Getting Warner’s syndrome while fishing on holiday

I RECENTLY went on a short holiday to Croatia, the first time I’ve visited this rather wonderful country, writes Dick Warner.

Late one afternoon I booked into a country hotel on the banks of the River Gacka (this is pronounced “gatchka”, There seems to be a very loose relationship between spelling and pronunciation in the Croatian language.) I was in karst limestone country — a bit like the Burren with trees — and most of the Gacka flows underground. However, here it was behaving like a normal river and its crystal clear limestone water has a reputation for providing some of the best trout fishing in Europe, which was what had brought me to this rather obscure part of the country.

The hotel had obviously started life as a large water mill and stood at the confluence of the Gacka and a small tributary. I went to check things out as soon as I had dumped my luggage in the room. A pair of pied wagtails were nesting in a sluice house and a dipper whirred away up the tributary. In the main river a group of dab-chicks were busily diving after food. I went for a short walk and heard two birds making very strange sounds but, however hard I tried, I couldn’t spot them.

Later, with the help of audio recordings on the internet, I confirmed they were green woodpeckers. I’ve never been very good at identifying birdcalls but these internet recordings are brilliant.

The next day I went fishing and caught nothing, though my son got two very nice trout. There has to be a term in psychology for that feeling you get when you teach a child to do something and then he continually out-performs you. If there isn’t I suggest it should be called Warner’s syndrome. I also saw a lot more of the dab-chicks and quite soon realised they weren’t dab-chicks. They were larger, had whitish underparts and a very peculiar trilling call. They were Slavonian grebes, a species I’d never seen before.

They do turn up in Ireland as rare winter visitors which are largely confined to estuaries, bays and sea loughs, and they do breed in tiny numbers in northern Scotland. The ones I saw and heard on the Gacka were also winter migrants and hadn’t yet donned their rather splendid breeding plumage with the elaborate helmets which give them their American name of horned grebe.

Where, I wondered, was Slavonia? I had a pretty good idea where Slovenia was but I’d never heard of Slavonia. Another internet search revealed the interesting fact that it’s in Croatia, or, at least, it was. It’s the name of a former kingdom in the east of the country. After struggling with some rather inadequate maps I came to the conclusion that my fishing river wasn’t actually in Slavonia but was very close to its border. An appropriate place to see your first Slavonian grebes.