Down near the city end of the Grand Canal, I’ve noticed in passing, there lives a colony of grey herons.
Or at least that’s where they work, 9am-5pm or later. They patrol a section of the waterway between the two Mount Street bridges, or often just watch from the roofs of canal bank houses, spaced out like sentries, one roof each.
The official collective noun for herons is a “siege”. And there is something military-looking about the birds’ appearance.
But the word siege, which comes to us via French, means “sitting”. Whereas herons never sit when on duty. They stand, long and erect, until spurred into their dramatic and distinctive flight formation: necks crooked, legs stretched out behind.
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It must be a mixture of colour and bearing that gives herons such an ominous reputation in folklore. They used to be considered a feathered version of the banshee: if one flew over your house, it foretold death. But overflights must be far too common on Dublin’s canal banks for that to be a credible threat now.
Their other portentous reputation was as weather forecasters. The key question there was whether they were seen flying with or against the flow of a river. Except that reports of the belief don’t seem to agree which direction was the bad one. And it may not apply to canals, anyway.
Conversely, tradition holds that a heron perching on your house brings good fortune. In which case, Percy Place – the terrace on the Dublin 4 side of the canal – must be the luckiest road in Ireland. I’ve seen as many as eight herons lined up on the rooftops there.
Then again, if you own one of those houses, you’re lucky already. Several were built by William Beckett, father of Samuel (who benefited from the rental income while a struggling young writer – one of the reasons he didn’t have to slum it as a contributor to the Irishman’s Diary, something his mother urged him to do circa 1934). One of those was for sale recently at €1.75 million.
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Folklore aside, having a heron on your roof is not lucky if you also happen to have a goldfish or carp pool. The birds like all fish, but colourful, highly visible ones are a speciality.
The grey heron has many nicknames in Ireland, most of them anthropomorphic and usually female. In Mayo, the bird is Máire Fhada (Long Mary). In Galway, Long Siobhán. Down around Kerry, they call it “long-necked Joanie” or “Nora of the bog”.
On the other hand, in Donegal, it can be “Big Andy”. And among anglers, it’s the “Old Man of the River”. The greyness helps explain that. Also, the limitless patience with which a heron will wait for something to show up. Then, any old-mannish qualities disappear, as the bird springs into action and its long bill becomes a spear, striking with ferocity to impale an unfortunate fish.
Anglers sometimes envy the heron’s fishing prowess. But the birds are not exclusively pescatarian. They also devour mice, frogs, various insects and the occasional rat. I saw two rats one night a while ago on the Dublin 2 side of the heron’s patrol. I haven’t seen them since.
They must sometimes compete for food with another wily animal now increasingly at home in the city. If so, it may be a chess-like battle of wits.
Aesop’s fables include one about a fox and heron (it’s usually said to be a crane or stork, but herons have long been misidentified as those) inviting each other to dinner.
The fox serves soup in a shallow bowl that the bird’s beak is too long to drink from. The bird then returns the begrudgery, serving soup in a narrow-necked vase for which the fox’s snout is useless. The imagined stand-off has been depicted in art by Peter Breugel among others.
Heron’s feet were once used as a charm by fishermen, who also smeared heron fat on their lines from a belief – based on the bird’s success rate – that the smell must exert some irresistible attraction on fish. Heron oil is also reputed to cure various ills, including arthritis.
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But one must never kill a heron, because that is the ultimate bad luck. There are legends of those who did and were soon struck down themselves.
On the other hand, while searching the archives for heron lore, I found a wonderful column from the Midland Tribune years ago, “According to Trodd”, in which a veteran fisherman confessed to just such a crime.
“Once, for some inexplicable reason, in the rashness of youth, I shot a heron,” wrote Valentine Trodd in the intro to what was otherwise a eulogy to the bird’s great patience and skill.
By way of explanation, he quoted Oscar Wilde: “Each man kills the thing he loves.” But his love for the bird must have earned him a pardon. He wrote that column in 1997 and I see he was still going strong as recently as 2023 when, aged about 88, he published a collection of poetry.
