Category: Birds
Guest Photographer: A Summer Road Trip by Adela Hurtado Saura
Everyone knows a herring gull when they hear one
Everyone knows a herring gull when they hear one. Step off a train in Brighton on a summer’s day and you’ll hear their laughing call extend all the way to sea. It’s the sound used in TV and the movies to establish seaside towns. Two years ago I sat in Pavilion Gardens, green ash leaflets fanning against a blue sky, graduands strolling around with their grinning parents, when a bird poo bombshell exploded all over me. The velocity was shocking. I thought I had died and gone to graduation. The crap covered my hair, face, chest and arm. My companion was caught between the need to console and gloat. ‘You have to laugh, or else there’s nothing you can do,’ she said. ‘I’ll get a cloth.’
That day I learned some respect, seagull-style. My admiration for this bird is strange, a love unrequited on the animal’s side, a little masochistic on mine. I went to university in Liverpool and lived in a flat in the very heart of the city. My bedroom looked-out upon a row of fast food and booze outlets siphoning their stench out onto our balcony. At night we would peer over the ledge and watch the overblown shadows of rats moving between bins and under cars. Squalls came from that chasm after dark, and deep, booming voices often extinguished them. During my tenure, Saturday nights in Liverpool city centre were accentuated by the boozy rowing of couples, up against the walls of bars, stumbling across the pavement like seamen. But above it all something else was happening.
On a fine spring evening in my first year we lay on our backs on the grass verges beneath the Anglican cathedral.
‘Look!’ I had shouted, ‘a shooting star!’
‘No, you bloody idiot, it’s a seagull,’ was my acquaintance’s reply.
Smaller gulls, probably black-headed gulls, would catch the orange colour of streetlamps as they flew over. My inebriation did the rest. In the spring and summer months, when the gales which blow up and down Renshaw Street had died away, the angelic shapes of white gulls would waft down the road. Take the view from the corner of Rodney St., where Hardman St., meets Leece St., looking down onto the old Rapid Hardware store. When the sun set between the cormorant-esque liverbirds, the silhouettes of gulls moved like ashes from a fire, drifting on a light breeze to and from the Mersey.
From my old window, what I now know to be a newborn juvenile herring gull would call to its parent, waiting there for long periods of time, a bit like a package dipped in soot. Its bill is coal-black, a dusty grey hint to its body, ending in the white of its head. I have a polaroid picture of an adult herring gull perched on the rail looking into my room, a white-washed statue. The irony of the erroneous term ‘seagull’ is that now foodstocks have diminished in the bird’s natural coastal habitat, herring and black-headed gulls are coming inland to feed from the waste we leave in the street. They don’t merely follow the trawler anymore but the tractor. I recall a flock of feral pigeons, birds deriving from the cliff-dwelling rock dove, being dive-bombed by a herring gull over the scraps of chicken wings thrown into the road outside a fast food joint on Bold Street. It was like the moment the Tyrannosaurus Rex rears its head in Jurassic Park.
Whichever monstrous gull it was that crapped on me in Brighton, I forgive it. The presence of these birds on the margins of my youth have defined a remnant of my past with perhaps a little more tenderness than one might expect.
The cuckoo goes
We won’t know
when the cuckoo goes,
we’ll never know it’s gone,
we won’t know
when the cuckoo goes,
we’ve never heard its song.
We won’t know
when the cuckoo goes,
we’ll never know it’s gone,
we won’t know
when the cuckoo goes,
they say it won’t be long.
We won’t know
when the cuckoo goes,
we’ll say that nothing’s wrong,
until the day
that the cuckoo goes,
we’ll sing the cuckoo’s song.
And if the cuckoo goes,
then the cuckoo’s gone.
Walkers
All rights reserved by Daniel Mikhailovich
Set: Cliffe Pools
Set: Indian Summer
Set: Owls
Set: Picos de Europa with EuCAN
I was fortunate enough to spend some time in Los Picos de Europa working with FCQ on behalf of EuCAN, a Dorset-based conservation action group. FCQ are a conservation group working to protect the Bearded vulture, otherwise known as Quebrantahuesos in Spanish, “Bone-breaker” for its diet of bones (and not specifically bone marrow, as is commonly stated in avian literature). The bird is referred to as the Lammergeier (a German phrase) or in Latin as Gypaetus barbartus. “Bearded vulture” is a misleading term because the bird is not all vulture, and its beard is more a moustache.
The Fundacion is an all-action group based in Benia, Asturius in Northern Spain. The organisation aims to promote and aid the work of shepherds in the Picos. By doing so, an ancient aspect of Asturian culture can be maintained, and food for the Quebrantahuesos can be provided, also. The bird will eat the remains of sheep and goats that have died in the region, often waiting alongside Griffon vultures (Gypus fulvus) to finish their banquet of flesh until just the bones are left – the meal of the Quebrantahuesos.
The work of FCQ taught me that conservation is not purely ecological or environmental, but intensely cultural. What is different about conservation in the Picos compared to conservation in London, for example, is that it is a system whereby humans are still a part of the cycle. Conservation need not be purely aesthetic, as in the preservation of nature’s beauty, which is a common conception. In the case of the farmers of the Picos, it’s about preserving a way of life. If, perhaps, conservation in urbanised England represents a longing to return to a lifestyle much closer and in keeping with nature, then the work in the Picos is an attempt for people to maintain a lifestyle close to and dependent on the natural world.
Please click any image to view more photos on my Flickr page, and please visit the websites linked at the top and bottom of the page.
Diego and Jose at FCQ headquarters
Rafa shearing his sheep. This is an annual event for a shepherd, and EuCAN mucked-in to help with the workload, some 300 or more animals
The Picos glimpsed on either side of a vehicle
EuCAN and FCQ building Quebrantahuesos release pens. This is where the young will be reared and liberated from, into the mountains overhead
Two farmers in Belbin, a summer village in the Picos. The farmers spend the summer here making goats cheese
A Nightjar (Caprimulgus europaeus), one of the many avian delights of the region
Woodland brown butterfly (Lopinga achine)
Nigel Burch moved to Spain thirty-years-ago. Trained in horticulture he runs a hotel and organic farm with his family in the Picos. Nigel has an apple orchard, livestock, vegetable gardens and resplendent wildflower meadows. He said his aim was to promote biodiversity and his land was living-proof of the benefits diversifying plant and animal-life can bring.
Cattle roam the Picos. The sound of cowbells jingling is commonly heard
Steve Bennett talks to an audience at the FCQ centre in Benia. Steve outlined the aims of EuCAN, the difficulties in securing funding for a not-for-profit organisation in a time of great financial strain for many European organisations and people alike
Diego & Chris take a breather during a 5-hour-long process of beam dragging. Low-carbon transportation is the law in the inhospitable terrain that much of the Picos poses. EuCAN joined forces with FCQ to build a bridge linking two valleys, the aim of which is to allow shepherds and their livestock access to another part of the Picos for further grazing. More livestock also means more food for the Quebrantahuesos
FCQ (Fundacion para la Conservacion del Quebrantahuesos)
EuCAN (European Conservation Action Network)
© All Rights Reserved, Daniel James Greenwood, 2011
Kingcombe Birds
I spent a weekend with the European Conservation Action Network (EuCAN) at the Dorset Wildlife Trust’s Kingcombe centre. The birds seen here were caught in mist nets and ringed by Neil, who measured their wingspan, checked for disease, and sent them away back into the wild.
Neil exhibits a female bullfinch
Pair of goldfinches
Great tit
Chaffinch
Goldfinches having their wing feathers checked
Blue tit having its ankle ringed
Rachel surveys a dunnock
Goldfinch being ringed
Unlocking Landscapes 