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 ar...