Mayo trout anglers delight as Hawthorn fly begins to hatch

COUNTYFILE

ACCORDING to church tradition, last Wednesday (April 25) was St. Mark's Day. For the trout angler, it's the day that St. Mark's fly begins to hatch.

This particular insect is also known as the Hawthorn fly, as its emergence coincides with the first heady blooms on the hawthorn trees.

Perhaps you have seen St. Mark's hawthorn fly yourself. It is large, hairy and black, and bears a pair of stout hind legs that hang down when the insect is in flight. It looks more than a little cross, and rather like it might bite.

Occasionally it hatches in huge numbers and when it does it becomes the sole focus of all sorts of insect eating birds. And trout.

I often wondered what these large flies might taste of. They must surely be good, for when the wind blows them onto the water every trout that swims will be leaping and splashing to get every one.

It seems serendipitous, that just at the moment breeding birds need a good feed of protein if they are to produce healthy eggs and offspring, and just as our trout are recovering from a cold-water winter, along would come this large and meaty, weak-winged and easy to catch insect.

Look out for them. And when you see them, if you fish at all, head down to the river and catch yourself a fat spring trout.

At last, after many years of increasing dereliction, Irish waters are getting some of the attention they deserve.

For decades we have sought to deepen and straighten everything from the smallest brook to the largest river, somehow convinced that we act in our own best interests.

And after all, deep straight rivers ought to carry floodwater away. It would appear logical that this is so. In reality, while heavy rainfall is swiftly removed from upland areas it all arrives further downstream at once.

With remarkable lack of foresight, large towns and cities have been built on what used to be flood plains.

While traditional weather patterns might not have presented long-lasting threats, our modified climate appears to be producing a greater incidence of severe weather events which our ditches and drains are incapable of holding at bay.

The opinion is that as climate change takes a firmer hold, flooding events will become far more common and a great deal more damaging.

Now it seems that rivers and streams are actually far better at limiting flood damage if they retain all their natural twists and turns, and so engineers with an understanding of hydrology are much in demand.

It will take far more work to restore our rivers to something like the way they were before we got our hands on them than it did to drain them in the first place. It will also be far more expensive.

In ecological terms it will be time and money well spent.

We wonder why we are losing our salmon as fast as we are.

While it isn't the whole answer, at least part of the reason is that countless miles of previously productive spawning streams are now choked with weed or even dry up altogether through the summer months.

It will take a huge effort to undo the damage unintentionally done.

The job in hand reminds me of a visit to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina.

Two hundred years ago that vast mountain range was densely forested. A hundred years later there was hardly a tree to be seen.

Greed had felled the lot. Now much of the forest has been restored. It was an immense undertaking, but it shows what can be done.