Iberia

by James A. Michener

  Over the vast area one sees mostly the movement of birds, thousands upon thousands of them, birds that have known Siberia and the most remote fjords of Norway, that will spend their summers on the moors of Scotland and in the forests of Germany. They live in tremendous families, each associating with its own kind, but a single area of marshland may contain fifty different species, waiting through the long winter till their summer feeding places in the north have thawed.

  On the thirteenth day of January each year, in obedience to one of those unfathomable rules that govern birds, storks fly north from Africa to their chimneys of Holland and Germany and continue to do so for some weeks, so that the Spanish have a saying which could be translated as:

  At the day of St. Blas

  The storks do pass.

  Why they go north in midwinter has never been explained, but in midsummer they will go south, as if their calendar were askew.

  But there are also, in these months, the birds that live permanently in the Spanish swamps, and in some ways these are the most interesting because they are the ones that we shall see in all seasons, like old friends. There is no more beautiful small bird in Europe than the goldfinch of Las Marismas, a tiny gem of color and design. I have watched a group of goldfinches for an entire morning and have never tired of their display, the flash of their color against the brown swamp, the chattering of their family life. Large numbers are trapped here and sold throughout Europe, for they make fine pets, and whenever I saw them caged in other parts of Spain, I thought of Las Marismas, for they seemed to take the swamps with them.

  At the opposite end, so far as size is concerned, was quite another bird. I remember one day, when I was on the Atlantic Ocean edge of the swamps, seeing a huge creature fly into the crown of a tree. It was slightly smaller than a griffon vulture, which are common throughout Las Marismas, and of a different character. Since it remained motionless in the tree, I was able to study it at leisure, but it was not a bird with which I was familiar; later I learned that I had seen an imperial eagle, the noblest inhabitant of the swamps. There are partridge, too, and magpies, and crested coots, and purple gallinules, and a species of owl.

  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.

  SPRING

  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.

  Lean matador, chunky author trudging home after a day studying the bulls.

  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

  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 fall
en 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.

  Concha y Sierra brand painted in whitewash on a wooden shield in the testing ring. The horn scratches remind the visitor that the bulls of this ranch have given tremendous glory to some bullfighters and have taken the lives of others.

  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 marshland would be a better translation of the Spanish, or even the Scottish moorland, because when dry, Las Marismas has many characteristics of the latter; but considering the area as it exists throughout four seasons, swampland is not an inappropriate description.

  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.

  The kangaroos that were introduced somewhat later than the camels have already vanished, as have the monkeys which were brought to Sanlúcar from nearby Gibraltar. So far as climate and food are concerned, there is no reason why monkeys should not have prospered in Las Marismas, but once more the peasants of Sanlúcar, who must have
been an unusually suspicious lot, protested that the almost-human faces of the monkeys scared them at night, and that if God had wanted such beasts … The last monkeys were killed off about fifty years ago.

  More rewarding than the camels that one occasionally sees are the melons, which are among Spain’s best. They grow luxuriantly wherever sandy soil remains soft enough during the early summer to permit the vines to mature; most often the blazing sun absorbs all moisture and the plants wither, but if they survive, the fruit they yield is delicious. Apart from the rice, it is the only edible thing grown here commercially.

  But whatever the season, Las Marismas is primarily the residence of birds, and what happens to men or camels or melons is a secondary concern, and so as summer ends one looks again to the sky and sees aloft the great bustards, accompanied by their cousins the little bustards, coming to glean the hard ground for seeds and bees and insects. They fly in splendid circles and land in two or three hops. Their quick eyes scan an area in seconds to determine where the good feeding will be, and they pick the land clean, quarreling among themselves as to who saw which first. When they take their short hops and rise again into the air they see below them only a parched earth, blazing in heat as great as that of a desert, with the somnolent Guadalquivir wandering southward through the middle of Las Marismas, and at its mouth the sunburnt adobe of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, blistering in the sun as it did in the days when Columbus stopped there.

  AUTUMN