Rudd is making a comeback

I WENT fishing the other day. Fly fishing for trout in a small stocked lake. The day was hot, there was no breeze and the sun blazed down on a lake that looked as though it was filled with molten lead. These are not good conditions for catching trout.

I thought of giving up even before I’d started. Then I noticed some activity in a shallow part of the lake. Fish were swirling around and I thought that some of them might be taking very small flies on the surface. I opened my fly box and picked out a dry fly that was so small it took me 15 minutes to thread it on to the line.

When I cast it out the results were instantaneous. Something rose but I failed to hook it. For the next 20 minutes the same thing happened on practically every cast. There are days like this. Dry fly fishing has a lot to do with reflexes and there are times when human reflexes seem to get it wrong every time.

Eventually when the take came I deliberately waited for a couple of seconds before tightening the line. It worked but the result was slightly unexpected. I landed a rudd about the size of the palm of my hand. I hadn’t even known there were rudd in the lake.

But it was quite a nice consolation prize so I went on to catch and release four more. I like rudd. They were a lot commoner when I was young and I used to enjoy fishing for them. The reason they became scarce (although there are signs they have made a bit of a comeback) is competition with roach. Roach were introduced into Ireland in the 1870s by an English pike angler who brought them over with him to use as live-bait. But for a long time they were more or less confined to the Munster Blackwater. In the 1970s they started to spread and there was a 32-county population explosion.

Rudd are very similar fish to roach. They occupy almost the same ecological niche and the roach out-competed them.Roach like to forage on the bottom and rudd prefer surface feeding. The most reliable way of telling them apart, because they also look very alike, is that in the bottom feeding roach the upper lip protrudes over the lower one, while it’s the other way round in rudd.

Unfortunately this distinction is blurred by the fact that the two species can inter-breed and produce fertile off-spring. When the roach population exploded they didn’t only out-compete the rudd, they also out-bred them.

I still think the rudd is a more elegant fish and I hope that it does increase in numbers now the roach population is more stable.

FORGET-ME-NOT (Myosotis arvensis)

There are several native species of forget-me-not and some varieties in cultivation but the commonest one is the field forget-me-not. It’s an annual plant with hairy grey-green stems and leaves. The leaves are elliptical — the botanical name of the genus is Myosotis from the Greek ‘mouse-eared’, a reference to the shape of the leaves.

At this time of year it produces clusters of small, five-petalled, grey-blue flowers with a pale centre. The name comes to us from the French ‘ne m’oubliez pas’ and there are similar names in many European languages.

Why the plant is associated with memory is not clear. The field forget-me-not is widespread and common on reasonably well-drained soils throughout Ireland.

It grows in fields, road verges and sand dunes and can become a garden weed. It’s a member of the borage family.