Spanish Secrets: A Wild, Wild, Wildlife
Storks fly by while you tend the lawn. Frogs make enough din to remind you of car alarms. Wild boar wander in the lane. Craig Briggs introduces us to wild, wild Galicia.
My personal experiences of British natural wildlife prior to leaving the UK for our new life in Galicia, Northern Spain, were few and far between.
A few distant glimpses of town foxes darting across the road as car head-lights hit them, and the backside of a badger disappearing into a hedgerow which I saw while travelling to work early one morning.
Oh and I almost forgot. The hedgehog which narrowly escaped being impaled on my garden fork as I weeded the garden.
Here in Galicia not only is the wildlife different but also the frequency of sightings.
Take last weekend for example.
With spring well and truly in full swing, and daytime temperatures in the 20's, Melanie and I are preparing part of the garden for seeding a lawn. Throughout the day storks fly overhead, thankfully carrying nothing more than food or nesting material in their beaks.
The village of Canabal where we now live sprang up around a long since closed brick factory. It has been left with a permanent reminder of its once grander history - a large chimney stack,.
It’s this chimney stack that brings the storks back year after year. This year we have six birds nesting.
Another legacy of this industrial past are the many ponds left in the old quarry workings. This abundance of water, particularly in the dry summer months attracts a host of much larger wildlife.
One of our neighbours has landscaped one of these ponds, which is now on his land, to make a small lake. This has attracted thousands of frogs which in a few months time, after the mating season, will bear more than a passing resemblance to the sound of a car alarm.
And should we have some rain in the evenings it brings the frogs out onto the lane in front of the house in almost biblical proportions, -which is not too bad if you're on foot, but trying to avoid them when driving home after a night out is a different kettle of fish.
It was the weekend of the wine festival in our local parish council. The parish village is ironically called Sober, the humour of which is completely lost on the Spanish. Sober is home to the Amandi wine zone one of the most prestigious wine growing zones in the area. As you might imagine is a very popular festival.
We'd arranged to go to the festival with some English friends, David and Marie, who moved here about a year ago and live in the nearby village of Ferreira de Panton.
In a complete contrast to England the whole event is an enjoyable celebration. Despite the fact that copious amounts of free wine are drunk, there is no drunkenness or rowdiness.
There is dancing in the streets, and Marie was even serenaded by a traditionally dressed player from Madrid who knelt on one knee whilst playing his guitar to sing a beautiful Ballard - though somewhat out of tune.
Returning home from the festival we had just turned into the lane to our house when we saw what we thought was a dog. As we drew closer it became clear that it wasn't a dog at all. There were three animals - but they were definitely not dogs.
To our amazement, not two meters from the car, were three quite young wild boar.
One by one, and without any real urgency, they clambered down the drainage ditch at the edge of the lane, over a small tumbled down wall and off into the night.
I think it's safe to say that we really do have a wild, wild, wildlife.
