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.

Out for a run in the motor

I went to Castilla la Mancha yesterday. Just the bottom bit, the part nearest home, bordering Murcia. I'd intended to go further, to a place called Argamasilla de Alba, one of the villages that claims to be the unnamed village where the Knight of the Sad Countenance lived, the one at the start of the el Quijote book. Then it dawned just how far it was so, when I was just about to join the Albacete bound motorway, I had a look at a paper map that I had in the car and chose a place that was in the middle of a bundle of mountains where the roads looked very wiggly. 

The place was called Riópar. I made a bit of a diversion to stop at a reservoir which the sign said was 6kms from the main road. It was actually over 18kms to the dam wall but it was an interesting run nonetheless. It was also the first time in Spain that the "beware deer" sign was telling the truth, at least for me - four deer bounded in front of the car and disappeared into the long grass. Riópar turned out to have next to nothing to look at. The bar I went to for a drink and a sandwich didn't even have toilets but they did offer sliced tomatoes on the sandwich which was another Spanish first for me.

In Riópar I set the SatNav for Alcaraz, which I vaguely thought I may have visited before. Jane, the SatNav voice, didn't get at all angry when I took no notice of her at the turn for Riópar el Viejo. Again there was nothing much to look at but an old looking church and a nicely disordered cemetery. On the drive to Alcaraz the car climbed through the sun dappled pine forests (well they looked like pines to me) and went through yet another pass that was over 1,000 metres - I'd gone over one earlier that was over 1,100 metres (3,608 ft) - and even as I drove home across a flat plain there was another. High country. Alcaraz was nice enough, I had been there before, with a main square full of big impressive buildings. There were nice views to the olive tree planted hillside opposite but in the whole day I probably walked less than a couple of kilometres. Most of the time I was in the car, windows open, radio loud enough to compete with the wind noise and often going slowly enough to appreciate the countryside I was passing through. 

And it was the countryside that I enjoyed most. Just driving through Spain. Whenever we go to the neighbouring town of Yecla Maggie comments on the beauty of wide valley, thick with vineyards, that we pass through. From Jumilla to the A30 motorway the road glides between mountain chains to left and right which, I don't know quite how to describe it, just reek of Spain. The colours, the dark hills, the bright crops, the dusty yet green valley floor, flat but rolling, tranquil yet always active. 

As I drove up the hillside from Riópar to Alcaraz the deserted road twisted and snaked like so many that I've driven in Spain. I could have stopped to take photos tens of times but I've tried it before. Photos don't capture the heat, the sounds, the smells or even the look. I've grown to really appreciate the landscapes we have all around us and even on the humdrum runs it often strikes me how beguiling it all is. But I did stop for one last snap, not far from Hellín. The plain went on and on and on as it so often does in Castilla la Mancha and the colours were stupendous. At least I think so.

Mind you I should add that I grew to love the Cambridgeshire Fens too so maybe I'm easily pleased.

With no added preservatives

I went to have a quick look at the tanganilla competition in Culebrón this morning as part of the weekend long fiesta. Tanganilla, I think, also goes by the name of caliche, hito, bolinche and chito and there seem to be variations of it all over Spain.

Tanganilla isn't a difficult game to organise. A line in the dirt, a 10cm high (or thereabouts) wooden rod and some 7cm across (or thereabouts) metal discs plus some players - maybe a referee. The rod is set up about 20 metres from the line - I understand that one of the variations, and there are lots, says that the distance is 22 strides. Isn't that the length of a cricket pitch? The basic idea is to knock over the rod but from watching there seemed to be other rules about how close the thrown discs were to the fallen rod. Amongst the many regional variations a common one seems to involve placing a coin on top of the rod and then measuring the distance of the discs from the coin once it has been knocked off the rod. Dead easy and complicated at the same time - like pétanque or crown green bowling. I thought that the game was one of the innovations of last year's fiesta but a reader of the blog put me right - apparently it was a feature of fiestas in the past. The reader reckons it disappeared in 2008 or 2009. Obviously as my gut expands my memory shrinks because I don't remember having seen the game in the village before. If innovation isn't correct then revival is and I thought it was a good thing. A traditional game, no cost a bit of fun plus an easy opportunity to drink beer.

The other day in my English class, where I nearly always start off with any sort of Q&A session, to get everybody warmed up, I asked about fast food. Do you prefer burgers, pizza or kebabs? What's your favourite fast food? blah, blah. It's not the first time I've asked similar questions. When someone answers hamburgers I then ask whether they prefer McDonald's, Burger King, Fosters Hollywood, TGB and so on. Then I ask what they order?, what side order?, what drink?, diet or standard? But it didn't go that way with my Pinoso students. They liked burgers OK but they liked the ones from the local butchers or the ones that their Gran makes. It's the first time that I've asked the series of questions outside of a reasonably big town. The Pinoseros were re-assuringly dismissive of the floppy, semi warm burgers that the chains have a tendency to serve up. It was particularly re-assuring because Maggie and I have been shocked recently to see the queues of traffic waiting in the Drive Thru lane at the McDonald's in Petrer as we leave the cinema. Spaniards tend to like and enjoy food and it seems strange that they would queue for burgers.

I suppose the difference is that Petrer, or the side by side towns of Elda and Petrer, have a population of about 90,000 - somewhat larger than the fewer than 8,000 of Pinoso. Tanganilla and home made burgers - symbols of a rural idyll?

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.