From shooting teal to shooting stars

TEAL are such pretty little ducks — hardly as big as a wood pigeon — it’s sad to think of them stuffed inside a widgeon which is stuffed inside a mallard which is stuffed inside a goose, and the lot then put in the oven and roasted.

That was a Victorian sportsman’s recipe. There was game in plenty then — indeed I’m sure it was possible for a shooting party to ‘bag’ all the ingredients in a day’s shoot in Ireland or Britain as recently as the 1950s.

In India, at Bharatpur in Rajasthan, I recall seeing a series of white marble plaques recording the great ‘bags’ of the era. Lord Linlithgow, then Viceroy of India, downed 4,273 birds in a day on November 12, 1938, and holds the dubious distinction of the world record for shooting duck.

Happily, even such massive ‘extractions’ little dented the vast stocks of wild birds at Bharathpur. They are still there in their millions, and today the 29 sq km park, donated to the nation by the Maharajah of Bharathpur — a shooting man himself — protects 375 species. I visited the park in 1976 and 1999. Birds of prey, having fed, roosted amongst the water birds, their prey species, who seemed unconcerned until the raptor launched itself in search of another meal.

While it might be said that it is cruel to shoot birds, shooters do their best to make a clean kill and send dogs or beaters to catch a wounded bird which will then be dispatched quickly. A bird disembowelled by a hawk, falcon or eagle suffers no less cruelly.

In October, 1998, I wrote, “The moon is full these nights, and rides a clear sky. We can see Jupiter and its three moons through the telescope. Our Japanese visitors gasp upon seeing close-ups of the landscapes of the moon. They do not see any rabbits there — Japanese folk tales say the moon is the home of rabbits. A silly idea — but then, they are amazed when I point out the Man in the Moon, the eyes, the overhanging eyebrows, the bridge of the nose, the laconic mouth. In the future, every time they see the moon they will see the man, not the rabbits.”

Jupiter is still there in the night sky, a symbol of continuity to comfort our world in flux. Last week I again saw it through the telescope, four, not three, moons twirling about it like gyroscopes. It’s not a case of another moon having been born, but rather that their mother planet was closer to us than usual and so the four Galilean moons could be seen.

Each was named for a lover of the god Zeus — Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto — by Galileo Galilei who first found them in January 1610. What romantic names and how amazing that he should have perfected a telescope that could see as well mine so long ago.

Anyway, back here on earth I recently counted, as near as one could count, 3,000 duck bobbing on the waters of a west Cork bay, rafts and flotillas of duck, teal, widgeon, mallard, shelduck and a few mergansers. And there were swans, two pure white adults and a string of cygnets swimming behind them, all in a perfect line, gliding, as if on a conveyor belt, across the surface. A pal of mine — a shooting man, as it turns out — compared them to a train with carriages.

Later, as I returned from my walk, the tide had drawn back at the bay margins and swans and teal were busy gulping down leaves of sea-lettuce, the green weed which now plagues many Irish estuaries. It is heartening to see it put to some use.

Were it possible to collect this crop, which now grows in its thousands of tons every summer, what a bounty of nitrate-enriched fertiliser it would make.