Hope And Caution

Rivers can cleanse themselves after a disaster and recover

Rivers can cleanse themselves after a disaster and recover. Can the land be brought back from incessant dosing with chemicals of certain kinds, the land and its crops? That's a different story. Since the disaster on the River Borora or Moynalty, all life at first seemed to have disappeared for about ten miles of water. Even life under the stones. On the surface, the unfortunate dipper, the lovely bobbing bird that can swim under water and walk on the bottom, was seen as a corpse being washed along downstream. The waterhens had already gone from certain stretches and the mink was blamed. But Gerry Farrell, the doyen of the river, while appalled and downcast, has, from the first, hoped and prayed that the river will be left to heal itself.

He urges the authorities not to try to restore fish life by restocking with alien fry. Let Nature take its way. And there is some cheerful news, for he has seen waterhens around his stretch. Next, while idly, and without hope, i.e. just for the hell of it, he went down to the bottom of his garden and idly threw a line with a fly onto the water, lo and behold a small, maybe six-inch, trout came up for a look, but thought better of it and veered away. And what to him is very good news - he has seen that important creature in the food-chain, the minnow, a small shoal of them, having come down into the river from a small side-stream he knows well.

So the side-streams contribute something, and fish from down below the damaged area may come up, and certainly fish from way above the disaster scene will come down. And then, a complete surprise for two men working in the river to replace a kingfisher post that had been swept away in the previous weeks' unduly heavy flooding. There was a sudden, brilliant flash and past them, at high speed went a feathered projectile - a kingfisher returned from its usual winter sojourn in the estuary, as many believe. It may not find much food just there, but it flies fast and far. The two let out a cheer.

There was recently a conference on Food Safety: A New Beginning. The customer in the supermarket often wonders how many times this fine apple, say (often imported) was sprayed. Professor Hugh Pennington, one of the speakers, concerned mostly with E coli in mind, listed potential sources of infection from milk and meat and cheese, yoghurt, vegetables and more. Of vegetables, particularly imported ones, his advice was "wash and pray". A joke. Life is dangerous in this chemical world and you probably won't follow John Seymour: "the hoe is the herbicide of the future."