Cyprinus carpio
A few weeks ago I found myself,
somehow, in a conversation about the Thames. Somebody disparaged the river, and
remembering a particular anecdote from a university lecture over a decade ago I
took it upon myself to defend the river’s health: the restoration of the
Thames, I explained, had been a major success story, and a visitor to London is now likely to
see Swans (Cygnus) and
other birdlife inhabiting the waterway. The
river may not be pristine, but life has a way of asserting itself.
Nonetheless, “it still looks as
dirty as the Yarra”, as my conversational opposite remarked. The Yarra
River, Melbourne’s
river, is notoriously brown and muddy; some of that is just its natural
condition, but it’s fair to say that nobody in Melbourne would ever consider swimming in
it. At places where the river’s flow brings
the water butting up against hard obstacles – bridges, embankments – the
collection of detritus is enough to put anyone off. Yet birdlife of all sorts can be found along
the length of the river, and for birdlife to thrive there need to be not just
plants but fish and other animals upon which those birds can feed. The river’s not perfect; but it’s a long way
from dead.
Lake Burley Griffin, in Canberra, is another oft-disregarded
body of water which sustains more life than many people credit it with. Before I moved to Melbourne I’d delight in
frequent sightings of Darters (Anhingidae) hunting in the lake’s
depths, diving for long periods before emerging, but barely – their bodies
below the surface like submarines, and just their thin and spring-loaded necks
and heads held serpentine above the water (hence their other name,
“Snake-bird”). Grebes, too, could be
seen bobbing on the surface of the lake, tiny like rubber ducks in an enormous
bath; in winter they all looked alike, but come spring and summer the males
began to moult into their breeding plumage and Hoary-headed Grebes (Poliocephalus
poliocephalus) with their striped heads could easily be distinguished from Australasian
Grebes (Tachybaptus novaehollandiae) with their yellow facial spot.
Darters and Grebes are both
predators, swimming with great agility beneath the surface of the water after
fish and smaller animals. So, too, are
cormorants, which are also numerous on Lake Burley Griffin – Great Cormorants (Phalacrocorax
carbo); Little Black Cormorants (Phalacrocorax sulcirostris); Little
Pied Cormorants (Microcarbo melanoleucos). The very presence of
these birds suggests some degree of health and life and vigour beneath the
lake’s muddy surface, but speak to the average Canberran and they’ll swear
blind that there’s nothing in that lake except Carp. Bloody Carp.
They must be the most hated fish
in Australia. They’ve driven out the natives; they stir up
mud; worst of all, they’re no good for eating (though try telling that to the
Chinese-Australians who line Lake Burley Griffin with their fishing rods and
baskets all year long). Once many years
ago when walking along a quiet edge of Lake Burley Griffin, around the fence of
the Yarralumla Nursery towards Weston Park at whose tip the lake is at its
narrowest, I came across a hand-written sign pinned to a tree. A boast: the sign’s author proclaimed himself
the Carp killer, the Carp executioner, the bane of all Carp; he offered a
bounty on Carp; he cursed them beyond all bounds of reason. He could, frankly, have been anybody in Canberra – or in Australia.
His mission to rid the world – or
at least the lake – of Carp was destined to be futile. There are unknowable numbers of them in the
depths of those waters. They must bump
against Scrivener Dam and feel their way curiously along the concrete wall that
binds their habitat, preventing it from gushing in torrents into the Molonglo River.
One spring I was walking along the lake, again in that same
beech-dappled stretch of the bike path that leads from residential Yarralumla
where I lived to the grand Yarralumla of Government House, when I was
distracted by shallow splashing and sloshing in a willow-ringed pond to my
right. Carp, spawning: somehow I’d lived
my entire life in that same small part of Canberra
by the lake and never seen such a thing before.
The great fish writhed just beneath the pond’s surface, or occasionally
broke it to splash and gulp and twist their pale bellies to the sun. They chased each-other; they lunged at
each-other; it was an ancient and unmistakably carnal ritual.
It was hard not to see it, also,
as a kind of declaration of ownership; an ostentatious display of fecundity and
vigour in a body of water usually regarded as stagnant and unsalvageable. Carp can reproduce in phenomenal numbers:
according to the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, a six
kilogram female carp can produce 1.5 million eggs. Of course the great majority of these will
die or be consumed before they even get a start in life, but even so – the
potential is staggering. No wonder the
Carp, when I saw them in that small inlet of the lake, seemed to make the water
quiver with the solidity of their flesh.
Early on a Saturday morning
recently, just the day after that conversation about the Thames, I was riding
my bike back home along the Merri Creek here in Melbourne.
Riding slowly beneath the Eastern Freeway, fifty metres or so upstream
from where the creek flows into the Yarra, I was distracted by the plopping of
water. I stopped my bike, and leaned
against the chain-link fence; there again, a splash sent ripples across the
murky surface of the creek. And again,
and again. I had an inkling what was
causing it, but I wanted to see – to make sure.
(As I waited I recalled how, years earlier, I’d heard fish leaping
unseen from the surface of a distant and very different river, the Lemmenjoki
in the far north of Finland,
on a still autumn evening when the last insects of the season had hatched in a
great swarm above the water.)
In front of me a couple of people
had stopped too, their attention also having been caught by the sound. “Is it a Platypus?” the woman asked
excitedly, perhaps with more hope than expectation. I didn’t want to disappoint her, and for a
moment I even dared to hope that she might be right – unlikely as it might have
seemed to see Platypus at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning, beneath the
Eastern Freeway (yet Platypus, Ornithorhynchus anatinus, are known to
live in the Yarra’s catchment, in creeks further out of the city; they may even
live in Fairfield and Kew, only a few kilometres from where I and my fellow
observers were stopped).
I quickly dismissed thoughts of a
Platypus sighting from my mind; but I was quietly hopeful of something else: a
Grebe, or a Cormorant, or some kind of swimming bird. Some unusual Duck (Anatidae) – once, in the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve outside
Canberra, I thought I’d seen a Platypus, and been scarcely disappointed when
the animal turned out to instead be the even rarer Musk Duck (Biziura lobata).
I was hoping for anything,
really. I was aware that November had
slipped away from me, and with it another spring, and my annual chance to see
the Sacred Kingfishers (Todiramphus sanctus) whose migratory return a
few years ago to the Yarra River and its tributaries was hailed as a truly
tangible sign of the waterways’ recovery and restored health. Two years ago, in my first few months of
living in this part of Melbourne, I’d seen several Kingfishers – but growing
complacent with time I’d neglected to amble along the creek and the river the
year after that, or this year. Now
they’ll have dispersed along the river, and begun nesting, and my chance to see
them will probably have passed for twelve months.
Whatever was splashing in the
water that day under the Eastern Freeway couldn’t have been a Kingfisher, of
course, but it had to be something. Some
rare fish – just last week I noticed that the workmen constructing the
long-projected fishway at Yarra Bend had finally packed up their construction
site and departed – some aquatic mammal or diving bird. Anything but Carp.
But Carp they were. I’d known, really, that the creatures fussing
the water couldn’t have been anything else.
When they eventually showed themselves they seemed to rise in their
dozens, a great chain of them; and yet, to my astonishment and to the
astonishment of the couple with whom I was gazing into the water, they were
exceptionally beautiful. There’s
something stirring about seeing a creature utterly at home in its environment,
and as those great fish turned their bellies to the sun just beneath the green
surface of the water and rolled like a line of celebratory streamers downstream
to the Yarra they were no less magnificent than any Platypus or Kingfisher. They moved so languidly that even when one
broke the surface it was with infinite grace and elegance. They twirled and twined around each-other
ecstatically; they barely seemed to exert any effort at all; and then, in an
instant, they were gone again, sinking into the thick depths of the water.
I had to get home: I was
returning from the market and I needed to get my groceries into the
fridge. My fellow observers turned away
from the water. None of us had seen what
we had hoped to see; and yet I don’t think any of us, in that moment, wanted to
see anything else but Carp.
Image sourced from http://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/
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