Eden Wild Goose Nature
Nature notes from the Focus Magazine October 2020
 
EWGN 2020 10a Focus pix
Close encounters of the clawed kind
There we were, on a day out, visiting Northumberland and minding our own business. We were following the woodland trail on Wallington National Trust Estate and pottering by the river. Spotting an information board, I briefly detoured as I’m a bit of a sucker for them, reading, digesting and usually forgetting just as quickly all the information deemed important enough to convey. ‘Ooh’, I said to my fast disappearing husband who had better things to do than dawdle by notice boards, ‘they’re monitoring white clawed crayfish here, because they’re very rare’. Information immediately filed in my ‘to be forgotten soon’ file.
 
Just then, along bound a large and rumbustious black lab, down the riverbank at a rate of knots, and into the river with a very impressive splash. With an expression of utter joy on his face he lunged around briefly and noisily, before emerging with a chunk of wood, shaking vigorously and soakingly and hurtling up the riverbank as fast as he came, back to his elderly and rather bemused owner.
 
Having enjoyed the exuberant performance, we walked on and soon chanced upon the very same piece of wood retrieved a few seconds ago by the Labrador. Graeme nudged it with his foot, took a look and then
a second one, and imagine his delight! There, emerging from the underside of the log was one of those very same and apparently highly endangered cray fish we’d just read about. Cute but not much of a looker to the uninitiated eye, to be honest…  a small brown lobster-y crustacean, about 10 centimetres long. Remembering the tale of Androcles and the Lion, Graeme seized his moment to do an act of kindness, coaxed the small creature on to a piece of paper he happened to have in his pocket and gingerly (for it does indeed have quite big claws which can pinch) carried it some distance back down to the river and released it, whereupon it made its escape with considerably less éclat than that shown by the Labrador. But hopefully safe and able to continue its small, endangered life.
 
The moral of this tale? I read that these animals also live in the River Eden, described by Eden Rivers Trust as one of its most secretive inhabitants. They don’t have easy lives, being prey for otters, herons, fish and even to other white clawed crayfish, but most especially for the other species of crayfish us humans introduced, with disastrous consequences for this little UK native, back in the late twentieth century.
 
Does it really matter? Very few of us are ever going to see them or perhaps even know of their existence. And yet, yes of course it matters. We hear over and over how biodiversity is collapsing all around us, and this has consequences. I would love to be transported back to the Wetheral Woods of one hundred years ago and to hear the dawn chorus and look for the flowers and talk to the fishermen. I have a feeling that what we take for normal nature now isn’t normal at all, and we are living impoverished lives, almost devoid of what was once bountiful.
 
So let’s join in with others, campaign and do whatever we can to make our voices heard on behalf of the wildness that should be part of us all. Before it’s too late.
 
Philippa Skinner
 
Look up National Trust Wallingford for more information.