Welcome To The Kingfisher Wildlife Diaries – John Bailey
August 6th 2009
Carp Quest for the Queen
It's just possible you've seen the recent furore over the death of Benson, one of the UK's most prominent carp. The question mark over his demise added, naturally, to interest in his death. Did he die of natural causes or were an angler's ill-prepared baits the culprit. Probably, without a post-mortem, we will never know.
But all the nationals picked it up. I did an interview on ITN News and a piece for The Guardian. I know August is the silly season in the media but it's still pretty amazing.
You'd perhaps do well to remember all this when you do visit Kingfisher and you're walking around the main lake. The guys there are dedicated to their carp. They mean the world to them. They recognise individual fish, giants caught occasionally in the past. There's a very close bond indeed between the angler and his fish.
From the outside, long-stay carp fishing could seem a strange thing to do, a bit anoraky, a bit sad. But it's not. It's a lifestyle as much as a sport. Watching the dawns and dusks and the starlit skies. Appreciating the peace the reigns at Kingfishers. You might think it's unfair to catch a fish like Benson who was actually captured over sixty times. But Benson was one of the pin-ups of the carp world. It's not generally like that and if a carp is caught at Kingfishers it's treated with a care bordering on reverence.
So, at Kingfishers, appreciate the terns, the grebes, the waterfowl and everything in the wondrous Wensum valley. But don't forget the carp hidden beneath the lake's surface. Massive. Beautiful. Cunning. An integral part of the wild life at the Kingfisher Sanctuary.