Ireland's Wild River: The Mighty Shannon Natural World

BIRDS TWEETING

Early mornings, for me, are some of the best times.

The dawn chorus comes and the reeds are full of birdsong

and it's a wonderful, happy time.

BIRDSONG

It's a great time to be on the river.

It's time to find food

because you've been building up an appetite all night.

Time to find a mate.

A time to declare your intentions.

This is still my patch. This is my part of this river bank.

It's a wonderful, peaceful time of day.

And the light, if you're out there at sunrise,

sometimes the light is so, so special.

There aren't many really wild places left in this country

but on the Shannon river, you still get that feeling

no-one has ever been there before.

I want to see this river in all its moods, in every season.

Not just how it looks but how it sounds, how it feels.

I want to find the hidden places and the hidden creatures living there.

FROG CROAKS

I'm going to have no fixed agenda. I just want to wander.

Wander and explore.

This river is a lifeline for countless creatures who

shelter in and around its waters.

I'm going to follow them and see where they take me.

Spring on the Shannon.

The great awakening and there's such a sense of purpose in the air.

The orange-tip butterfly is one of the first of the season

and it's a real sign that spring is here.

Just a couple of months ago, all this was under water

and then the water recedes and they sort of appear out of nowhere

and colonise these watery meadows.

They're the most perfect little creatures.

Their wings are so delicate and the colours are so rich.

The two sexes are quite different.

The female doesn't have those lovely orange tips.

These must be some of the most beautiful,

natural wild flower meadows left in the country.

Never seen herbicides or pesticides.

It's just the way this rough grassland, farmland,

used to look in Ireland.

The landscape really hasn't changed but there is something missing.

This place should be resounding to the cries of the wading birds.

The lapwing and the curlew and the ring plover, the redshank

but they've all gone.

They've all disappeared within about the last 20 or 30, 40 years.

Some people blame the mink for this emptiness.

Ground-nesting birds, their little chicks

and the eggs have no protection against a predator like that.

But, you know, nature tends to be more complex than that.

The real reasons sometimes for the rise and fall of different creatures

can be very hard to identify.

Our countryside has changed dramatically in the last few decades

and I guess the river is just reflecting that change.

Now, you can travel for mile upon mile on this river

and never hear the sound of the curlew or

the call of the lapwing or the whistle of the redshank.

It's all gone.

It's very, very few and far between.

There are one or two places left on the river where

they still nest successfully.

Now, these low lying fields are known as the Callows.

This is exactly what birds like curlew and redshank

and lapwing need to breed.

And that is the warning call of a redshank.

BIRDS CALL

He says I'm too close.

And it's a call that just says, "Potential danger.

"Await further instructions."

Now, if I was to get closer,

if I was to get out of the boat, you would hear a very different call

and that other call is a real warning.

It says, "Not only have we spotted danger, but we actually have

"to react to it right now" and it's a particular call they make,

sort of a lovely, flutey whistle.

And that tells the chick to go straight for cover.

They're relying completely on the parent's vigilance.

People sometimes call them the guard dogs of the Callows.

I have a friend who lives in a remote part of the west of Ireland.

The only way to get to his house is on foot and he can always tell

if there are visitors on the way because he'll hear that redshank

calling and he'll know there'll be a knock on his door ten minutes later.

I don't see this as a journey from source to sea.

I see it very much as a wander around the entire system.

I want to be on different parts of the river

at different times of the year.

I have lived in Ireland most of my life

and I guess the Shannon is something I feel I've taken for granted.

I mean, this is the longest river in Britain and Ireland and it divides

our country in two from, sort of, the wilder west to the gentler east.

You have this feeling of crossing the Shannon.

You know you're going to another part of the country.

It reminds you of how time passes and the lives that were once here

and you have to sort of wonder, what will we leave behind?

Will the monoliths of the Celtic Tiger

look as romantic as the castle ruins?

I don't think so.

BATS SQUEAKING

Bats are one of the most unappreciated of creatures.

There are so many nasty stories associated with bats.

When you hear these stories and see the movies,

it's always about vampires and giving them a bad reputation

and that somehow seems to get engraved in our consciousness.

They are utterly harmless to human beings, absolutely harmless.

And they are not just harmless to us.

They really benefit, I mean, any creature that

goes around scooping up midges in the thousands is a friend of mine

because some nights on the river you would wish you had an entire

swarm of bats accompanying you every place you went.

We have about 30 mammals in Ireland and ten of them are bats.

If only we could totally reverse the way that many of us see them

and look at them as the incredibly well adapted sort of ancient

creatures that they are.

These are Daubenton's bats.

They are known commonly as water bats and that's

because they are perfectly adapted for life on the river.

If you look really closely, you can see the odd one flitting by really

fast and what they are doing is they are hunting over the water surface.

They're looking for little insects

which are caught on the top of the water.

As they struggle to free themselves from that surface tension,

they make little ripples and what the bats are doing now,

they are echo locating and finding where those little

ripples are coming from and they can sort of scoop up the insects,

either with their tail or with their feet.

They have extra big feet and they use those to just lift

the struggling insect from the surface of the river.

Flitting back and forth there.

The bats themselves live, I guess, in a different world.

They perceive the world in a different way to me.

Although their eyesight is as good as mine,

it's not much good to you when you're flying about in the dark.

So, as they fly up and down the river,

they have their mouths wide open and they are effectively

sort of screaming at the water and waiting for that echo to come back

and that's how they discern their environment.

That's how they see where they are going.

They like to hunt on the calm stretches of the river

because if the surface is too disturbed,

they wouldn't be able to locate their prey.

They're incredible aerial acrobats, constantly scanning the surface.

Incredible creatures.

Beautiful creatures.

This weather is really tough on the creatures that live off the river

and this wind has been continuously blowing for over a month.

Not quite what I had in my mind's eye when I set out on this journey.

I imagined those lovely, fine,

April evenings as the days start to lengthen.

Just listening to the birds singing, maybe sitting by a little camp fire

but for the last four or five weeks I've just been huddled down like

all the other creatures, waiting for this spell of weather to pass on.

This year this weather came at just the wrong time.

There should be great hatches of insects

and not just for the birds but for the fish and everything, too.

You know, everything is feeding voraciously at this time of year.

For nesting birds it's not just that the parents might not be able

to supply their chicks with enough food,

but the chicks get actively hammered by the wind and the rain.

But then it will be amazing if the conditions do pass and

the first sunny morning, the whole place will just come alive again.

There's nothing like travelling on a river.

There's just that feeling of sort of peace and tranquillity.

You can kind of drift in and out of animals' lives

and they don't even know you've been there.

You don't disturb them.

When I'm paddling my canoe,

I'm just wondering what's happening beneath me.

That whole cycle of life, things meeting and mating

and breeding and things killing each other, that's all

happening in the water but it's something that's hidden to us.

There's one fish that's found throughout this river system,

seldom seen, but at this time of year their presence becomes obvious

and that's because it's mating time.

People call them the barracuda of the Shannon.

It's very much the creature that, if you were a fish,

you would want to avoid.

They're superbly adapted for their environment.

They can move very, very fast if they have to.

Any fish that comes within striking range has no chance whatsoever.

Some people look at predators as being cruel

and this sort of thing but that's really not the case.

If you're an animal that's been injured in nature,

be you a deer in a forest,

if you've got a tiger around, the tiger will kill an injured deer.

If it breaks a leg, instead of dying slowly, a tiger will spot it

and kill it and the pike are sitting there at the bottom of the lake,

they're just not randomly chasing any fish.

They're looking for the ones which are moving a bit slowly,

or aren't doing so well, so they are sort of like an anaesthetic.

They put people out of their misery. They put fish out of their misery.

Right now, food is the last thing on their mind.

They're just thinking about making babies.

What the females are actually doing is,

they're laying their eggs on those little bits of reeds and they will

lay thousands of eggs, but they'll only last there for a few hours.

And then they'll fall onto the gravel beds so you

sort of wonder, why do they lay them on the reeds in the first place?

Maybe it's because the eggs are more likely to be fertilised

in mid-water. Must be something like that.

The males are just hugging the females, waiting for her to decide

to spawn and they're just going to hang with her as close as they can

because they'll get a very limited opportunity to become daddies.

When that opportunity arises, when she's ready to spawn,

that's what they've been waiting for and it's that moment they've got

to be right in there and that's what that splashing is all about.

People are always talking about the climate and changing

and is it changing and that sort of thing.

The natural world doesn't lie.

You can see an increase in temperature.

Things are moving north and west all the time

because they are able to tolerate living in those sort of

warmer conditions that are now on offer there.

BIRDS LOUDLY CHIRPING

So, you get this gradual influx in species

and the Shannon is going to...

You know, things are going to start being able to live here

that couldn't live here before.

I remember the first time I saw egrets, it was in the south of Spain

and I thought they were the most exotic thing I had ever seen.

I was walking up in the hills and I came over by this little lake

and there were these beautiful, pure white birds wading around in

the shallows and I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing and little

did I know that within, I suppose, 20 years, that those birds would

have made it to Ireland and they are breeding alongside our herons.

That's something I never thought I'd see.

There's something about herons too, when you see them hunched up,

they can look a little bit angry and a little bit fed up with life.

The egrets are like the new, beautiful cousins that have

just come along and taken their limelight or something.

They seem to put up with them

but the egrets, I guess, are just so much more elegant.

Everything seems very calm.

It's as if they've been living together all their lives.

The two species seem to sort of accept each other's presence.

Even though they must be in competition for feeding sites

and nesting sites.

My guess is there are so many fish in the river

that there's no big competition.

A CACOPHONY OF BIRD SOUNDS

Great sounds.

One of the parents has just come in and they're all just going for it.

It's a real survival of the fittest.

All the chicks have to be on their feet, as it were,

and scrambling for food.

It's known as scramble competition.

You've got to make your presence known to your parents so that you'll

be fed because if the parent doesn't spot you and you start missing

out on your meals, you'll end up getting weak and not making it.

My fear is that little guy has no chance, no future.

It's sad.

Nature can be tough.

MUSIC: Maith Dhom by Kila

We live in a country that's undergoing rapid change,

in the last 30, 40, 50 years.

The landscape has changed fundamentally

and that's always happened a certain amount,

it's just the speed of change has been dramatic.

Animals aren't good at adapting to fast change like that.

BIRD CHIRPS

That's a sound now that's really rare in these parts.

That's a corncrake.

I remember the days when they were so common,

they were found in pretty much every field in Ireland.

I used to listen to them just a few miles from Dublin city centre

when I was growing up.

But now they've really disappeared from so much of the country.

When you cut silage, you cut it early in the season so when you have

a bird like the corncrake that nests in long grass, it's just gotten

to the stage of finding a mate and the female is sitting on her nest,

sitting on her eggs, and that's when the grass cutters arrive.

So, they don't have time to raise their young.

So, year on year, corncrakes have just disappeared all over

the country and it happened very quickly.

And here on the Shannon, they've been making a bit of a stand

down on the Shannon Callows, probably because that land

was used a little less intensively than other parts of the country.

But unfortunately they've done really badly the last few years and

I've heard this year that there's actually just one male left calling.

THE BIRD CALLS

He's calling to establish a territory

but to let a female know that he's about, because if you're a corncrake

wandering around in the deep grass, you can't find each other,

so it's up to him to call in the female and if there's a receptive

female in the area, she should come and have a look at him but it seems

very likely, very possible, that there's no-one out there for him.

When I go to sleep tonight, there's a good chance when I wake up

in the morning, that little guy is still going to be calling

because the only thing on his mind right now is finding a mate.

That's why he has flown here all the way from Africa.

He doesn't know that there aren't any other corncrakes here.

He doesn't know that there aren't any females.

Poor little guy out there now.

He'll be calling all night.

All day too, probably, if he doesn't have any luck.

The Shannon is going to flow through this area now

and not hear that call again.

It's like being in another world.

Very peaceful, just the sounds of the reeds themselves

blowing gently in the wind.

But all this activity that's going on, that's unseen.

All the birds building their little platform floating nests.

Sitting on eggs. Chicks hatching.

That's all going on now all around here

and just by listening to the sounds you can tell that's what's going on.

None of the residents in here can see each other either.

That's why they're constantly calling.

Letting each other know where they are.

Contact calling. It's lovely to hear.

There's always one animal every year that sort of somehow

gets into your mind, that starts to fascinate you.

And for me, it's been the great crested grebe.

The eggs hatch on different days

because as soon as the first egg is laid,

the female starts incubating it.

Both parents are very diligent.

They have these amazing parental instincts.

The little grebe chicks must be some of the cutest chicks on the river.

They have beautiful little striped patterns,

so different looking than their parents.

Grebe parents will actually pluck their own feathers

and feed them to the chicks.

It's a remarkable thing to see.

Beautiful birds.

INSECTS HUM SOFTLY

It's amazing how the whole world seems to have gone silent now.

It's every year I notice around the 15th July or so, it's as if

someone had just flicked a switch. The Shannon is no different.

All the birds just stop making noise and that's because the breeding

season is over and they don't have to sing any more.

They don't any longer have to defend breeding territories.

They don't have to attract females.

They have no reason to sing and that's why they've stopped.

It really seems to happen over a matter of a week or so.

It suddenly just goes quiet.

Absolutely quiet.

The greatest angler on the river has got to be the kingfisher.

They're just master fishermen and they've got to be because

they can pretty much eat their own body weight in food every day.

Most of the time you just see a flash of blue.

But to really see how beautiful they are, you've got to slow them down.

I'm starting to see subtle changes in colour on the river banks.

Autumn isn't far away.

Great to see the red squirrels around.

The Shannon, which formed a barrier to people long ago, has been really

important for the red squirrel in Ireland because when someone

decided in their wisdom to bring the greys here, the greys never actually

managed to cross the Shannon and so that's why the reds are still here.

The poor little blighters, they just can't compete.

It's not that the greys are physically fighting with them,

it's just that they find the food quicker

and they'll take food that's still sort of raw,

raw nuts and that sort of thing, and these little guys just can't compete

so the females don't put on enough weight and so they don't breed.

In saying that, earlier I found some pine marten scat.

There's some sort of evidence that maybe

they are able to catch grey squirrels easier than reds.

Reds are a little more agile, they can get to the outer branches

of the trees, maybe where the pine martens can't get to them.

It may be that, with the rise of the pine marten again,

greys are going to be disadvantaged and the reds might make a comeback.

I mean, that would be great if that happened and it just might.

SWANS CALL AND HONK

For anyone who spends time on the water,

they know that sound, that's just the sound of the Shannon in winter.

That wonderful, haunting sort of call.

The sounds of the whoopers arriving. The end of the autumn and beginning

of winter is when they tend to arrive and they've been chased

from their northern breeding grounds by the cold weather up there.

They fly south to avoid it, they come to the Shannon because there's

a great big larder here to keep them going for the winter months.

You only have to watch swans taking off to see that flight

doesn't really come all that naturally to them.

They really have to push those bodies up into the air.

You'd think that they'd be a bird that maybe couldn't fly all that far

but they can fly all the way from Iceland to here nonstop.

Once you make a decision to undertake that flight,

there's no turning back because you've nothing to turn back to.

So, no matter what obstacle they hit,

or what weather they hit, they just have to keep going.

They must be very, very pleased

when they see the ribbon of the Shannon river from the air.

Maybe they're calling because they're just happy to be here.

They must use up a huge amount of energy on that flight,

but when they get here, they're as graceful as when they took off.

You'd swear that they've just come from down the road.

They're just looking absolutely perfect and pristine.

Some journey to undertake.

But one thing's for sure -

when they arrive here, there's loads of food.

They're vegetarians, they come here to feed on the grass.

It's what they like to eat

and there's no shortage of grass in Ireland.

We tend to spend so much of our lives indoors now and in cars.

We are maybe losing touch with those sort of seasonal markers

which give you a sense of the time of year and where you are.

You know, our houses are probably as warm in winter now as they

are in summer and we eat any kind of food we want at any time of year.

Those sort of traditional markers of the seasons are sort of disappearing

but in the natural world, of course, they're very much still there.

They're still driven by the climate, angle of the sun, day length,

all those things.

That wonderful sense of a year as something cyclical.

This is a rare cold snap and it won't last long.

As soon as the temperatures rise, things will start moving again.

FROGS CROAK

That's a great sound.

Guess to lots of people, birdsong is the first sign of spring

but for me it's the croaking of the frog.

Breeding season has begun.

Male frogs, lots of them, calling to lure in the females.

Males await the arrival of the next female.

This is an annual opportunity and they want to make the most of it.

Some of these little males have spent

the winter at the bottom of the pond, hibernating there.

It means that they're in position, they're in the breeding pond

when the females arrive in the springtime.

Females can be scattered out over this entire area.

Something wakes them up, the same sort of cues,

I guess, that wake up the males wake up the females.

They've been wintering under stone walls or under bits of boulder

or under logs, and some of these females have to make this

arduous journey across the land, laden with eggs.

Some sort of instinct drives them back toward these breeding ponds

and then it's the calls of the male that lure them in.

But the poor females.

You've got to... You've got to feel sorry for them

because all these males have only one thing on their mind right now.

She's on the edge of the pond and she's thinking, "Will I, won't I?"

And when she makes that final jump in, all hell breaks loose.

And these little males, what they're trying to do is,

they're trying to grab the female.

They have special pads on their little hands

and what they're trying to do is get into the right position.

They will wrestle each other and she is stuck in the middle.

Once they're really tight on there and in the right position,

they will hang on for dear life

and for the next few days they will not leave her.

Life for a female frog is not very easy.

The other males sort of know and they give up.

"Right, she's taken."

And then they wait for the next one to arrive.

Love frogs.

Every evening.

Every evening this happens.

Small flocks of little starlings come together to form bigger flocks.

It's just remarkable how so many birds come from the entire

surrounding countryside and all make their way back

to this one little spot.

And those flocks start to wheel

just a few minutes before they actually hit the reed beds,

there's just those extraordinary abstract patterns.

From a distance they could be, I don't know, a swarm of locusts

or a swarm of bees, it's very hard to get a sense of scale.

In many ways this is the greatest natural spectacle in Ireland.

It's just some sight,

and the sounds,

the sounds of myriads of beating wings.

It's better not to analyse things like this too much.

Sometimes you just want to sit back and enjoy.

Amazing sight. Just amazing.

My journey is coming to an end now and I've learned

so much along the way.

I've experienced this river in every season.

I've gotten to know its moods, gotten to know its creatures.

Somehow it's sort of gotten into me, it feels like it's a part of me now.

It's no longer A river. It's kind of MY river.

But it's our river.

Its future health and wellbeing is up to us.