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GULLS, WHALES & DEATH
Anglers visiting the lower
reaches of the Mataura River on a day when mayflies are hatching are almost always treated to a exhibition of life and death that parallels the drama of large spectacular animals that fall in the race of life.
Our
sympathies are captured by television crews, and newspaper photographers, who bring us images of dying animals close to us in form and function. The demise of giant mammals which have the ability to "talk" to one
another, to teach their babies and maybe even communicate with us seems tragic but is no more important than the loss of life that occurs above the river on a warm spring day.
From a distance the principal perpetrators of
the drama, white birds, can be seen in silent flight, weaving a silver pattern over the water. They chase unseen packages of protein for a taste of the river; a shimmering mayfly. A fragile refugee of the waves,
escaping the clutches of sharp toothed trout, but attracting the eye of a shining gull on a silver wing, in sunny skies.
The art of the chase which anglers become involved in is rarely recorded on video, the gulls moves are
too swift and unpredictable. The trout too subtle. While the gull is grace incarnate, it is too common for the news. Its image only rarely captured on an artist's canvas, or in a patient photographer's lens.
While
they soar we admire the gulls, but when they scavenge around dumps our opinion of them falls. Yet they are the same bird. Such is our view of the world. One in which we impose our values. Whales on a beach draw the pity out of us,
but these are the hunters of the seas that chase small fish to exhaustion. Great sharks that eat their carcasses receive our loathing but they too are simply following the message carried in their genes, received from their
ancestors. The message instilled when all hunters were the same.
Trout anglers need not travel to a remote shore to view the hunting instincts now common to all species of animals. They participate in it, they watch it in
all its beauty, and its gore. The chase should not be judged by human values. It should not be judged at all.
Whales may die by the hundred, mayflies by the thousand. The deaths bring life. Anglers die too, and they pass on
their life to another generation. A whale becomes a shark, a mayfly a gull, or a trout. A trout becomes an angler, an angler, maybe a rose garden or a tussock on a stream bank. There is no end to life, just change in form. As
we watch the changes or become part of them, perhaps we should only watch and wonder, and not make decisions about what might be right or wrong.
Maurice Rodway
Southland, New Zealand E-mail: fishgame@southnet.co.nz
Article ©1998 Maurice Rodway, All Rights Reserved. |
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