"Surprised you didn't refer to Douglas Deane when you were on the subject of the bittern," writes a friend. In his book The Ulster Countryside, published in 1983, Deane tells of being phoned by an Antrim farmer who told him to hurry down if he wanted to see one. The farmer told of going down to the lakeside when "a big brown bird got up at the edge of the reedbed, heavy rising like, and flew along the edge of the reeds and I never seen it again: it was a bittern. Did ye hear tell one was shot here about Christmas time a year ago by a man from the Malone Road in Belfast in the shootin' syndicate?" Deane writes: "I might have known the bird wouldn't show itself when I got here, especially a bittern which is shy of the open water, preferring to hunt its aquatic prey of fish, amphibians and invertebrates, in the jungle of the reeds hidden from human sight .. . Another bittern had been shot in this locality only a month ago, and, as the farmer told me, one was shot around Christmas 1979 or early 1980, almost at the same site, yet the people concerned were not brought to book and the matter of shooting a protected species quietly forgotten."
Deane then gives many of the incidents mentioned here of bittern sightings. Walter Harris in his Ancient and Present State of the County of Down (1744) says that "the flesh of the bittern is hard and fibrous, has a filthy taste and is not esteemed wholesome .. . The skin and feathers of it, burned, stops bleeding." In spite of Harris's disdain for its flesh, the bird was often offered for sale in Dublin and Belfast. Egg collection was a factor in the bird's disappearance, writes Deane, "but it was mainly as a table bird that it was shot." An American bittern was shot in Armagh in 1845, the first specimen of its kind, and it was said of it that "its stomach was empty, but it was very fat and very good eating, for we roasted it."
Henry VIII of England, noted gourmet, gave a year's imprisonment and forfeiture of 8 pence for each egg, for those who robbed the bird's nest. Deane speculates that in the very unusual call of this bird may lie some of the folklore of the banshee. He ends For in the Bittern's distant shriek/I heard unearthly voices speak. The Ulster Countryside by C. Douglas Deane. Century, 1983.