The river, he said, is not what it used to be, but it's still a daily fascination to watch it in all its moods and rises and falls. Recently, he says, it's been all rise. He's safe, he's on a hump, with his window just about ten yards from the edge. It's not a big river. Not big enough in summer to swim in. It wouldn't take a canoe, and it's too broken up for that with boundary wires across it here and there.
It is mildly polluted, now, much of the time. But the salmon still come up to spawn and, believe it or not, in a survey just a few years ago the Fisheries people noted something like a hundred and sixty redds on the few miles length. May it long continue, though you wonder what happens when the young are hatched and when, a year later, as parr and then smolts they have to fight for food with whatever trout are still there.
More to the point, a few years ago an angler casting a fly around May would often lay down his rod because he was hooking young salmon which should have been building up their strength for the big rush to the sea and then across the Atlantic.
You may have noted a leading article in this newspaper recently which pointed out that the drive of several Governments to increase production had not been equalled by insistence on carefully dealing with the resultant pollution. But birds are still active most of the year.
Just now the racing volume of the river discourages the heron which, says our man, has a steady fishing pitch just up from his window. The huge height of the waters now force the bird to forage in shallow ponds and ditches nearby. He is missed.
Owners of garden goldfish ponds may not like him, but the heron is a wonderful construct. No one has got him better than Michael Viney in his recent book A Year's Turning. "There are days," writes Michael, "when, battling down to the strand with head bowed against the wind, I surprise a heron hunched in the waves of the estuary. It lifts its wings like Otto Klemperer at the rostrum and lets itself be snatched aloft. A heron in a high wind ought to be an aerodynamic disaster: five feet of wings and only four pounds of body: how can it possibly mould those turbulent armfuls of air? But then, just as it seems likely to be blown in side out, like an umbrella, its wings find their arc, the neck is tucked in, and the legs trail out like a rudder. Away it goes, out above the bay to Connemara, a flying weather vane with its own, elected south."
A wonderful bird, The Fowler, Ralph Payne Gallwey, said that its feet are so soft and limber that it can stand anywhere on anything. His toes bend around, anything, as a starfish clings to a rough rock. No one is ever likely to have eaten one, certainly not to have done so twice. Anyway, now protected.