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.
