Portugese paradise
My son Brent's farmhouse is deep in the hills of southern Portugal. He and his wife are ballet dancers and earned the money for this hide-away performing for a year in Holland. The Nutcracker, among other modern works.
At each of the curtain calls at the end of every performance they would whisper to each other: "One more cork oak". For that is what surrounds them there. The Alentejo, as in southern Spain, is the land of this evergreen oak with its curious thick, soft bark that supplies much of the wine industry with its stoppers.
A forest fire swept through their hundred trees and much of the surrounding forest, six years ago. They were lucky to get out alive with their two children. Their gas bottles exploded and hurtled half a mile away and some of the olive trees perished but the farmhouse was saved.
This fire risk is a constant threat. So on my visit there last week to see all the forest flowers and the strange birds that inhabit this unique habitat, I prepared myself for the inevitable disappointments.
All those sweet-smelling cistus bushes, providing millions of flowers like stars in the night sky, a habitat for all kinds of birds and butterflies, are like petrol to the hungry flame of the south and have to be bulldozed away, now. Nightingales were singing away all night long under the full moon and in the morning last week, but by now much of their habitat will have been destroyed.
Wandering around in the bright spring sunshine, I thought I was back in the sort of paradise I once knew as a boy, when nightingales sang in May from almost every bush in the hedgerows and oak woods of southern England.
Wonderful too, was the song of woodlarks in the dark forest of the night. This is a simpler song than that full-throated ease of the nightingale. It is a simple, falling trill in the minor key. It is as haunting as the sound of wolves in mountains, or a lonely lion's roar in the Serengeti. Their song spins a trail of wilderness for a thousand miles from western Europe to the Caspian Sea.
No wonder the French composer Messian transcribed their song to the piano after hearing the song in the woods south of Paris. Tawny owl and nightjar, nightingale and curlew entered the classical repertoire as well. We have just a few woodlarks in Sussex too, in Ashdown Forest and at Chapel Common (see this week's walk) so we too can have an idea of these sounds of the south.
The woodlarks in Portugal should survive the cultivation of forests for they nest more on the sheep-grazed meadows. I listened also to cuckoos among the cork oaks, birds which are also becoming few and far between in Sussex during the past decade. Sardinian warblers darted about over the cistus bushes, with goldfinches, serins, greenfinches and chaffinches. Easiest of all to see around this little farmhouse were the woodchat shrikes.
Brent managed to photograph one as it sang at the top of a cork oak 20 yards from his kitchen window. He used his digital camera, and this technical wizardry amazes me, for I still live in the dark ages with my oId Pentax and had not a hope of capturing the cocky little bird with its chestnut cap as it trilled away, repeating the songs of other birds it had mimicked, before flying off back into the cistus bushes.
Will its nest survive the bull-dozing? It may. Lots of corners of the forest are left, otherwise all these birds that I have mentioned would not come back here year after year. Two species that are safe in this monoculture that supplies cork to the world since they nest in crevices and hollows of the trees are hoopoes and crested tits. The latter are like blue tits but have an enormous crest. Others are short-toed treecreepers and wrynecks in this fragile paradise of the deep south.
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Weather for Chichester
Monday 28 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 13 C to 20 C
Wind Speed: 29 mph
Wind direction: West
Tomorrow
Sunny spells
Temperature: 12 C to 22 C
Wind Speed: 14 mph
Wind direction: West
