We all remember the lines of Francis Ledwidge, He shall not hear the bittern cry/ In the wild sky where he is lain, from the opening lines of his Lament for Thomas McDonagh. But how many people in this country have ever heard a bittern? The Atlas of Breeding Birds in Britain and Ireland, a joint British/Irish product, has a map to make the point. It shows under the heading "Bittern", a few red dots on the east coast of Britain to mark the bird's breeding places, but for Ireland not a single dot. It tells us that the bird bred in Britain and Ireland up to about 1840. Indeed "roast bittern was a regular item of country fare." But drainage, shooting and egg-collecting did for it in England.
At the end of the century it had been extinct for perhaps 30 years. Then, recolonising from the Continent began. With some ups and downs it was estimated that at the printing of this book (1987 edition) there were perhaps 80 pairs in England. Now hundreds of thousands of pounds are to be spent in restoring watery, boggy areas suitable to the bird's habits. It is a sort of cousin of a heron, but brown, and blends in easily with the reedy environment it enjoys.
One thing most writers agree on is the noise the male makes - a boom, and the book on Ireland's Birds by Dempsey and O'Clery tells us that, in the last decade, several have been heard booming here in late spring and early summer. As to the boom, one very emphatic writer and successful man with a gun, Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey, disagrees. "The booming, marshshaking note which it is said to utter is highly imaginative in the describer". He claims it is more the sound of some night-roaming animal.
Peter Birkett, who set out details of the money and the methods being used in England to help bring back the bird in former numbers, tells us in the Sunday Tele- graph that local names in England for it include Bog Bumper, Boom Bird and Bull of the Bog. (Sir Ralph's point, the latter). Although the bold Sir Ralph has shot several, he quotes a Dr. Birkett (coincidence) of Waterford as holding that the bird is bad as food, and he endorses this view from his own experience "in the Mediterranean", mark you.
Well, the corncrake is having a bad time. Is the bittern a completely lost cause to us?