US market 1.1 million tonnes; and Australia imports 34,000 tonnes of fish for cats. Australians feed their cats 13.7kg per head of fish per annum while they consume only 11kg themselves.

As our global marine resources are threatened, high-energy environmentally-expensive protein gives cats the energy to go out and kill millions of wild birds annually. Not to eat them — they’re already fat on sardines. I suppose that if global food resources collapse altogether we can always eat the cats.

Away from the bad news, I find that autumn evenings have a stillness, a sort of ‘holiness’, about them like evenings at no other time of the year. Even in London traffic, at least in leafy parts of London, one can feel it. When I lived there, I often drove across Hyde Park to teaching jobs at six or seven in the evening.

These were the ‘golden’ hours in every sense. As a tutor, it was the time when I was earning the most money because my pupils were home from school and I could cram the most lessons in.

But in spite of my schedule, I’d try to stop for a minute as I drove across Kensington Gardens from Bayswater to Knightsbridge. I’d open the window and drink in the stillness that seemed to fall over everything as the sun yellowed and mist gathered under the trees. The sunset touched the pavilion where the statue of Prince Albert sat and he seemed gilded by the dying rays. Ah yes, a special time indeed.