We've been lucky in Ireland - well, certainly in the eastern part - not to have been overrun by mink escaped from farms where they were being cultivated for their skins. For a while there was real worry that they were going to devastate our rivers, trout, salmon and what-not, but it seems that they have been absorbed in many parts and are even failing to reproduce in any great number. Certainly in one tributary of the Boyne, three separate observers are agreed that hardly one seems to have survived, or if they are around, the damage they are capable of doing, is minimal. One hadn't seen a mink for over a year, and he is almost daily on the river; another, a keen fisherman and riverwatcher, says it is about two years since he came across one, and the third has had no evidence since he shot one five years ago across the river from his house. Maybe the news from elsewhere is less encouraging or maybe they have just blended into the general background. Aren't we lucky that we are not reading in our newspapers of the depredations of wolves and bears, as the French are. Or rampaging wild boar. Or even beavers with their tree-felling to make their dams, as might yet happen in Britain.
Would mink be responsible for hauling salmon out of the river, spent male salmon, on their way down river after the spawning act; that is, dying salmon? For Gerry Farrell has found something like eight of them near where he lives on the river (the Borora properly called, though often referred to as the Moynalty). Probably, he thinks, the work of otters, which another observer says, he came across for years. The otter usually takes a good hunk out of the fish when he gets it up on to the bank and then leaves the corpse to be disposed of by the usual other carnivores and carrion-eaters - rats, foxes, crows. Plenty of salmon must have come up the river this year, Gerry reckons, because it was for so long in flood.
Yes, he says, as if in answer to a query here, there should be a good number of fry out or coming out from now to April. They are not without their enemies. Gerry says the heron has a good eye for these youngsters. He has watched one of them standing among a host of such fry in the shallows and picking them off one by one. You wouldn't mind, so much, he said, seeing the heron take a one-pound fish, but think of so many potential onepound or more fish gone before they had lived to grow. Nature red in tooth and beak.