RTE - Living the Wildlife - Brilliant!

coolwings

A "heads up" for anybody who doesn't know about this series.
It is the best Irish wildlfe programme for quite a while, well worth the time to watch it.

The first episode was kingfishers on the River Dodder, and I should mention that anglers who fish in the Rathfarnham area will recognise a lot of pools in it. But the photography of the kingfishers is simply stunning!

If you missed it, watch it on the RTE player before it is deleted.
Link: http://www.rte.ie/player/#v=1094616

The latest episode is lampreys spawning in the Mulkear River.

thehamo

Saw that one my self. Very interesting stuff. Looked like some nice places to fish as well. Only started fishing the dodder late last year so still looking fir good places to fish it

SeaFields

Its fantastic isn't it.

They had a series last year too. Off the top of my head they had whales, basking sharks and sunfish amongst many others.

Some stunning photography.

aidanf

Haven't seem this one but I've seen previous series.

There was a good one where he was trying to film trout spawning at night. There was another really good one about eels which really opened my eyes to the decline in the eel population. When I used to fish as a kid were a pest that were constantly robbing my bait - I used to catch loads of them. Didn't know until I saw this that they were in trouble.

TimMac

Apparently they are considered a delicacy in some countries, being smoked here & shipped out worth a lot of money

Anyone see the episode on lampreys I never knew they exist, nice to see a few bars of silver swimming past while they were filming them.

aidanf wrote: »

Haven't seem this one but I've seen previous series.

There was a good one where he was trying to film trout spawning at night. There was another really good one about eels which really opened my eyes to the decline in the eel population. When I used to fish as a kid were a pest that were constantly robbing my bait - I used to catch loads of them. Didn't know until I saw this that they were in trouble.

aidanf

TimMac wrote: »

Apparently they are considered a delicacy in some countries, being smoked here & shipped out worth a lot of money

...

Coincidentally, I was reading a bit more about this yesterday. There's a big market for eel in japan and some other countries. So there are now several big money operations in Europe which farm eels for export.

Unfortunately, the eel is a marvel of biology. They only breed in the Sargasso Sea, and they only develop the ability to breed once they return to the Sargasso Sea. So the farm operations haven't been able to find a way to produce baby eels. So instead they have taken to trapping elvers as they return from the sea and enter major rivers in Europe. If you keep trapping the elvers that return from the Sargasso then there are less adults to return there and reproduce and so it seems a downward spiral in inevitable. There might be other causes of the decline too such as changing ocean currents but this one seems fairly obvious.

So the European Eel now is now listed as a critically endangered species. This came as a shock to me since they were so plentiful when I was growing up.

edit: btw, I'm not sure what the situation in Ireland is at the moment but I think commercial eel fishing has been stopped for this year.