Bog Myrtle & Peat

It’s hard to imagine that storks could ever lose their novelty. They’re enormous, and the rattling displays which accompany every departure and return of birds from the nest is uproarious. Necks are bent back to unthinkable angles, wings slump deadly down with elation as the beaks are made to snip and clatter like sewing machines. Watching them from the corner of a medieval plaza in the last gasp of blue dusk, the heavy birds come gliding in above the lamplight, catching an orange glow on their undersides like aeroplanes which pass above a sunset. And in the morning when the town is raucous with swallows and starlings, the returns are reversed for a departure. One bird heads out to the fields and the riverlands, while the other stays to shade the eggs or newborn, gawky chicks. It’s the wrong way round for a Scotsman who has only ever understood incubation as a means of bringing up the temperature. In Spain, the eggs and chicks can be scorched by the staring sun. So with eyes slit to a gentle dwam, the parent bird repels the heat like a parasol.

But they’re nothing like a centre of attention here amongst the work and business of local folk. The best way to mark yourself out as a visitor in Trujillo is by stopping to take a photograph of the storks which nest on the roof of the church of San Martín de Tours. Within the machine-gun rattle of Spanish conversation at street level, there’s no such thing as a pause to consider the cigueños. It’s as if they don’t exist, and men bend their attention towards the spitting of nutshells or the smoking of black cigars instead.

There’s more than simple indifference at work in lives which are so tightly interwoven with human beings, because the storks are an active inconvenience. In their various movements and observances, they repeatedly drop or fumble with nesting materials. Clods of grass and mud fall down onto the cars below, and litter is scattered freely across the town with every relay run. I hear that in poor years, older chicks will kill younger ones and cast them tumbling from the nest. And I presume it’s then for the street sweepers to gather up the wrecked remains of busted death from the pavement.

When a bluetit chick falls from its nest and wilts on the kerbside, you could easily miss the tragedy. But a baby stork would splat on the slabs like a painter’s scaffolding, and this would be called a disgrace in Britain. Petitions would be signed and presented to the local council in an effort to “clean up our streets” or assign high-viz welfare officers to look after birds which seemed to be ailing. But we’re uniquely pathetic in this respect, and in this (as in so many things) the Spanish are our wonderful opposites.

I doubt the people of Trujillo actively welcome shit and corpses strewn across their streets, but there’s nothing like a word of complaint from such close coexistence – and surely sufficient pleasure or duty to offset the inconvenience. Besides, certain buildings have custom-built racks and stays to stabilise the heavy nests, and even these are oddly passive help. It’s hard to know if they’re built to encourage the birds or simply because they’ll come and try anyway – and if they’re in a weldmesh cup, the risk and damage are reduced? Meanwhile, in certain farmers’ fields towards Santa Marta de Magasca, platforms are erected with the specific aim of drawing in storks to nest. There’s no real case to explain these towers beyond a simple desire to encourage birds where nest-sites might otherwise be lacking.

In the tourist shop which stands in the shadow of a dozen nests, there are postcards and fridge magnets which feature storks in all their strange enormity. Shops like these are always interesting because they show you what local people think you’ve come to see. Trujillo is endlessly beautiful, but there are only a handful of photographs of the plaza or the statue of bold Pizarro. Most of the shelf-space is given over to images of storks, and they’re worn as a badge of honour in the face of visiting crowds. They birds must lose their novelty eventually, but the people of Trujillo still know they are special – and it’s not for me to suggest that they don’t love the storks and the thousands of swifts which churn above the Alcazaba at dawn. It’s only to say that their love has a steadiness and a sense of calm that is quite unlike the fretful, restless disgust and concern that we seem to feel for birds in Britain.

For me, the rarest and most extraordinary thing we can do with wildlife is to look away from it; to know it’s there and think instead of something else. I don’t miss any one species which has declined or been lost from Galloway more than I miss the feeling that there’s nothing to worry about.