From the Heights: Vultures, Deer, and Remembering Bill

We’re back in Extremadura, Spain, because vultures and deer. Big birds like griffon vultures were easier to capture than the little birds. Do click on these; they're quite nice if you can see them at size.

I loved the griffons. We watched them for much of the day. This one is building its nest in a likely cranny.

This one may have been feeding on a bloody carcass, as its head was stained red. I wondered how so many huge vultures found enough to eat. I understand there are feeding stations where cattle are laid out for them. Knowing how vultures are suffering and declining worldwide, it’s comforting to see them being subsidized here in Extremadura.

I was grateful to see so many griffon vultures sailing by with comfortably full crops and bloodied heads.

Phoebe, Liam and I climbed to the top of a tower to see the countryside. We did a lot of that, climbing cathedral towers and castle towers, always looking for the eagle's vantage point. 

Ah my beautiful babies. How I reveled in being with them for two weeks. We never got sick of each other. That alone makes my heart sing. To see their enduring love for each other...I can paint and write for the rest of my life, but these two and that love they share is the most beautiful thing I've somehow, inexplicably produced. Had a lot of help from their big sweet crazy dad.

He would have loved showing us Extremadura. We laughed about how goal-oriented he'd have been, searching for the golden eagle, the gigantic black vulture that we somehow spotted the second we entered the park. We looked, too, but we didn't find eagles, and that was OK with us. It wouldn't have been OK with him! He was a goaly guy.

They’re somewhere out there, and that was enough for us. We didn’t have to go chasing over hill and dale to find one. We felt him with us. How could he be anywhere else? If you could see him at 20...he looked an awful lot like this beautiful boy.

You'd have to love wind to live here. Wind sculpted our hair every second.

Me, lugging all necessary optics, all the time, up hill and down dale. 

I was thoroughly encumbered. Once in awhile I'd give Liam my camera to carry, and think how lovely it would be to have a personal porter.

Gliding down, flaps lowered...I imagined my great wings carrying me like a hang-glider, my legs dangling down.

It looks like such fun to dip and dive over this landscape, to ride on the wind instead of standing around fighting it.

And then we rest...

Some of the vultures were carrying twigs and greenery for their nests, before Christmas! Seeing such a majestic and mysterious bird carrying a little sprig of greenery moved me. You could see its goal, there in its bill. It had a thought in its mind and was carrying it out.

After having seen the stag swim the river, we were thrilled to see an Iberian hind and her fawns feeding amongst scattered boulders on a hillside. This is Cervus elaphus hispanicus, the Iberian red deer.

These creatures are much larger and longer legged and lankier than our whitetail; they're very much like the Scottish red deer, which is built more on an elkish body plan. Both European red deer and American elk are in the genus Cervus. Interestingly, Cervus is a primarily Eurasian genus, and our wapiti is the only representative in North America, and certainly the largest of any Cervus worldwide. Our elk are just hyooooge compared to Iberian deer, but this is still a whole lot of animal!

I was most delighted with this shot of three running amongst the rocks; the way they're in focus but the rocks aren't. Please click on it! It looks like a diorama if you embiggen it.

That evening, an Iberian stag cut right in front of our car, and Liam grabbed the moment. December 21, the Winter Solstice, was a charmed day with my sweet family, and it wasn't over yet!

           

This post is a little Valentine to my Liam and Phoebe. Your mama is very far away at the moment, but I hope you can feel my love hurtling on clumsy wings through an Ecuadorean rainstorm, up over the Andes, over the Gulf of Mexico, up through the Appalachian chain, and dropping down into Morgantown. Then it’s picking up again, crossing the winter Atlantic, and zeroing in on a certain girl in mainland Spain right now. You can close the windows and bar the doors, but it’s coming in.

Birds and Hogs, Cranes and Dogs!

These photos were taken Dec. 21,  2019, on Liam's and my epic trip to mainland Spain to be with Phoebe and, later, Oscar and his family way out in the Canary Islands. Despite my life's barrelling on apace, I am dogged about getting this Spain stuff posted, so my kids and I will have something semi-coherent to remember the trip by. I can see by the numbers that you really prefer the day-to-day Indigo Hill reportage, and I get that. It's more accessible and personal.  I thank those of you who stick with me here on the blog as I travel a bit.  

Monfragüe National Park in Extremadura, south central Spain, is a wild and windy place. Being winter, it was also cold, though I understand it can be broiling hot in summer. We carried on despite the howling wind, and managed to see some sights and some wildlife.  

This is a very distant blue rock thrush. I'm sure in proper light it's lovely, its blue being more of a slate color. There are similar birds in South Africa.

The cork oaks in the dehesa forest are laid out so regularly you wonder if they were planted like this, or if they somehow assert their space and keep all other oaks away with root poisons. I don't know the answer to this. I've been rooting around to try to understand more about this strange oak savannah ecosystem. Suffice it to say it's probably anthropogenic in origin, and dates back thousands of years, yet it provides both for livestock and wildlife in myriad ways.

 It's an acorn-based economy! Sheep and pigs and cattle graze the grass beneath the oaks and wild olives; shepherds take the sheep, especially, to the highlands in summer, which prevents overgrazing of the dehesa plain, in a process called transhumancia. It's much like the cattle drives of the old American west, but it's still going on.

I was beyond thrilled to get a close look at a Mastin de Extremadura, and a brindle one to boot! This Spanish mastiff, a specialty of the region, was wandering out by the road, with no humans in sight, but his job is to guard the sheep. These dogs are raised with sheep from the time they're tiny; they seem to think they're sheep, and want only to be with sheep. But let someone approach their herd, and their protective nature comes out. They'll follow you with the evil eye until you give up the pursuit. And they can back it up with massive jaws and great speed.

I just couldn't get over the beauty of this dog, with a tail like a tiger's, and brindle stripes running through its long fur. I will admit to a new fascination with brindling. Not sure where that came from.

It wanted nothing at all to do with us, and retreated to the top of the bank.

There, I got a shot of its kind and gentle face. Still, not a dog to be challenged or trifled with. It's got a job to do!

I will sit here until you drive away. Please go away. I have sheep to guard.

Meanwhile, nicely rounded Iberian hogs and sheep, cattle and goats, kept in by wire and impossibly ancient mortar-free stone fences, all eat the acorns that fall from the oaks, and that  diet gives the hogs' hams their unique flavor. But they're not the only ones who eat the acorns. 

Cranes (which look like nothing unless you click on the photo) do too!

Click on the photo to see a juenile crane, with its featureless head. This was as close as we ever got to them, and they were in a hurry to right that wrong, walking off immediately.

I managed to catch a few in transit.

The hogs were pretty wild, too, come to think of it.

Cattle were more approachable.

A couple of the famous fighting bulls for which the region is known. Oscar is a born Spaniard, but he detests bullfighting, as do many of his peers. One hopes we are entering a different age, one a bit more advanced than that of the Roman emperors and their bloodlust.

There was so much to take in here that my mind was whirling the whole time. The interconnectedness of the dehesa oaks and olives; the livestock living cheek to jowl with cranes and vultures and azure-winged magpies

You may be quite sure I bemoaned my craptastic shots of these beautiful magpies. You can only see their azure if you click. Oh how I wanted to be closer, but they were too wild.

A crested lark amongst the cowpies. We loved his up-do. 

A beautiful linnet in winter plumage!

Linnet reprise.

A pair of siskins with Moorish architecture behind.

And a wood pigeon. Man, I was under-equipped in the camera realm. An 800 mm lens might have gotten something; my 300 was smoking and still I got so little. No wonder European birders flip all the way out when they come to America and especially the Neotropics. It's like a dang petting zoo compared to Extremadura. 

A confiding great tit. It was wonderful to have any bird confide in us, so skittish were they all. There aren't many bird families whose European representatives are prettier than the American species, but man, the tits in Europe are really beautiful. Insert whatever middle-school level joke you wish here _____________.  I saw long-tailed tits flying over Caceres this same evening, but getting photos of them would have been an impossible dream.

All right. I've gone on long enough. Until next time!! Olé!

Living Gargoyles

Despite the allure of sunny Sanibel and Key West, from whence I just returned, I am doggedly returning to late December in Spain, specifically Monfragüe National Park in Extremadura. 

I may have to take a Key Deer break in here somewhere, but for now, we're gonna look at griffons.

Griffon vultures. Enormous fabulous legendary Old World vultures that somehow manage to nest and thrive in this rugged and forbidding place. 

This is one of their strongholds for roosting and nesting. Spain, in fact, holds Europe's largest single colony of griffon vultures, in Hoces del Rio Duratón National Park, in the province of Segovia. Get this: From a low of just a few thousand around 1980, there are now more than 25,000 griffons plying the air in Spain. And they're increasing in Italy, having been shot out. People are beginning to wake up, even across the Mediterranean, that you don't just willy-nilly shoot everything that flies. Oh, it's so good to hear good news about vultures. However their populations are always at threat. Apparently a ruling that barred leaving cow carcasses out (for fear of transmitting Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) really bit into the Pyrenees griffon populations, and they turned to attacking young and weak living animals, something they normally eschew. 

And another tidbit (sorry) from Wikipedia: In May 2013, a 52-year-old woman who was hiking in the Pyrenees and had fallen off a cliff to her death was eaten by griffon vultures before rescue workers were able to recover her body, leaving only her clothes and a few of her bones. Due to her being the first human to be documented being eaten by griffon vultures, the story brought worldwide attention to the griffon vulture problems in Southern Europe. 

Imagine!! The cleanup crew takes care of her. All of which makes me think about my promise to my kids not to leave myself out for the turkey vultures. Sigh. I won't, I won't. But a girl can dream. 

We watched the great birds cruising around the oak forests known as dehesa. 

The sediment-filled river roiled below the great rock, and a griffon dropped down to perch near its tossing waves. 

It was such a rare privilege to be able to stand on an overlook and look down on a bird whose back one generally never gets to see. It reminded me of Andrew Wyeth's excellent painting of a turkey vulture and the landscape it surveys, from above. 

Some passed at eye level. 

To look into the cool hard yellow eye of a griffon is a fine, fine thing.

Please click on these. You'll see the griffon's great foot coming up to scratch its head!

Thos impossibly long secondaries! The great sails that hold this massive bird aloft! Oh, I can smell those feathers!

Looking more closely at the mountain, we could see it finely crenulated by the silhouettes of vultures.
Use "crenulated" in a sentence today! (I didn't have time to get my pie crust crenulated, dear. You'll have to eat it smooth.)

For a closer look, here they are, wings spread. They can't be sunning. It wasn't sunny in Extremadura. Or Madrid. Or Trujillo. Or anywhere, until we got to La Gomera. Whew. Brr. 

Phoebe, Liam and I were hanging out, watching vultures and other fascinating wildlife. We instinctively knew that it doesn't get any better than this, so we stayed there for a couple of hours at least, wind and cold and all. 

There was a quiet birdwatcher in the parking area with his scope set up pointing up toward a nearby stack. He kind of watched us for an hour or so, and must have decided we were OK, because he motioned for us to come look through his scope. Well I'll be danged. There was a griffon there, and it was tending a nest! In late December! Holy crow!

I had lugged my scope and tripod to Spain. But I  had zero idea there was a griffon nest right next to us. O bless you, Belgian birder who now lives in Extremadura!! I swung my scope over to the nearby nest, and set up my digiscoping rig with the old iPhone 6. 

 I really fought with myself over whether to bring the scope at all, because I knew the kids and I would be traipsing through pueblos and walled cities and Roman ruins, too, not just birding. And the extra weight was a thing.  Had I known what I now know about birding in the dead of winter in Extremadura, I would never have brought it. Except. The ONE time I got it set up on a cooperative bird, this happened. 

I was content watching the wind ruffle the piano-key like feathers of the sitting vulture. And then its mate dropped in.

I do not know what those big round doo-dads are on the birds' upper breast, but I like them a lot. They're decorative, if not somewhat sexy.

Bring the scope. It's always going to be worth it.