Iberia (37 page)

The resident bird which dominates the scene in winter is the
cattle egret, a snowy-white bird with yellow legs, a long yellowish
bill and a silhouette much like a heron’s or a small stork’s. They
get their name from their habit of feeding not only with cattle
but on them, so that if you are wandering through Las Marismas
it is not unlikely that you will see a sleek and coiffured little egret
riding like a debutante between the horns of some massive fighting
bull as he grazes in the swampland, and I have often watched a
herd of bulls and a flock of egrets as they blended together in such
harmony that one would have thought they had been created as
halves of a symbiosis. Certainly they form one of the most
attractive features of the year. Regardless of where one sees them,
the egrets are winsome birds, delicate in motion on the land and
unforgettable in their broad-winged flight. They range far from
the swamps and can often be seen in the fields near Sevilla, looking
for insects, but no matter where they spend their days, at night
they return to the swamps in flocks that number in the hundreds.
They can be seen in all seasons but are most appreciated in winter,
when they have least competition, as the total bird population is
then at its smallest.

Primarily, winter in Las Marismas is a resting time, for the
birds, for the animals, for the seed plants and for the men; but to
see the swamps in this season is an intellectual challenge. Can you
imagine what they will look like in summer? I failed the test, for
I was unable to visualize this watery world, this endless waste of
tussock and salt, becoming other than what it then was. I could
not imagine the transformation it was to undergo.

The rains cease. Evaporation begins, and with each inch that the
water falls, grass springs up to take its place. What had seemed,
only a few weeks ago, seventy-percent water, now seems
ninety-percent grassy meadowland, but if one steps off established
paths, he sinks in up to his knees, for the underlying water will
remain until well into June. As the waters recede, the swamps
cease being attractive to ducks and geese, who fly north in huge
flocks to the thawing lakes of Russia; but as seed grasses appear,
with their assurance of food, large numbers of terns and coots
arrive to set up housekeeping, and the men of Sanlúcar de
Barrameda, the town at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, prepare
their boats for one of the strangest harvests in Europe.

It begins when grass has fairly well covered the swamps, so that
horses and cows can be led in to forage. They eat such grass as
shows above the water, in which they stand up to their knees, but
as they feed they leave behind shreds of grass that float on the
surface and these the terns and coots collect for their nests, which
they build on circular flat constructions that float on water and
stretch in all directions for miles.

Now comes the harvest. In these semi-floating nests the birds
lay large quantities of eggs, and for as long as men have lived along
Las Marismas they have poled their flat-bottomed boats into the
marsh in spring, collecting these birds’ eggs. They work in teams
of six or seven men to a large boat, from which small skiffs, each
bearing a single man, set out to explore tiny rivulets, gathering
eggs which will later be sold for food. Year after year they rob the
nests of hundreds of thousands of eggs, but the bird population
seems not to suffer for enough eggs are overlooked to ensure the
perpetuation of the species.

Only once did I see a team of egg collectors in action. They
came, as usual, from Sanlúcar, one of my favorite towns in Spain,
a sun-baked, miserable dump of a place that looks much as it did
in the days of Columbus and Magellan, who knew it well, a most
authentic remnant of old Spain. Five men entered the area in a
large boat painted blue and boasting an outboard motor. In the
boat they carried a small skiff which they launched in the marshes.
The man who poled it through the shallow waters was
indefatigable, for he moved swiftly from one floating nest to the
next, scooping up enormous numbers of eggs. How many did he
gather in the short time I saw him? Probably five or six hundred,
and he had touched only a small portion of those available to
him. The men in the blue boat were drinking wine and
encouraging him, and I never understood what the division of
labor was supposed to be. Perhaps the man in the skiff was the
only worker; the others may have come from Sanlúcar for the
ride.

As the grasses grow and the land begins to solidify, small land
birds begin to crowd Las Marismas in flocks of such magnitude
that most Americans have no experience with which to compare
them. Many arrive from Africa and the Holy Land, and I shall
never forget my astonishment, one spring day when I had
arranged a picnic in Las Marismas for a group of friends, at seeing,
near the clearing in which we ate, two of my favorite birds from
Israel, the long-billed, inquisitive hoopoe and the brightly colored
bee-eater. ‘Are they native here?’ I asked an expert who was
sharing our picnic. ‘No, they migrate from Africa but they arrive
so regularly each year that we think of them as native.’

Even in spring, when the swamps have begun to look like land,
it is the water birds that one remembers best, for now the avocets
arrive, those delicate, long-legged birds with the upturned bills;
I had not known the avocet until I spent some time in Colorado,
where they were common, but the Spanish ones seem larger and
more colorful. The stilts come now, too, and the slender-billed
terns, so that what lakes remain are crowded with fascinating life,
even though the spectacular ducks and geese have gone.

Summer is something to see in Las Marismas! Even though storm
clouds occasionally hang over the Atlantic, the sky over the land
becomes an incandescent arc producing temperatures that go
well above a hundred degrees in the shade, if any can be found.
Day after day the sky hangs there, motionless, relentless, drying
up the waters and bringing the grasses to seed. What few streams
remain are covered with golden pollen, and even their banks are
barren for yards on each side. Young birds are everywhere, feeding
on fallen seeds and slapping their awkward feet on the baked earth
as they look for water. Jack rabbits appear in large numbers; they
attract fox and lynx, who hunt them constantly, but it is from an
unexpected source that the food supply becomes abundant.

As the accidental streams that crisscross Las Marismas dry up,
multitudes of fat carp search frantically for the permanent rivers
which will sustain them through the summer, and in great
numbers they move in obedience to faulty instinct from one
evaporating fragment of water to the next, until at last they perish
in vast numbers on dry earth. At times their glistening bodies
completely cover what had lately been a lake, but before they have
a chance to rot and thus contaminate Las Marismas, flocks of
kites and vultures, sensing the impending tragedy while flying
over North Africa, swoop in and help the local birds clean up the
carcasses.

The bird that seems to represent summer at its best is the heron.
The large white ones appear in flocks of up to six thousand at one
time, the smaller in flocks of twenty thousand, ranging over the
entire area in white dignity. How can so many birds find food?
They eat fish when they find them, and frogs, lizards and the
larger insects. They scour the dried earth for remnants of the carp
and uncover so much food that they prosper where other birds
would fail.

A bizarre tragedy now occurs and one that I would have
thought improbable had I not seen it. Among the hordes of
aquatic birds that resided here in the spring, and I am speaking
not of hundreds but of hundreds of thousands, most have left,
but there are some who nested here, and they seem unable to
believe that these watery lands are going to dry up, so in spite of
mounting evidence in late June and early July, they linger on.
Now the remorseless drought of late summer catches up with
them and for some weeks the three-month-old ducklings search
frantically for ponds which they knew existed in a given spot only
a month before, but they find only sun-baked earth. Sometimes
they march on webbed feet, three or four thousand in a small
area, searching vainly for water, and one by one they perish.

Now the raptores move in on silent wings to kill off the
survivors. The sharp-eared lynx darts out from his hiding place
to catch his supper, while the fox and the rat keep watch. The
mournful pilgrimage continues for the better part of a week, this
noisy march of hopeless ducks trying to find water, and then Las
Marismas is silent once more.

The extraordinary thing about this season is that in drying, the
once-muddy areas of land become a perfect highway for
automobiles—flat, even, undisturbed and so hard that cars throw
no dust. I have several times driven far out into the summer
swamps at thirty miles an hour, and when something interesting
loomed ahead, at forty or even forty-five, and in this way have
covered twenty or thirty miles with no inconvenience but with a
sense of flying low in an airplane over a placid bay. Of course, the
driver must have some general knowledge of where the permanent
waterways are, for even if the water has evaporated, as is
sometimes the case, the vanished rivulet leaves such a depression
that the car could not cross it. Except for this limitation one can
ride for hours across Las Marismas and see the skeletons of carp.

If one were to see Las Marismas for the first time in midsummer
he would find it difficult to believe that the place should be called
a swampland, for there is certainly no evidence to justify such a
name. Perhaps

In summer many men come into Las Marismas, some to tend
cattle, others to hunt and still others to wander through the
wilderness as their ancestors have done for generations. The
immense expanse of sky and the weirdness of the absolutely flat
landscape exert a powerful appeal to these men, and one of their
delights is to shoot a rabbit, skin it and then spread-eagle it on a
structure made of three sticks tied together in the form of a Cross
of Lorraine. The upright member of the cross is left long, so that
it can be used as a handle for holding the rabbit over a fire of hot
coals until the meat is hard and crisp. Salt is rubbed on the
finished meat, which is cut into thin strips and mixed with raw
tomatoes, peppers, much onion, garlic, olive oil and vinegar.
‘Maybe the best salad a man can eat,’ those who live along Las
Marismas claim. For as long as men can remember, huntsmen
who prowl the swamps have been entitled to shoot all the rabbits
they need for food; the most recent estimate is that about eight
thousand are taken each year.

But as the knowing men cross the hard-baked swamp they are
careful to watch out for a menace which through the years has
taken the lives of many animals and occasionally even of men.
This is the ever-present ojo (eye), which stands invitingly here
and there in attractive spots, a kind of minute oasis with a central
eye of water, perhaps a swampy spring or well, and surrounding
green grass and shrubs and sometimes even small trees. On the
great arid swamp these ojos are most tempting, for they promise
both water and shade, but they are treacherous because they also
contain quicksand of a most virulent sort, and once it grabs hold
of a leg it rarely lets go. Domestic animals wander into the ojo
alone, get stuck and never break loose. If they die, they do so
beside the carcass of some boar or deer that got stuck in exactly
the same way a week before. Within a few hours the bones are
white; vultures keep watch on the ojos.

No matter how well one knows Las Marismas he occasionally
meets with surprises. One day as I was riding past a section of the
swamp I saw long rows of what looked to be human beings, each
bent forward from the waist as if gleaning a field for some lost
object. I stopped and crossed the intervening land to see what
they were doing; much of the land was under water but ridges
had been left as footpaths, and after I had walked along these for
a few hundred yards I saw that the bent-over people were women,
with heavy nets over their heads and faces, and that they were
engaged in transplanting rice, digging handfuls of young rice
plants from the seed bed, where they grew in close profusion, and
carrying them to the larger fields where they would be
transplanted, one stalk at a time in the mud. The women were
thus required to stand in water and bend over the soggy fields for
eight and ten hours at a time, exactly as other women were doing
in Asia.

The nets over the face served two purposes. If a woman bent
close to the water on a sunny day for extended periods, the
reflected rays of the sun would bounce up at her face and produce
a sunburn that might in time cause cancer. More immediately,
the nets kept away the hordes of mosquitoes that infested Las
Marismas in summer, making it at times almost unbearable. ‘If
you’re going into the swamps,’ Spaniards told me repeatedly,
‘take along some 612.’ This was a potent insect-repellent that
worked.

And occasionally as one penetrates the swamps he sees on the
horizon a strange brown animal larger than a bull and thinks for
the moment that his eyes are deceiving him. Then the animal
moves, in an undulating manner, stops, twists his long neck and
raises his long-nosed face. It’s a camel. His ancestors were brought
over from Africa in the latter part of the eighteenth century for
use among the sand dunes around Sanlúcar; they adapted well to
Spain, but peasants protested that they frightened them and that
if God had wanted such ungainly beasts on Spanish soil He would
have seen to the matter. Men interested in working the area tried
to explain that the camels were harmless, but to no avail. In 1828
all those in the Sanlúcar area were rounded up, transported across
the Gaudalquivir and set free. There cannot be many left, and I
suppose that within another decade they will have disappeared.