Dishing out the fish, it’s just delish

THE bounty of the mackerel arrived off the coast this summer, as every summer, and were shoaling in the bay during the Women’s Angling Competition at the Courtmacsherry Festival last week.

Off the Seven Heads, the women hauled them in, and one woman kindly phoned us to say there would be mackerel for the taking on the pier at 8.30pm. After the days of relentless rain, it was great to have had a lovely evening for the competition. Thirty-five ladies took part. The largest individual catch was 56lbs of fish.

We were not the only plastic-bag bearers waiting as the boats pulled in. It must have been some small compensation for holidaymakers, having suffered sunlight-deprivation and deluge-disappointment for days, to be able to carry a dozen fresh, shining mackerel home to the holiday accommodation and have the weather to barbecue them outdoors that very evening. We took 20 fish for our current family of 10. Barbecued mackerel is a treat. The grandchildren, now no longer children, look forward to it when they arrive from the English Home Counties. You don’t get fish like that there, with their bright eyes and firm bodies straight from the ocean, and the salty taste of the sea.

We’ve discovered that the smoke of embers from natural wood doubles the already delicious flavour of the fish. For mackerel, beech embers are perfect, although not for salmon, because the smoky flavour is too strong.

It has always been beyond me why it is not permissible for an enterprising person to set up a small barbecue on a pier and serve holidays makers a single mackerel with a plastic fork on a paper plate at a euro a throw. One sees this at all the ports in Morocco, in the Middle and Far East. I’m told that here Health and Safety legislation will not allow it. What a pity.! A few bob could be earned, and the holidaymakers’ seaside experience enhanced. I imagine periwinkle stalls have disappeared for the same reason. Boiled periwinkles in a cone of brown paper were a feature of my childhood visits to Ballybunion, Youghal, and Tramore.

Meanwhile, a son’s friend told me a fascinating tale of a drama he’d witnessed on the pier last April. When he told me “a group of hawks” arrived, I feared he was indulging in a flight of fancy: he made it sound as everyday as a flock of sparrows. Hawks rarely travel in groups, except on migration. Kestrels hover alone; sparrowhawks rocket through forest glades like solitary reapers; peregrines are most often seen as a lone spec in the sky. But, no, he insisted, a group of four suddenly arrived at the pier, pursued by clouds of screaming gulls, clanging jackdaws and cawing rooks.

They circled, despite the harassment, stocky, brownish birds, with broad-based, pointed wings. Then, a wood-pigeon flew out of a tree on the village street, heading out over the bay. And, now, the picture immediately fell into place. One hawk spotted it and flew fast and straight as an arrow in pursuit, striking it in mid air as the others followed close behind. The unfortunate pigeon exploded into a cloud of feathers – a “fright moult”, so called – and was then carried for a hundred yards or so until it was dropped into the sea where it struggled to swim for a moment before sinking. All the time, the other three hawks had kept close company with the killer, despite the tumult of outraged birds all around.

It was, clearly, a family of peregrines, and the parents were teaching their offspring how to hunt. The family was apparently well fed; they didn’t need the food source in this case. I have heard of similar behaviour, of an adult peregrine catching, and repeatedly releasing, a pigeon, and then giving a fledgling an opportunity to try its skill at recapturing the somewhat disorientated bird.

The fledgling would fail. As the pigeon winged desperately for freedom, the adult would again descend upon it at perhaps 100 miles per hour and snatch it in the air, to carry it a distance and release it again.

Nature is immensely cruel. But, at least, unlike the cat playing with the mouse, this was a tutorial. Killing is the peregrine’s sustenance and trade. It does not have a dish of high-protein KittyBitz to resort to.