Donal Hickey: Delight at rare sight of gudgeon

Little fish with a French name turns up on riverbank

Every angler remembers the day they caught their first trout. But not many can tell when they hooked their first gudgeon: chances are they never landed this little fish with the French name.

It’s only natural then there should be delight at the sighting of a species not seen that often in our rivers in a half-century. Maybe the presence of gudgeon is the result of conservation work in recent years.

IRD Duhallow, which is engaged in conservation projects in north Cork, says there was ‘unexpected excitement’, when a gudgeon — only the size of a chicken goujon or about as long as your finger  — turned up during a farmers’ day on the riverbank.

The farmers were participating in the RaptorLIFE project when they got to try their hand at fly casting, as well as meeting some of the inhabitants of their local river. Because of the gudgeon’s size and the fact it largely lives in the sandy beds of fast-flowing rivers, it is generally ignored by anglers. We remember, long ago, catching eels and little long-tailed fellows we called ‘collies’, but never saw gudgeons.

The fish we’re now talking about was recorded in the Allow River. A non-native species, gudgeon is thought to have been introduced to Ireland sometime after the 12th century. Much of what’s known about gudgeon comes from research on fish caught in the Allow and Blackwater catchments, in 1971. But the species has gone largely undetected in the Allow since then.

Hence the excitement as the distribution of this fish is not widely recorded in Ireland. Other species recorded on the farmers’ day included Atlantic salmon, brown trout, brook lamprey, and the critically endangered European eel Silvery gudgeon feed on a variety of insects, larvae, and algae. The species is not fished commercially or for sport in Ireland, however, in Victorian and Edwardian times it was fashionable to fish for and fry gudgeon in breadcrumbs in the famous dish, Gudgeon Tansy. Francophiles tell us the word ‘goujon’ is derived from the French name for the fish.

Some landowners on the Araglin and Blackwater, in Co Cork, have voluntarily fenced their sections of the rivers to exclude livestock so as to improve water quality, restore vegetation, and stabilise river banks.

Andrew Gillespie, of Inland Fisheries Ireland, gave excellent insights to farmers into life on the rivers. Through learning and knowledge exchange, the idea is farmers will build a keener appreciation of river environments, take ownership of river protection in their areas, and encourage others to do likewise. IRD Duhallow RaptorLIFE has fenced off 29km of river in the upper reaches of the Blackwater Special Area for Conservation to create cleaner rivers for fish.