birds of our coasts, gathering in sheltered harbours by winter where they can fish in relative safety from the tumult of the open sea. Though attractive birds, their plumage is not clear cut; the colours merge and dilute, as if the bird has thrown on its cosmetics all in a hurry, only to have them blurred and sullied by the water.
The goosander is a bird of wild lakes and rivers, only haunting the coasts in winter. And its sublime plumage (sans the windswept crest of the merganser) always retains its clear demarcations, especially in the male: that luscious green head atop a white nick and chest, flanked by darker wing markings.
Preferring, as it does, forested habitats within touching distance of fresh water, the goosander has adopted a breeding strategy you’d think anathema for a duck, especially one so large (significantly bigger than most you’ll find at your local pond). It routinely nests in tree holes, a habit normally reserved for the much smaller songbirds with which it shares its woodland home. It’s as if the peculiarities of passerine-hood have rubbed off on the goosander, and so it endeavours to stake a claim to the most prized of nesting real estate the forest has to offer.
Selecting a suitable nest site is the task of the female goosander. Her standards are exacting – and they have to be. Finding a tree hole large enough to house a family of goosanders is challenging enough. But the need to overshadow running water restricts the goosander’s nesting choices even further. It is onto this water (or, at the very least, a soft surface near the water) that young goosanders – still flightless – must crash when they leave the nest for the first time, or else risk a fatal fall straight onto solid ground.
Most tree holes don’t meet the criteria: big enough to house the female and her brood at a squeeze, while being close enough to a stream or lakeside to allow a safe landing for the chicks. It’s not unheard of for hole-ridden trees to play host to several goosander families. Once she’s found a hole that satisfies her, the female fashions the bottom into a bowl, lining it with soft down plucked from her own breast. However, the chicks don’t get to enjoy this cosy bedding for long. Within forty-eight hours of hatching their mother’s call tempts them from the nest, out onto the water below.
In their generosity, conservationists have erected nest boxes in Glendalough that the birds have readily taken to. In their absence, and if there’s a dearth of tree holes, goosanders are forced to compromise, making their homes under mossy boulders or even in the gutted ruins of homesteads. This means a walk over land for the female and her chicks to reach the lake or stream. Here, the youngsters are fed on aquatic invertebrates until they’re ready for the fish that will sustain them for the rest of their lives.
…
Excitement over, the monotony of birdwatching returns. We know the goosanders are nesting nearby, and will not stay away for long. So we decide to stake out this spot, waiting for their nervousness to abate before they make the brief flight back upstream. And so we settle into the streamside, peppered with deer dung, to await their return.
In my yearning for a second look, my mind begins to get the better of me. Fleets of bubbles float by, sometimes forming large clumps of white froth, and I’m all too keen to mistake this for the white chest of the male goosander.
Frustrated, I lie back to take in the sights of the valley around me. Among the conifers, houses stud the slope rising above the stream. Down river, the valley floor gives way to pasture. Here, sheep roam freely. Lambs, with long, curving tails, frolic. In the field on the far bank, a brace of hinds bolt for cover, white rumps taking up the rear. The deer know the best way through this valley, and it is so often their paths that we follow through the long grass, dusted with ice like the leaves of the trees shadowing the stream. By now, the rising sun has come to collect its toll. As the branches begin to weep, large drops splatter on my shoulders.
Beside us, the river is the colour of lager. It’s barely a metre deep, and on its bed smooth stones are sprinkled with the minerals that drew generations of miners to Glendalough. Panning would bring us little fortune here though, for anything that could be strained from this stream would be too little and too poor to be worth the effort.
I can see no signs of life in the water as it leisurely makes its way to the lake. I wonder how piscivores like the goosander draw enough sustenance from Glendalough, especially given that the waters of the upper lake (the largest in the valley) are notoriously acidic. But being predators, goosanders are often seen as a benchmark of the health of the rivers and lakes they call home. Their presence in Glendalough is a measure of the fecundity of its waters. In any case, acidity can bestow a clarity to the water. This can help the goosanders zero in on what fish there are here.
In an age when many birds seem to be beating a retreat in the wake of the devastation left by man, it’s exciting that (for now) the goosander is on the march. Not thirty years ago, breeding pairs were almost unheard of in Ireland. At the time, this was no surprise. The ducks Irish people are most familiar with are birds of temperate wetlands. Their docile dabbling nature has eased their transition into an increasingly human world.
But the goosander is not most ducks. By nature, it’s a creature of the wild boreal forests, that vast coniferous belt that hangs like a curtain just below the icy grip of the Arctic. It’s a harsh realm, shared with wolves and bears. Wintering goosanders rarely made it as far south as Ireland, So while wigeon, teal and other ducks could (and still can) be found in flocks of hundreds all around our coasts each winter, for many years the only glimpse you’d get of a goosander in Ireland (if you were lucky) was of a green- or copper-headed speck patrolling an estuary.
That all changed in 1994 when goosanders were recorded breeding in County Wicklow for the very first time. The species had previously tried to establish an outpost in Donegal, but while this attempt to colonise Ireland eventually petered out, the Wicklow population has endured.
In so doing, goosanders have added Ireland to the expanding list of countries in which they have made a permanent home, having colonised vast swathes of Britain in the previous decades and even claimed a toehold in the Alps. Although they’ve bred in Ireland every year since 1994, the population here remains small and centred around its stronghold in the Wicklow Mountains.
Here, where the valleys vacated by long-gone glaciers have been occupied by fresh mountain lakes, the species has found its Shangri-la. And they’re not the first to find peace and prosperity in this valley. The most famous to do so was St. Kevin, who found in Glendalough the perfect place to establish his monastery back in the sixth century. St. Kevin was renowned as a great lover of nature, as one of the most famous legends of his life in Glendalough – documented in The Church and Kindness to Animals – attests:
And while he was lifting up his hand to heaven through the window, as he used to do, a blackbird by chance alighted on it, and treating it as a nest, laid an egg there. And the Saint showed such compassion towards it, out of his patient and loving heart, that he neither closed his hand nor withdrew it, but indefatigably held it out and adapted it for the purpose until the young one was fully hatched.
But Kevin’s avian associations stretch even further into legend. Perhaps the most striking recalls how he first laid claim to Glendalough. At that time, the O’Tooles were among the most powerful of the Gaelic families in the region. Their king, grief-stricken over the ill health of his aging pet goose, reached out to Kevin to help save the bird. Kevin agreed – but only if he could have all the land that the goose flew over. Sure enough, with a touch from Kevin the goose regained a youthful vigour. It took off in a circuit around the valley that we now know as Glendalough.
It was here that Kevin sought the solitude in which he could immerse himself in God’s living work, eschewing the company of people for that of the birds and beasts that thrived in the valley. Back then, the goosander was almost certainly not among them, though it’s ironic that the vacuum left by one departing hermit has centuries later been filled by an avian
