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.

Swarming things that swarm on the earth

A few days ago, in Galicia, where we were, you needed a light jacket in the evening. Daytime temperatures were low but, with the sun, it was perfectly pleasant. A Coruña was the worst, weatherwise. As we joined the crowds to protest the homophobic killing of Samuel Luiz it was bucketing down. I know it rains a lot up North but I'd underestimated the Northern Europeanness of the Galician climate, my shorts got a week off and I had to buy more socks. Sandals and trainers with invisible socks were just too Mediterranean.

Back in Alicante the sun was cracking the flags. The news was full of weather warnings for everywhere except where we were. Pinoso is quite high up and the temperature only got to about 38ºC but other places in the province got over 40ºC. On the journey back, and yesterday too, we had dust laden skies and high temperatures.

So we returned from temperate climes with greenery and rivers to the dustiness of Alicante. Yesterday was the first full day back so there were sweeping and garden tasks to be done. I don't like flies much at all but I really can't bear it when the little buggers land in the corner of my mouth for a quick feed. Horrid. They were doing it a lot yesterday.

After dark the flies go away but hundreds of other beasties come out to play. The room I generally use for my computer work opens directly onto a patio. Beetles, often caught up in the fluffiness of airborne seed carriers, process across the floor, the occasional lost ant runs around in circles, the moths settle on the wall not expecting the predatory small lizard and tens and tens of other small walking and flying and jumping things come and go. If it's true that 95% of all life on earth is plant then there must be an awful lot of plants.

I was typing. A small iridescent beetly shaped thing walked back and forth amongst the keys of my keyboard, a little moth had taken up residence below F6 and just above &, there was an ant too investigating the space bar. Something very, very small and white was negotiating the forest of the grey hairs on my forearm. The room was awash with life other than mine. I was tired, the blog wasn't going well. Time for bed I thought, I'll finish it tomorrow. As I headed for the toothbrush I saw something twiglike on the red cloth of one of the armchairs in the room. I presumed a cat had carried the debris in on its fur. I went to remove it and the cricket like beast, surprised by my touch, bounced into my face before disappearing under the bed.

A friend commented on my lauding of the heat in Alicante but I must say it's glad to be home, sockless and coatless.

Warming up

Last night, well this morning I suppose, the windows started to rattle and the wind howled and the thunder thundered and the lightning lit the bedroom from time to time. When I got up a couple of hours later the sun was shining on the puddles on the patio and the cats were tiptoeing from dry spot to dry spot. It's a sign of the time of year. Like my feet hurting. Neither is new. I've complained about this, the feet that is, a lot. It stems from walking miles in flat bottomed sandals at Benicassim pop festival but the foot pain was always bad each summer long before the Benicassim debacle. Really the trouble starts as I move from proper shoes with proper socks to sandals and lighter shoes worn with those funny short socks. In Spanish the socks are called pinkies. Isn't that a great name?

So Summer, early Summer when it's still Spring, is big storms and uncomfortable feet. And flies, hundreds of flies, thousands of flies. No, not just flies really; all sorts of small flying and walking things with myriad legs. Some of them bite, some sting, some amuse the cats or sing long and loud into the night. The cats were keeping their distance from a small but very hissy snake in the living room yesterday morning. I escorted it out into the field opposite wearing big gardening gloves (me not the snake). The toads have stopped though; I haven't seen any toads for a while. Sometime in the winter I kept finding toads all over the place - they seemed to like the shower in the guest room especially but also just the corner under the computer desk. The wasps and bees are back too. The wasps are really attracted to water. If the hose isn't turned off at the tap it drips and forms a shallow puddle on the patio and that water attracts a large but mono-specific cloud of wasps (should that adjective be unispecific, unispecies, monospecies?). I hear that people who have pools find this waspish determination to drink water less than amusing. I don't know why the swallows, which are particularly talkative at this time of year, don't swoop down on these various clouds of fast food. Maybe they do, maybe that's why they fly acrobatically close to my head every now and again. And at dusk the chattering of swallows becomes the clicking whistling of the bats.

But I realised this is because it's now definitely summer. It's easy to tell when it's summer in Spain, in Alicante at least. It becomes warm on a regular basis. There is no doubt about it as there is in the UK. The shower is a good indicator of this. In winter I wait for the water to run warm from the distant gas water heater but, by now, if I'm impatient, even the cold water isn't cold enough to be unusable from the get go. The mirror doesn't mist up either but that might be because the window is open. And doors and windows stay open. I have to remember that we need to be security conscious and lock this and that.

Lots more motor traffic in the lane too. The apricot tractor went back and forth and back and forth with the trailer piled high with blue plastic boxes full of fruit. I suppose that's why people have to buy their shelves from Ikea now because nobody uses those orange boxes that I fastened together as shelves when I was a poor student. But there are lots more traffic movements in general. I suppose there are maintenance tasks even if they are not harvesting. I'm certainly locked in a struggle with the the Culebrón plant life. The weeds can grow faster than I can knock them down - I swear that some can grow 15cms from one day to the next. The mulberries fell onto the drive to be squashed underfoot, under-tyre, and turned into an oozing pulp that had to be swept away, now the nisperos are falling off the trees in significant quantities and just to add to the fun some sort of ball things, seed pods I suppose, are tumbling off the palm tree in dustpan flexing quantities. If my fight with the plants, on a garden scale is grim and unceasing then I suppose the farmers are locked into something even more titanic. Mind you their hoes are bigger than mine.

No doubt about it though. It's warming up and it'll soon be my very favourite time of year here in Spain, when the countryside just heaves and sighs as the sun beats down. And I can crack open the ice cold beer without any feelings of protestant guilt.