Читать книгу Ireland Through Birds - Conor W. O'Brien - Страница 9

GOOSANDER

Glendalough

It begins on the path. The sunlight of a March morning cuts through the lobed leaves of the oak canopy. Steam flows from every breath; scarves wrapped tight against the cold. A trickle of muddy water flanks the path on one side, overhung by mossy boulders. On the other, the land angles down towards the valley floor, forested all the way.

Before long, my friend Mark and I come to an aisle of skeletal birch and ash shrubs, stripped of leaves by a winter just ended. Families of long-tailed tits pirouette about the twigs above us, hoovering up any invertebrates stirred to life by the inklings of spring. Fresh buds provide the only greenery. They also make a ripe harvest for bullfinches, flitting through the shrubbery.

We soon emerge at the valley floor. At its heart lies the ancient church of St. Saviour, roofless from centuries of neglect.

The holy men who sought God in Glendalough could scarcely have picked a better spot for their church. Even a sceptic can admit that it commands a captivating view of creation. The brook that tinkles beside the church is hemmed in by hills. They are crested with conifers on one side and threadbare deciduous trees on the other. It’s as if each clan has staked its claim to either bank, with occasional copses breaking the trend, the vanguard of some horticultural crusade across the valley, forays onto enemy soil.

The conifers are crawling with songbirds. Siskin, blue tit and chaffinch all poke their heads out from between the needles. Blackbirds and song thrush are in full verse. Every half hour or so, there’s the squawk of a pheasant. Further afield, the drumming of great spotted woodpeckers adds percussion to the ensemble. But the great tit champions them all with its relentless two-toned cry. Great tits are notorious bullies at bird feeders, and their competitive personalities also manifest in song. Long after the other birds have desisted, the gnawing teacher, teacher call still rings out across the valley.

So much is patience with birdwatching. I think of sitting in hides overlooking reed beds or staking out valleys for raptors that fail to manifest. But sometimes nature is generous. A morning such as this was proof.

The stream bisecting the valley flows right past St. Saviour’s Church, which is itself ringed by a mossy ridge. No sooner had we poked our heads over this, to gaze at the amber stream below, and there they were. Four goosanders in two handsome pairs, as if taken straight from the pages of a guidebook; the females with copper heads and silver backs, the males with their stunning white chest, black saddle and green head, darker still in the shadow of the trees. For both sexes, a blood red bill, drooping at the tip, completes the package.

It is so quick I only have time to note their fine details before the flotilla, hurried but not panicked into flight, makes its way downstream, heads turned at 45-degree angles to keep us in view. The tangled undergrowth soon obscures them, and they vanish around a bend in the distance.

…

Goosanders are one of a brace of breeding ducks we have known as the sawbills (a third, the smew, is a scarce winter visitor). It is the largest of this family of ducks, which derive their name from the notched, fish-eating accoutrement they carry. Not for the sawbills is the clumsy, spoon-shaped beak of the dabbling ducks, the mallards that throng on urban waterways begging for bread from passers-by or the flocks that colour our wetlands each winter. Most of these birds, despite spending so much of their time on the water, can scarcely upend to crane for a seed beyond the reach of their outstretched neck.

Not so the sawbills. Never content to languish at the surface, they get their food by diving. And far from subsisting on debris floating on the water’s surface, or grazing on waterside meadows like avian ungulates, they’ve embraced a predatory lifestyle, pursuing fish and invertebrates with singular agility.

As with most birds that have taken to the water, their webbed feet are placed far back on the body for maximum propulsion underwater. (This, though, leaves them at a disadvantage on land, where they can only amble awkwardly.) And like most avian fishermen, they track down their prey by sight. In the case of the goosander, they frequently dip their heads beneath the water, scoping out the submerged surrounds for a meal. Once a fish has been spotted (amphibians and insects are also taken) the chase begins. If successful, the goosander usually surfaces with prey in its beak. Tenderly tossing it around in its saw bill, the meal is then swallowed headfirst, ensuring no spiny fins get caught and easing its passage down the bird’s throat.

Fishing is when the saw bill comes in handy. Running up and down its length are tiny serrations, hooking backwards to secure tight purchase on slimy prey. In this way, the sawbills harken back to some of the most primitive birds, flightless behemoths who snapped up fish with toothed beaks while their dinosaur cousins still dominated on land. The goosander, though, is a bird of flight. Like all modern birds it has abandoned teeth entirely in order to shed the weight needed to take wing. The serrations, though, are about as close as any modern bird comes.

The bill also has use during courtship. In the mating season, displaying males elongate their necks and bills skywards to their fullest extent, cutting circles in the water as they bid to woo passing females.

The goosander shares its saw bill with its close cousin, the red-breasted merganser. At first glance, they appear similar. But there are important differences. Mergansers, for one, are primarily birds of our coasts, gathering in sheltered harbours by winter where they can fish in relative safety from the tumult of the open sea. Though attractive birds, their plumage is not clear cut; the colours merge and dilute, as if the bird has thrown on its cosmetics all in a hurry, only to have them blurred and sullied by the water.

The goosander is a bird of wild lakes and rivers, only haunting the coasts in winter. And its sublime plumage (sans the windswept crest of the merganser) always retains its clear demarcations, especially in the male: that luscious green head atop a white nick and chest, flanked by darker wing markings.

Preferring, as it does, forested habitats within touching distance of fresh water, the goosander has adopted a breeding strategy you’d think anathema for a duck, especially one so large (significantly bigger than most you’ll find at your local pond). It routinely nests in tree holes, a habit normally reserved for the much smaller songbirds with which it shares its woodland home. It’s as if the peculiarities of passerine-hood have rubbed off on the goosander, and so it endeavours to stake a claim to the most prized of nesting real estate the forest has to offer.

Selecting a suitable nest site is the task of the female goosander. Her standards are exacting – and they have to be. Finding a tree hole large enough to house a family of goosanders is challenging enough. But the need to overshadow running water restricts the goosander’s nesting choices even further. It is onto this water (or, at the very least, a soft surface near the water) that young goosanders – still flightless – must crash when they leave the nest for the first time, or else risk a fatal fall straight onto solid ground.

Most tree holes don’t meet the criteria: big enough to house the female and her brood at a squeeze, while being close enough to a stream or lakeside to allow a safe landing for the chicks. It’s not unheard of for hole-ridden trees to play host to several goosander families. Once she’s found a hole that satisfies her, the female fashions the bottom into a bowl, lining it with soft down plucked from her own breast. However, the chicks don’t get to enjoy this cosy bedding for long. Within forty-eight hours of hatching their mother’s call tempts them from the nest, out onto the water below.

In their generosity, conservationists have erected nest boxes in Glendalough that the birds have readily taken to. In their absence, and if there’s a dearth of tree holes, goosanders are forced to compromise, making their homes under mossy boulders or even in the gutted ruins of homesteads. This means a walk over land for the female and her chicks to reach the lake or stream. Here, the youngsters are fed on aquatic invertebrates until they’re ready for the fish that will sustain them for the rest of their lives.

…

Excitement over, the monotony of birdwatching returns. We know the goosanders are nesting nearby, and will not stay away for long. So we decide to stake out this spot, waiting for their nervousness to abate before they make the brief flight back upstream. And so we settle into the streamside, peppered with deer dung, to await their return.

In my yearning for a second look, my mind begins to get the better of me. Fleets of bubbles float by, sometimes forming large clumps of white froth, and I’m all too keen to mistake this for the white chest of the male goosander.

Frustrated, I lie back to take in the sights of the valley around me. Among the conifers, houses stud the slope rising above the stream. Down river, the valley floor gives way to pasture. Here, sheep roam freely. Lambs, with long, curving tails, frolic. In the field on the far bank, a brace of hinds bolt for cover, white rumps taking up the rear. The deer know the best way through this valley, and it is so often their paths that we follow through the long grass, dusted with ice like the leaves of the trees shadowing the stream. By now, the rising sun has come to collect its toll. As the branches begin to weep, large drops splatter on my shoulders.

Beside us, the river is the colour of lager. It’s barely a metre deep, and on its bed smooth stones are sprinkled with the minerals that drew generations of miners to Glendalough. Panning would bring us little fortune here though, for anything that could be strained from this stream would be too little and too poor to be worth the effort.

I can see no signs of life in the water as it leisurely makes its way to the lake. I wonder how piscivores like the goosander draw enough sustenance from Glendalough, especially given that the waters of the upper lake (the largest in the valley) are notoriously acidic. But being predators, goosanders are often seen as a benchmark of the health of the rivers and lakes they call home. Their presence in Glendalough is a measure of the fecundity of its waters. In any case, acidity can bestow a clarity to the water. This can help the goosanders zero in on what fish there are here.

In an age when many birds seem to be beating a retreat in the wake of the devastation left by man, it’s exciting that (for now) the goosander is on the march. Not thirty years ago, breeding pairs were almost unheard of in Ireland. At the time, this was no surprise. The ducks Irish people are most familiar with are birds of temperate wetlands. Their docile dabbling nature has eased their transition into an increasingly human world.

But the goosander is not most ducks. By nature, it’s a creature of the wild boreal forests, that vast coniferous belt that hangs like a curtain just below the icy grip of the Arctic. It’s a harsh realm, shared with wolves and bears. Wintering goosanders rarely made it as far south as Ireland, So while wigeon, teal and other ducks could (and still can) be found in flocks of hundreds all around our coasts each winter, for many years the only glimpse you’d get of a goosander in Ireland (if you were lucky) was of a green- or copper-headed speck patrolling an estuary.

That all changed in 1994 when goosanders were recorded breeding in County Wicklow for the very first time. The species had previously tried to establish an outpost in Donegal, but while this attempt to colonise Ireland eventually petered out, the Wicklow population has endured.

In so doing, goosanders have added Ireland to the expanding list of countries in which they have made a permanent home, having colonised vast swathes of Britain in the previous decades and even claimed a toehold in the Alps. Although they’ve bred in Ireland every year since 1994, the population here remains small and centred around its stronghold in the Wicklow Mountains.

Here, where the valleys vacated by long-gone glaciers have been occupied by fresh mountain lakes, the species has found its Shangri-la. And they’re not the first to find peace and prosperity in this valley. The most famous to do so was St. Kevin, who found in Glendalough the perfect place to establish his monastery back in the sixth century. St. Kevin was renowned as a great lover of nature, as one of the most famous legends of his life in Glendalough – documented in The Church and Kindness to Animals – attests:

And while he was lifting up his hand to heaven through the window, as he used to do, a blackbird by chance alighted on it, and treating it as a nest, laid an egg there. And the Saint showed such compassion towards it, out of his patient and loving heart, that he neither closed his hand nor withdrew it, but indefatigably held it out and adapted it for the purpose until the young one was fully hatched.

But Kevin’s avian associations stretch even further into legend. Perhaps the most striking recalls how he first laid claim to Glendalough. At that time, the O’Tooles were among the most powerful of the Gaelic families in the region. Their king, grief-stricken over the ill health of his aging pet goose, reached out to Kevin to help save the bird. Kevin agreed – but only if he could have all the land that the goose flew over. Sure enough, with a touch from Kevin the goose regained a youthful vigour. It took off in a circuit around the valley that we now know as Glendalough.

It was here that Kevin sought the solitude in which he could immerse himself in God’s living work, eschewing the company of people for that of the birds and beasts that thrived in the valley. Back then, the goosander was almost certainly not among them, though it’s ironic that the vacuum left by one departing hermit has centuries later been filled by an avian recluse that has found sanctuary in Glendalough.

In a crueller irony, it was the teachings of the solitude-loving St. Kevin that would see the solitude of Glendalough shattered. Kevin was one of Ireland’s most accomplished and well-travelled Christian scholars (even journeying to Rome and back). As recorded in Bethada Náem nÉrenn:

Great is the pilgrimage of Coemgen (as Kevin was then known),

If men should perform it aright;

To go seven times to his fair is the same

As to go once to Rome.

To claim that seven visits to this valley in the Wicklow Mountains was the spiritual equal to a pilgrimage to the centre of Western Christendom was a bold idea for the time. But it soon took root. And so St. Kevin’s teachings spawned a monastic tradition that turned Glendalough into one of the centres of Christian teaching in Ireland in the centuries after his death. A monastery flourished here, complete with its own cathedral and round tower to safeguard monks and their treasures from the Vikings that raided their way up and down the east coast.

It wasn’t just the divine that enticed settlers to Glendalough, but also the prosaic. The tectonic churning that raised the Wicklow Mountains forged at their heart seams of lead, silver and other ores that drew a mining community to the valley. By the middle of the 1800s they’d become well established, tunnelling deep into the mountain slopes in pursuit of wealth. At the height of the mining boom over two thousand people lived here. The scale of their operations soon outmatched the mules and other draught animals used to haul chunks of ore to processing, and so a railway had to be introduced to take up the load.

Hunger for wealth drove further development along the valley. New seams were cut open and worked to their roots. The miners’ labour beneath the mountains took them so far from the comforts of the Wicklow coast that one mine was even named Van Diemen’s Land in tribute to the island (present day Tasmania) on the other side of the globe, where many Irish convicts of the day were shipped, and from where very few returned. Buildings sprung up in the miners’ village on the valley floor, including a water-powered crusher to pulverise the ore peeled from the mountains. This was mainly operated by the women of the village as their husbands and sons toiled by torchlight underground.

Outside, centuries of development had wrought a heavy price on the once pristine wilds of Glendalough. Very little of the ancient forest that once carpeted the valley remains today, with much of the greenery to be found now dating from just the nineteenth century or later.

By the late 1800s the mining community had begun to suffer. More and more of its members took their expertise overseas, where they used it to develop the extraction industries that would fuel manufacturing booms in Britain and the United States. Increased demand for lead during the First World War would see a temporary flowering of mining fortunes, but once the Treaty of Versailles had been signed the mines of Glendalough sunk into decline again. By the late 1950s they were abandoned altogether.

Both the monks and the miners, the pious and the enterprising, left their mark on Glendalough. The round tower, now restored, still stands proud, keeping company with a smattering of other monastic buildings. More solitary, the church of St. Saviour, now haunted by nearby nesting goosanders, lies in ruins, though the Romanesque curves of its arches and blotches of lichen crawling across its stonework still lend it colour and grace.

The miners’ legacy is somewhat less striking. You can still find the rusting remains of the crusher, lying otherwise much as it was when working. Among the other remnants they left behind are piles of excavated stone dumped on the valley floor. During childhood visits with my family, I can remember climbing among them, the miner in me looking for the crystal that would make my fortune. And there were indeed crystals to be found on the slag heaps, encrusted onto stone like icing on a cake. But the generations that came before had left no great mineral treasure in Glendalough. Far from twinkling with every caress of the sun, the crystals I unearthed were murky, like frosted glass; hardly the stuff of wedding rings.

Today, the most striking living legacies of human habitation in Glendalough are the feral goats that still patrol the valley. These are not native, but were introduced to provide meat, milk and labour to bygone settlers before escaping (or simply outlasting) their masters, who would desert the valley. Now, they can be seen grazing out in the rushes on the valley floor, or picking their way with delicate care up the scree-strewn slopes of the mountainsides. Crowned with great ridged horns and curtained by flowing coats of grey and black hair, they remain as a visceral reminder of the shifting fortunes of this valley.

Even in boyhood, when its history had not made such an impact on me, Glendalough left a strong impression. This was especially true of the upper lake, its shoreline of flattened, silvery stone blurring into a vast dark abyss. It was like a black hole at the heart of the valley towards which trees marched and mountains descended to their doom. Chinos rolled up above my knees, I’d splash through the shallows, never fearing I’d snag my foot on a sharp rock, for the stones that made up the lake floor had long since surrendered their hooks and corners to the perpetual caress of gentle waves.

Looking back now, I can understand why pious folk found peace on its shores. Rarely stirring to a swell, the lake exudes tranquillity, and an ethereal quality. I imagined that peace would come undone at any moment. My boyhood self hoped this would come in the form of a monster surging up from the depths, for in my head I compared the upper lake to Loch Ness, and used it as the setting for my own fruitless monster hunts. Though no unknown beasts ever greeted me at their end, childhood vignettes in Glendalough helped awaken my yearning for nature. And hikes up its slopes exposed me to the sheer beauty buried in Wicklow’s mountainous heart.

The waters of the lake might be too shallow (and devoid of prey) to sustain a hidden monster. But the goosanders find all the food they need in the two lakes (lower and upper) that give Glendalough its name (Gleann dá Locha, the glen of the two lakes) and the streams that feed into them. Clear, shallow waters suit them down to the ground. Seeing them here amid the drumming of the great spotted woodpecker (another recent colonist) adds a whole new dimension to Glendalough for me. It feels like a potent commitment by the natural world to restock this space with wild denizens, among them a new cast of characters to augment the fauna of the Wicklow Mountains.

Otters and minks might provide some competition, but not enough to threaten the goosanders. The biggest danger they face comes in the form of another mustelid (weasel) and, ironically, another species that every effort is being made to preserve: the pine marten. Wicklow is one of the strongholds of the pine marten resurgence in Ireland. And while this arboreal sharpshooter is the ideal tonic to the feral population of grey squirrels now rampant throughout the county, it certainly won’t refuse the succulent eggs and chicks of goosanders. Nesting in trees puts these ducks at risk of pine marten predation. That’s why many of the trees bearing goosander nest boxes are enclosed with sheaths of metal on their trunks; the marten’s claws can get no purchase on the metal, and their designs on the goosander’s brood can be thwarted.

…

As can happen, the end goal can be found back where you started. Having staked out the riverside for over an hour, we make our way back to the car, content with the fleeting view of fleeing goosanders.

On our way, we approach a bridge fording the same river. That’s when we see her. Right on the riverbank, perched on a rock, almost completely obscured by the overgrown grass, is the female. As with almost all ducks, her livery pales in comparison to the male. But in the shaft of sunlight breaking through the canopy, she’s still stunning: her head a rich copper, her back silver cut through by the outline of her feathers. Slowly, like a ballerina in motion, she extends her neck, perhaps forcing a stubborn fish down her throat.

We’re much closer than before. And yet she shows no signs of panic, even though she can surely see us towering on the bank above her. It’s only then we notice the male, approaching her on the languid current. She slides into the water beside him, and together they make their way downstream. The light on him is less forgiving; he clings to the shadows of the opposite bank, frustrating my urge to get a decent photo of his stunning green head. But the pleasure of seeing them so close – and so unhurried – is compensation enough.

As the procession slips downstream, a second female joins the couple; the second male is nowhere to be seen. Breaking into a light jog, we follow them to the bridge, watching them pass under us. Once again, their heads are angled to keep us in view, but there is no urgency in their cruising. They’re more than happy to let the stream dictate the tempo of their journey: free birds, floating.

The amber water beneath them glistens and sparkles, as if the riverbed were studded with gold. It’s like the miners of old have foolishly left a fortune behind. And as the goosanders float over it, they pass under branch after branch, until finally they melt away into the overhanging undergrowth.