The woods along Afon Teifi were dappled with autumn’s palette. It was fascinating to match tint to tree, to look forward to fire-tones suggested before realised. Squirrels dipped and scurried for nuts among paling hazel foliage. Before the first frosts, a solitary leaf drifted downwards, presage of pattering quiet tumult through coming weeks.
From a riverside path, suddenly I glimpsed a flash of brilliant white, focused the glass in time to see a drake goosander arrowing upriver, low above the surface, its chuckling call carrying through still air, its large wing-patches startlingly white against cloud-reflecting water: “So arrogantly pure a child might think/ It could be murdered with a spot of ink” (as Yeats wrote of a swan).
Though this gorgeous, visionary bird’s demise is more likely to come about by government decree, the Welsh Assembly having granted a limited number of licences to shoot them on Welsh rivers because of insufficiently researched concerns among the fishing interest regarding their possible predation on salmon and trout.
These government culls on behalf of interest groups have always made me uneasy. Forty years ago in this column, Bill Condry wrote on the shooting of thousands of oystercatchers in Burry Inlet to protect the cockle industry, declining at the time through over-fishing and effluent discharge from Llanelli’s tinplate factories. But the oystercatchers got the blame, so out came the guns. As with badgers, the cull proved useless because oystercatchers from surrounding areas quickly moved in to make good the losses.
Goosanders used to be a rarity on Welsh rivers. Thirty years ago sightings were notable. In the early 1980s that fine naturalist Hilda Murrell – herself an honest, doomed irritant to government – recorded one with delight on the wooded lower reaches of Afon Tanat before its confluence with Efyrnwy by Llanymynech. My glimpses of these spectacular, shy, tree-hole-nesting ducks have grown more frequent in recent years. May that hopeful trend continue, and authority pay heed to Aldo Leopold’s heartfelt plea: “Let wildlife manage wildlife.” Jim Perrin
• A William Condry Reader, edited by Jim Perrin, was published in August
• For details of tonight’s Condry lecture in Machynlleth see thecondrylecture.co.uk
