Why I reel at the demise of the eel

WE call the little stream that runs alongside our garden Abhainn Éasca because one day, some years ago, I turned over a stone and found a twelve-inch long black eel.

It swam away, leisurely, drifting down with the current. Eel River, we decided was a good name for a nameless rivulet, a meandering brook in summer, a gurgling freshet.

This morning, I passed its mouth, issuing into the sea three hundred yards below the house, and stopped to see if there were any elvers under the rocks there. I remembered my childhood passion for small rivers running across sandy shores. Back then, lifting flat rocks, I was certain to come across dozens of bootlace eels, as we called them, and small dabs dashing away from my footfalls. If the stream ran down from a lake, one might find sticklebacks higher up, in the dark boggy waters, under the banks. The males were gorgeous in the breeding season, bright reds and blues, almost as bright as aquarium neon tetras – and there they were, in an Irish stream.

I found no bootlace eels in Abhainn Éasca mouth this morning. I wonder if they still come in from the sea. Anyone who, as a child, enjoyed seaside holidays in the 50s, 60s, 70s or 80s, or before, and explored the shoreline streams, will remember them. But the European eel is now in almost terminal decline, listed as critically endangered. The number of elvers entering some rivers is down by 99% since the 1980s. This familiar creature is only one step away from extinction in the wild.

Meanwhile, out in the channel, great northern divers were back again, as always at this time of year, and my hands were once again frozen stiff on the binoculars as I watched them in a cold wind in the bright winter sun. Behind me, a grey crow was having a mighty struggle with a mussel shell, pecking at it on the sand, then carrying it 30 feet aloft and dropping it, hoping it would land on a rock and crack open. It wasn’t a very accurate bombardier it seemed, because it was forced to do it again and again before it finally succeeded and gulped down the mussel. One would have thought it would have dropped it on the nearby tarred road, but it didn’t. Perhaps it was honing its bombardier skills.

Out on a sandbank, seven cormorants stood in a line; they looked like black-suited waiters with their hands behind their backs, waiting for the diners to arrive. I rounded the corner and, suddenly, there was no wind, just warm sun. However a squall blew in, rain pelted down and I was sent running for the shelter of some bushes and leafless trees.

I crouched under them, listening to the rain peppering my jacket like buckshot. The bay turned grey, reflecting the cloud-laden sky. After 10 minutes, I lost patience and opted to tramp off into the teeth of the wind and rain, even though I’d be drenched by the time I reached home. But, hold on... The vestiges of a rainbow appeared over the water, and suddenly the fields across the bay were swept with bright sunlight and, then, a magnificent rainbow arched, in full colour, from east to west, and I had something to divert me as I waited for the sunlight to arrive at where I stood. And, a few minutes later, it did.

So, it was a 10 minute interlude between the games the weather plays with us. We are the playthings of the weather, the sport of the rain clouds that send us scurrying for shelter, of the snow clouds that blanket the fields and cities in white, of the blue skies that bless or burn the land.

Our fate is in the clouds or in the lack of them and, these days, our global future depends upon the sensible rulings of the cognoscenti at climate conferences such as that presently in train at Copenhagen. We must cut our carbon emissions and their destruction of the atmosphere. We must accept this. It is not too late.