You've got to feel for these old leatheries

ANOTHER LIFE:IT IS 26 YEARS since Gabriel King – a slightly-built, gentle young man with something powerful on his mind – arrived at my gate on a bicycle.

He’d been travelling down the coast from Killybegs, Donegal’s big fishing port, and was fresh from new encounters on the way.

It was hard to imagine him chatting up fishermen, fresh off the boat at some remote quayside, or gathered from the trawlers in a port bar, still stubbly and tired, to get them talking about turtles – specifically Dermochelys coriacea, otherwise the leathery, luth or leatherback: how many they'd seen, or tangled with, and what they thought about them. But he knew how to do it, and to great effect. If, this summer, the leatheries are heading towards us sure of better respect and concern, King's long crusade deserves much of the credit.

His dogged research produced the clinching evidence for the leathery’s place in Ireland’s natural world. It showed the ancient animal not as some rare and doomed wanderer from the tropics, to be hauled up a slipway for display (and there, weeping salt tears of jellyfish water, to die of respiratory collapse or heart attack) but as much a regular, long-distance migrant to these seas as the bluefin tuna or humpback whale.

What pushed him to it prompts a personal preface to Marine Turtles in Irish Waters, a supplement to the current Irish Naturalists' Journal. For this enduring chronicle of the island's natural history, published academically since 1925, King collaborated with Dr Simon Berrow, whose dedication to the marine megafauna includes turtles and basking sharks along with dolphins and whales.

The young Gabriel had a tortoise in his English back garden that “spoke through my imagination of ancient mysteries”. Later, living in Greece, the family cared for injured tortoises, and this spread to concern for mistreated Mediterranean turtles, leatheries among them. On a visit to Ireland in the early 1980s, the episode of a leathery caught in fishing gear alerted King to the established Irish view of all turtles as tropical waifs and strays on a one-way drift to die in cold water.

Whatever of other turtles, such as the loggerhead or Kemp’s ridley, this didn’t fit the two-metre leathery, its body, beneath a ridged and rubbery carapace, well evolved to stay warm in cold water. If such a substantial animal was doomed to perish at the end of summer, why weren’t more bodies washed ashore? And if the turtle could, indeed, leave Ireland in its own good time, why not help it out of entanglements in lobster-pot lines and nets? As King tried, and failed, to add any more records of leathery casualties, the case for the animal’s regular migration across the Atlantic from breeding beaches in Trinidad, French Guiana and elsewhere, grew stronger all the time. A permanent return to Ireland sent him out on his marathon quest “along the windward roads” to find sightings to prove it.

A bicycle made it easier to meander down tracks and boreens, lured on by a glimpse of lobster creels behind a hedge, or to find remote jetties and landing places and there to wait for a fisherman’s return. At ports, the fleet might also be at sea, compelling him to go back again and again to find the right man at home.

In 2005 King published a list of more than 800 newly discovered records of the leathery turtle. With more to find in Northern Ireland, and a contract from the Environment Agency, he visited every port, harbour, jetty and marina from Carlingford Lough to Lough Foyle, quizzing fishermen, coastguards, lifeboatmen, yachtsmen, sea anglers, current and former lighthouse keepers and retired fishermen – even birdwatchers – on the chance of more information.

The new paper, a crowning work, rests on more than 1,000 records from Irish waters. Some 80 per cent were of living animals, notably off Co Cork. It complements the recent Anglo-Irish Interreg study of the turtle and its jellyfish prey.

There were also 107 records of leatheries captured in fishing gear. Most are now released alive in Ireland’s inshore waters, thanks not least to educators such as King and Berrow. But on wider seas the animals are critically endangered from long-line fishing and from drifting water-filled plastic bags, which so fatally resemble jellyfish. Dr Berrow’s extraction of plastic from the gut of a dead leathery found off Cork was one of his sadder autopsies.

The leatheries of the Pacific are already close to extinction. And now the Caribbean oil disaster strikes at a vital heartland of breeding Atlantic turtles (especially that of the little Kemp’s ridley, in the Gulf of Mexico). “How can one not be moved,” demands King, “by the pending fate of species whose fossil records extend back about 180 million years?”

EYE ON NATURE

I saw a most unusual creature living in a pond in a local bog. It appears to construct its shell from twigs, and small amounts of vegetation and grass, forming a tower. After observing it for a while I could see that it was moving.

Eoin McGurk, Birr, Co Offaly

It was the house or case of the larva of a case-building caddis fly. When ready to pupate, it will spin a silken cocoon within the case. After pupation it will chew its way out and fly away.

While crossing the footbridge over the Shannon at the University of Limerick, I saw a large grey/black barred goose with an orange bill swimming in close formation with two large white geese that were shepherding six goslings along the river.

David O’Connor, Limerick

They were domestic geese, probably two females and a gander.

A duck finally landed on one of my ponds after 10 years. It has the blue-green head of the mallard, orange legs and a browny-black back, but lacks the white neck ring; instead it has some white blotches.

Bob Quinn, Bealadangan, Co Galway

Your mallard has been the object of some hybridisation, most likely with some reared mallards. Rearing-and-release schemes have led to aberrant genes that result in anomalies in plumage colour.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. E-mail viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address