In tooth and claw

Roadkill always surprises me. I mean, the Pinoso Monóvar road, for instance, is not a particularly busy road and yet it is littered with the carcasses of dead rabbits, snakes, hedgehogs, foxes, cats and, occasionally, wild boar. I can't see how the sums stack up. Every now and then a lone rabbit crosses the road. Every now and again an occasional car comes down the road. What dread fate puts the two in the very same spot at the very instant for slaughter to occur?

In our early days in Spain we did a lot of commuting to and from Elche to Pinoso. We noticed that there wasn't much wildlife to be seen from the car. Whereas the place we'd lived in the UK seethed with rabbits, in Spain we never saw anything alive. It was similar in the early years in our Spanish garden in Culebrón. A few wagtails, swallows in spring and summer but, in general, the bird population seemed very sparse in comparison to what we'd been used to. Over the past few years the number of living things around us seems to have increased substantially. All I can presume is that there are fewer deadly herbicides and pesticides in agricultural use and that the creatures have benefitted.

I got to thinking about animals as a blog topic because last Thursday night I was reasonably surprised to find a very small ladder snake in our living room. In trying to pick it up I missed my chance and it slithered behind a very heavy piece of furniture. When it emerged, late the next day, I caught it easily and popped it into the field opposite our house. Fifteen minutes later I wondered what the lumpy squishy looking thing was on the floor. I was just about to blame the cat's digestive systems when I realised it was a toad. We get quite a few toads come visiting. I have no idea why - so far as I know it's a long way to any damp land. One of the favourite haunts for the visiting toads is in one of the bathroom shower pans! I usually pop the strays in the patch of succulents we have at the back of  the garden. The nearest thing we have to wetland.

Thinking about it we actually get quite a few wild beasts in the house. Usually though that's because we have four "domestic" cats. They bring shrews, voles, mice and rats into the house and then play cat and mouse with them. Often the supposed prey escape the cats. We've had lots of experience of sniffing the air to determine where the rotting flesh smell is coming from. Heavy, almost immovable furniture seems to be the preferred resting place of so many small animals left to die terrified or injured by our loveable pets. From time to time the cats bring us a live bird, or one time a bat. We have very high ceilings in the living room with pendant light fittings. Getting a terrified blackbird to leave of its own free will is not easy. Actually clearing the gizzards of animals devoured by our cats from our doormat isn't my favourite household chore either.

Whilst we used to bemoan the lack of largish creatures in our garden we have never been short of insect sized beasts in the house. Beetles, for instance, stroll in or out of our living room as though the telly was theirs to watch. Sometimes they do that remarkably noisy and clumsy flying too. Strangely, fingers crossed, I don't think we've ever had cockroaches in Culebrón unlike when we've lived in urban areas. There are lots of other, attention drawing insects from time to time. It's hard to ignore a preying mantis on a door frame or one of those 5 or 6cm long millipedes walking across the floor and the woodlice that roll up into defensive balls are pretty obvious too. There are grasshopper related beasts, centipedes and billions of spiders in a range of sizes just as there are lots and lots of varieties of ants. The ants usually stay outside but when they make occasional forays into the house we unleash Putin like chemical strikes against them. Despite netting on the windows and fly curtains on the doors our living space is a flutter of wings and buzzing beasties. Moths we have in squadrons. Generally they are the small, boring dun coloured ones. There are so many that all our dry goods are in plastic containers to avoid wriggling flour or undulating breadcrumbs. We get mosquitoes too but we're high enough for them not to be common. Moving up the food chain we get a lot of lizards. Without getting zoological there are smaller ones and larger ones. The large ones are maybe 15 to 20 cm long and the little ones 10 to 15 cm long. Both sizes  tend to wait near the lamps and then pounce on the flying things attracted by the light. It's still a bit of an event when a lizard suddenly runs across the wall as we're watching the telly. Thankfully in all these years we've only had one scorpion inside.

Outside there are lots of things that crawl, slither, hop and fly. Some of them, like the tens of butterflies that bob and dart around our garden are truly beautiful but some of them are a real nuisance. Like flies. They are everywhere and sometimes they make something as ordinary as sitting outside unbearable. There are lots and lots of wasps too, particularly where there is water, plenty of bees too and hovering hornet type things. Just the other day we had a near carpet of low flying wasps, or maybe bees, that sometimes landed to tunnel into the ground. We've had squirrels in the garden, they're a sort of iridescent brown colour with red tinges to their long hair (the one in the photo was watching a fiesta in Algueña when I took its blurry snap). The most common birds are wagtails, blackbirds, spuggies, collared doves and about twenty million swallows. The latter sit on the phone wires above our house and leave evidence of their stay on the cars parked below. Cuckoos and their cuckooing are pretty common at the moment and we have a few hoopoes that live close by. There are, nowadays, lots of other birds in our garden but I can't tell one from another. Oh, and it would be unusual not to see some sort of hunting bird hovering gently waiting for something to move below if you scanned the near distance.

From the front gate I've seen rabbits, hares and foxes but the wild boars, the hedgehogs and the like I generally see from a moving car. Far too often those animals have been reduced to a two dimensional version of their former selves in one of those random acts of violence I started with.

Learning things in books

You will remember that I have a theory that the majority of Spaniards classify birds into just three types:

1: Pajaros are biggish birds like blackbirds and pigeons. Pajaro in English translates as bird.

2: Pajaritos are smallish robin or sparrow sized birds. This is just the word pajaro with the termination -ito which is used for diminutives. An English example might be book and booklet or pig and piglet where the -let suggests something smaller.

3: Pato is used for birds with webbed feet, swimming birds like geese and swans. Pato translates directly as duck.

On more than one occasion I have asked a Spaniard to identify a bird, for instance, what I now know is a hoopoe or, maybe, I describe a magpie and and ask for the Spanish word for such a bird. The answer to both questions is pajaro. I find this amusing. Obviously my observation is partially true at best; there are lots of Spaniards who know birds. However, I have never been one to let the truth get in the way of a good story.

So, a little while ago I read a book about Magellan sailing around the world for the first time, proving that the Atlantic and Pacific were linked. Actually Magellan was killed in the Philippines but, the at one time mutinous, Juan Sebastián Elcano brought the Victoria home to complete that first ever circumnavigation.

In the book there is a quote which I recognised as endorsing my view. Magellan's boats, or ships if you prefer, were looking for a way through the waterway which is now called the Straits of Magellan. Part of the sentence in the book says "Exploran otras dos con igual resulatado: la bahía de los Patos, llamada así porque abundan en ella los pingüinos..." or, in English, "They explore two more (bays) with the same result: Duck Bay, so called because in it the penguins were so abundant.."

So, you see, historical, geographical and literary precedent.

Twitching

I have pals who are very knowledgeable about birds. Those same people are likely to know about plants and trees too. If I know a few birds, a handful of trees and a couple of constellations, they can wax lyrical.

I've wondered about this in the past but it was a conversation about robins that reminded me. I was talking to a couple of students about Christmas cards. Cards are not a standard thing here. I mentioned that there were robins on Christmas cards. I translated robins to petirrojos. Nothing, not a glimmer. You know, like mirlos, gorriones, tordos, alondras, lavanderas. I was just digging a bigger hole; blackbirds, sparrows, thrushes, larks and wagtails were nothing to them. They just presumed my Spanish was as crap as it is. And these were a couple of professional, well travelled students who live in a small town surrounded by countryside.

I think that it's true to say that most Britons can recognise a big handful of birds. We know that we can mitigate the bad luck of seeing a single magpie with a friendly greeting. We know that those dusk time clouds of birds that settle on city centre buildings are starlings. I have no idea why but most of us can tell a crow from a kestrel. Sparrows, wrens, geese, gulls, cormorants, swallows and jays are known to us. This doesn't seem to be a city versus country thing. Country folk might better know which finch is which and whether it's a common or arctic tern but even if city dwellers are a bit unsure about the differences between swallows, swifts and martins they know that it's not a wagtail. And  even if we don't know the birds we know the names. If somebody were to tell us that's a such and such kite as against a such and such harrier we'd believe them because we know that harriers and kites are birds.

Now, obviously, some Spaniards know birds just as well as the most clued up of Britons. They know the difference between a bullinch and a chaffinch between a goldfinch and a greenfinch or between a sparrowhawk and a hen harrier but, for the majority of the Spaniards that I have ever spoken to about this, hunters apart, birds fall into three classes.

There are birds that float - these are ducks, patos. Even swans can be ducks. Then there are little birds. Sparrow sized birds. Theses are pajaritos which has no better translation than little birds. Finally there are pajaros; birds. and that includes everything that isn't a duck or a little bird.

Nice and simple at least.

The dark swallows will return

On a good day, with a following wind, I can tell an ash from a rowan, a beech from a hornbeam. Chestnuts, sycamores or oaks are easy. The black and white job is a magpie, that brown and blue is a jay but they are all corvidae. Wagtails and blackbirds, spuggies and starlings, robins and reindeer - I can tell them apart. I don't know a lot of bird names in Spanish but I know a few - if I know the bird in English I usually know it in Spanish though those little finch jobs keep slipping my mind - pinzones and jilgueros I think.

Sometimes I know the name but I wouldn't recognise the bird if it were to gather in large numbers on my porch or peck holes in the top of my soft-top Aston Martin. Kites spring to mind as an example. They were pointed out to us as we cruised the Duero in Salamanca but I have no real idea what they look like. I'm not really much good at natural stuff. Our garden is full of colour. Maggie despairs of my lack of plant knowledge. It was only because she mentioned it yesterday that I noticed we have lilac in bloom. As we drove through Almansa the other day I confused cherry blossom with jacaranda - purple trees are purple trees.

I was knocking back weeds the other day when I heard a cuckoo. This is one of the main things I do in the garden, take out weeds. Some Spanish person told us that keeping the soil weed free was a Mediterranean tradition. Apparently rigorous weed control means that your garden will not burst into flame so easily in July or August. Weeds are green. Occasionally I realise that I have hoed out something that Maggie planted. In my opinion she should have bought something with a bit of colour. If it's coloured it may be a flower. If it's green it's obviously a weed.

The cuckoos have been on the go for a little while now. I mentioned this to a Spaniard who looked blank at the news. I suppose the Spanish do not have a history of letters to the editor of The Times. Maybe they don't have Gilbert White either but I presume they have something similar?

Anyway, so I'm talking to my English class about collective nouns. We've done team and flock and herd and I say we have more which are less common - a gaggle of geese -  no need to write that down I say, it's not an important or useful word. Although I think the word goose, in Spanish, is a dead normal word, an everyweek if not an everyday word, most of the students don't. We're getting silly now so I mention a murmuration of starlings but it takes me much longer to explain what a starling is than it does to explain the term murmuration. By the time we're onto a venue of vultures - surely they know vultures? - I am really in a hole.

I have a pal. On the rare occasions twenty or thirty years ago, when she persuaded me that walking in the countryside had any value, she would hop around woodland lanes pointing out coltsfoot, stinking jenny or celandines. It was a bit like Ivor Cutler's dad - "Loook! A thistle," and then, "Looook! another thistle." We soon knew the thistle. She told me her mum had told her about plants and animals because she was a country lass.

I think we Brits know a bit about birds and trees and plants. Some know more than others of course. For many of us I suspect it's a bit superficial - if it's got the wings at the front instead of in the centre it's a hawk - kestrel? If it's at the seaside it's a seagull. Long legs? heron? crane? egret at a push? And if it's on a pond and likes bread it's a duck.

We live in the countryside in Culebrón and in Pinoso. I am consistently surprised when my mention, in Spanish, of nightingales, swallows, sparrows, robins, voles, shrews, hares, badgers, hedgehogs, nettles or thistles leads to bewilderment amongst my students. I would have thought that all country folk would have known their way around the local fauna and flora but apparently not.

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The blog title is from a poem by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

Volverán las oscuras golondrinas

en tu balcón sus nidos a colgar,

y, otra vez, con el ala a sus cristales

 jugando llamarán;

The dark swallows will return

To your balcony to hang their nests

And again with their wings at your window

They will call as they play.