Life

Take On Nature: In January we could well learn from that patient fisherman the heron

A grey heron fishing on the Garavogue in Sligo
A grey heron fishing on the Garavogue in Sligo A grey heron fishing on the Garavogue in Sligo

JANUARY is a long, lean, stubborn month, slow to release its hold on darkness and give way to the ascending daylight with its murmurings of spring. It is, as someone said to me recently, a month which "doesn’t have much going for it", a sentiment with which most of us, I suspect would agree.

It is named after the Roman god Janus, revered as the ‘god of beginnings and transitions’; other sources say it comes from the Latin word ianua, meaning door, since January is the door to the year.

Janus was the guardian of gates and presided over the beginning of everything, often symbolised by the image of a face looking backward and forward simultaneously, something many of us do each new year.

However bleak January may seem, I still enjoyed the grey heron I saw recently, rising from a damp rushy corner of the Dromore Riverside Walk. Ardea cinerea is a common species in wetlands, estuaries and along rivers throughout Ireland but its presence here at this local walkway was a welcome sign of the increasing popularity of this space for wildlife and walkers.

With its grey plumage and majestic stature, the grey heron is an unmistakable bird. Its patient, motionless, one-legged pose at a water’s edge, coiled and ready to strike with its spear-like bill at passing fish, is a familiar sight for many. Herons are still commonly but mistakenly called cranes, one of our long lost birds. This confusion is reflected in many of the Irish names used for heron, as corr, meaning crane, is used with various adjectives to give us ‘heron’. Names like corr réisc (marsh crane), corr éisc (fish crane), corr ghlas (grey crane), corr mhóna (bog crane) are all used for the bird.

An old English name for heron was heronshaw, whose corrupted form, handsaw, appears in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In the Norfolk Broads the bird is still called a harnser, while some Irish counties continue to use another variant, hernshaw.

Herons were hunted in the Middle Ages, and often graced English banqueting tables of the rich and famous as this recipe from the 1400s indicates:

Take a heron; lete him blode as a crane, And let the skyn be on; roste him and sause him as be a crane; breke awey the bone fro the kne to the fote... his sauce is to be mynced with pouder of gynger, vynegre, & mustard.

Because herons were the property of the ‘crown’ and reserved for the royal hunt, heavy fines were levied on anyone caught poaching the bird in England while the penalty in Scotland was amputation of the right hand.

Buried deep in the works of WBYeats, I discovered a short story he penned in 1895 entitled The Old Men of the Twilight, in which he wrote of how St Patrick curses those ‘men of learning’ with druidistic leanings for not properly listening to his preaching on the true ‘Maker of the world’. The saint says: "I lay upon you this curse and change you to an example for ever and ever; you shall become grey herons and stand pondering in grey pools and flit over the world in that hour when it is most full of sighs; and your deaths shall come to you by chance and unforeseen, that no fire of certainty may visit your hearts."

January will pass, as all things do, and to help us through its dark days as well as other dark times, perhaps we could do with some of the patience and perseverance of the hunting heron.