Notes from Sunny Portugal

Oooo the heat, the sun, the ladies!! Why cant this be sunny Sunderland. alass I was only here for a few days, but what a few days.

Soaring white stork

I stepped forth from the airport foyer to be greeted by over a dozen wheeling white storks directly overhead, what a sight; I was definitely in Portugal. The sun was shinning and on the way to the hotel, amidst the bouts of childish ‘lads’ humour I spotted numerous Mediterranean delights, hoopoes, a roller and several azure winged magpies and a host of small birds.

In the evening and quiet periods even in grog I noticed some lost UK prizes, things that were once just as common in the UK. Towards the end of the day, the sky above the town was filled with the screams of thousands of swifts and trills of martins and swallows. Walking the streets, the archways and eaves of new and old buildings alike had scores of nests beneath and nobody was batting and eyelid, nobody was knocing them down or denying them nesting opportunity.

Everywhere were ‘spuggies’ your common or garden house sparrow’, and the song of crickets and cicada’s, the real song of the ‘Med’, a wonderful evening chorus of bird and insect life.

Thinking back I remember, my granny used to have hearth crickets in her terraced cottage’s open hearth that would sing gently through the evenings whilst she poured scalding water over me in the tin bath in front of the fire.

What else did we used to have around our homes?

They were all here, in abundance too. Some slightly less welcome than others of course, like the many cockroaches cleaning the streets at night of abandoned junk food, but nevertheless now still largely absent from our sterile living environs. We never hear hearth crickets anymore and the sound of screaming swifts and chirping spuggies is no longer as apparent as it once was.

Peering over garden walls into secluded corners often brought a glimpse of a scurrying reptile, maybe a wall lizard or even, once I saw a large snake, probably a Montpellier. None of which would be allowed within a hundred miles of our safe urban homes but here all are tolerated as natural pest controllers. We were all in trigued and even through the beer goggles saw entertainment around the pool one day as a spuggie caught a very large cockroach and proceeded to bash the hell out of it before dismantling it and carting the bits off, “and you thought sparrows were seed eaters”. Well this one showed one of the reasons why they are declining so much ,they need protein, insects, bugs to feed their young. Little wonder our fields and gardens are so impoverished, as everytime we see an insect we reach for the poison spray

Stork nesting on street lights Faro, Portugal

Down on the golf courses and new apartments where you might expect northing they were going to extraordinary lengths to accommodate nesting white storks, other wildlife and a host of amphibians of all shapes and sizes. This view ,from someone who has worked in conservation for many years and dealt with developers ‘nightmares’ in the UK over and over
again was very refreshing but even more ironic given Portugal’s present economic plight.

Despite this, the key words that were obvious were, ‘tolerance’ and ‘acceptance’.

In the foyer of the hotel I picked up a local magazine where an article on the Iberian lynx stood out. Almost certainly extinct in Portugal it is now subject to a captive breeding initiative for future re-establishment, again against the country’s economic background they are determined to make this project succeed.

You just want to live in a country that has these in, well I do anyway, stunning!

The main factor for the decline in the Iberian lynx has been the disappearance of its main prey item, the humble rabbit, a result of human introduced diseases. The knock on consequence of no lynx has been an increase in smaller predators which in turn has seen impacts on prey species so the whole system is now out of balance because one link in the chain is missing.

The crux of this Iberian waffle is that predators are essential, especially top predators as it is these that create balance in the system. The UK is blessed with so few creatures that fulfil this roll, all have given way to ‘UK man’s’ intolerance.

Just to demonstrate this point as I alighted back in sunny (not) Newcastle my phone informed me of an incident in Northumberland; where hot on the heels of last weeks report, an otter had actually been killed by dogs ‘accidentally’. As I drove from this airport, depressed by weather and news, the fields were not lifting with small brown birds or multi coloured ones for that matter they were sterile agricultural spaces inhabited by nothing but pigeons and pheasants.

Somewhere out there we need to take a long hard look at ourselves and our priorities and give our heads a shake.