Yes, the bittern. You may have heard Seamus Heaney on the BBC the other evening reminding us of Cathal Buidhe's warning that in the hereafter there will be no drink. This brought to mind a charming letter from Brother Mark Hogan of St Joseph's School for Deaf Boys, at Cabra and Edmund Rice House, Navan Road, Dublin, who remembers seeing what he is convinced must be a bittern, some 50 years ago. The location was among the rushy and wet corcasses of the Maigue river meadows between Adare and the Shannon Estuary. Beaters were covering the ground to catch hares for coursing. A bittern-like bird was flushed from a rushy spot and it "flew low but strongly, silently to drop back into cover at some safe distance". The writer tells us that he was familiar with bird life of the region - curlew, lapwing, golden plover, godwits, whimbrel and even dwindling greylags. So he feels he had some credentials. The bird's size, colouring, flight pattern tallied with his books' description. (Corcassses, by the way, is in the Oxford Dictionary, meaning salt marshes along the Shannon and Fergus).
On to a bittern report in a recent Sunday Telegraph. The Norfolk Wildlife Trust has spent £150,000 establishing a bittern habitat for the few that are known to be there (there are about a dozen breeding males in Britain - three on Hickling Broad, Norfolk). Boaters want to cut a plant called stonewort because it fouls their propellers, but the bittern depends on clean water and stonewort keeps the water of good quality. "We could have many bitterns. We must do nothing to jeopardise their recovery," says the conservationists. An admirable attitude. A lot of space is given to the bird in Francesca Greenoak's Penguin All the Birds of the Air, including local names for the bird. Bog Drum is given for Ireland and Scotland. Boom Bird for Wales. The booming, she says, is not particularly loud but has great carrying power and is hard to locate. (A sort of ventrioloqual quality?) The threefold boom is commonest and nine has been recorded.
Dryden said the bittern puts its beak into a reed and blows it like a trumpet. Payne-Gallwey, the Irish fowler, says the sound is more like a night-roaming animal than a bird. Not good to eat, according to him. That was in 1882, when they may have been around a lot. Will we ever see one here again?