Some people have a lifelong passion for birds. Watching them, admiring them, waiting each spring and summer for the return from mid-Africa or South Africa of certain familiar visitors, marvelling at the homing instinct of those who can find the same house or barn, and marvelling, too, at each generation which builds the nests to the same pattern and of the same materials. And note the dexterity which rooks, for example, show in balancing their twigs and weaving them into a firm nest. Other people are fascinated by wild animals: the regal, disdainful pace of a fox across even a suburban lawn; the friendly look of three white-striped badger faces approaching up the drive, then, suddenly taking fright and leaving at electrifying speed. It's a wonderful world, indeed, but of all creatures there is one species which lodges in the human mind to the point of addiction: the fish.
From the day your young boy, standing in his bare feet in a little stream, catching sticklebacks or spricks in his cupped hands, from the moment he espies, peeping out from under a stone, a three-inch fish, even, with red spots - he is gone. After that first glimpse he may move from brown trout to sea trout, to salmon, and the miracle 3,000 mile journey across the Atlantic and back to Ireland to spawn and reproduce. Or the boy may stay with the brown trout of our rivers and lakes. Hooked. The March issue of the English magazine The Field is marked "Irish Number" and has, as its colourful cover, three large trout: Gillaroo, Sonaghan and Ferox. Inside is an article devoted to the trout of Lough Melvin and Lough Neagh. Ireland, runs the text by Colin McKelvie (illustrations are by Rod Sutterby) "is lavishly endowed with rivers and loughs, the vast majority of which hold trout, and wild trout at that."
And he goes on to Lough Melvin, and particularly refers to work carried out on it by Professor Andrew Ferguson of QUB in the Seventies. Lough Melvin is a glacial trench, deeply gouged, of about 9,000 acres and he lists the four types of trout which local people have known for a long time: brown trout as normal; ferox trout, which preys on smaller trout and Arctic Char, which may live long and grow very big; sonaghan, small, dark, which feeds on daphnia, midge larvae, etc., and the gillaroo, vividly coloured and with a thickened stomach to cope with a diet of shrimps, snails and other crustaceans. Then Lough Neagh has dollaghan, the buddagh and the black buddagh.
Sounds too good to be true, but you can always try. Fine tourist publicity anyway. Y