IT was like a scene in miniature from Jurassic Park, a horde of blood-thirsty raptors hunting down their prey with ruthless efficiency. And it has caused much soul-searching here in Beggarsdale.

Fortunately, these mass killers were not genetically created dinosaurs stalking young children for food, as happened in the film, but birds - ducks to be precise - and rather pretty ones to boot.

The red-breasted merganser has arrived in the Dale in force and that will no doubt please the twitchers, as bird-watchers like to be known. To fisherman, however, their arrival has caused consternation.

The merganser, you see, is a determined and skilful predator which, just like the raptors in Jurassic Park, hunts in packs (I suppose flocks is the appropriate noun).

And this spring, two pairs have bred in the Dale with considerable success, one on the River Beggar itself and one on the Old Bridge Pool on the beck.

Between them, they have raised an astonishing 18 chicks, now half grown. They are a delight to watch, pretty things which bob up and down in the fast flowing water, diving in between the boulders and the clumps of water weed. Then, as I watched them the other day, I realised that they were not playing but fishing.

They formed into wings on either side of their mothers, like the horns of a bull, and then drove towards the shallows and the bank. Before them, shoals of fry - trout fry - began to leap from the water. The ducklings dived and dived, and came up every now and then with a beak full of wriggling lunch.

Now this is fascinating to watch, nature red in tooth and beak. But there is another side to this coin: the fact that trout stocks in the Dale have been falling for years. The grayling, once so numerous as to be looked upon almost as vermin, has disappeared.

We have always had our herons on the Beggar, and no-one begrudges the fish they eat. The kingfishers, God bless 'em, are making a come back after almost being wiped out by escaped mink.

But, in recent years, cormorants have been coming inland in ever increasing numbers, driven from the sea where food stocks have been decimated by over-fishing. And now the mergansers, spreading down from Scotland, are feasting on our precious trout fry.

So here is a classic country conundrum: how to choose between fish and fowl? In fact, according to a friend of mine in the RSPB, there is no choice: the mergansers are protected birds and could not be controlled without a licence from the Environment Agency which is almost impossible to obtain.

Personally, I would not dream of shooting such a lovely creature. But there are others who might, law or no law.

The answer, says my RSPB mate, is to improve the state of our rivers so that both fish and fowl can survive side by side (or rather, one above the other). That, he admits, would take time and money. From, of course, the Environment Agency.

Now wouldn't that make a better millennium memorial than some daft plastic dome on the banks of the Thames?

* The Curmudgeon is a satirical column based on a fictitious character in a mythical village.

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