He told me something else that seemed logical though
surprising. ‘The Coto played an important role in the history of
India. Some British officers stationed at Gibraltar during the years
when Spain and England were allies against Napoleon were invited
here as guests of the Spanish king, and while staying at the palace
they saw him hunt boar with a lance from horseback, and when
they were transferred to India they introduced the sport there.
So Errol Flynn and all the other Bengal Lancers got their start
here.’
Don Luis then solved a problem for me. ‘You asked how the
stones for this palace reached here? You wouldn’t believe it. They
came from quarries north of London. When the English
discovered our sherry wine and started to import huge quantities
of it, their ships could think of nothing to carry back to Spain on
the return trips. So for ballast they loaded up with granite blocks,
but no one in Cádiz or Jerez wanted the stone, so they dumped
it on the shore and men hauled it in handcarts to build this palace.’
In the pause that followed, Señor Ybarra queried Don Luis
concerning a girl who had made herself a depositada, and Don
Luis said, ‘She’s doing as well as you’d expect.’ He then turned to
me and explained. ‘In our country, getting a girl of good family
married sometimes involves a lot of problems. Suppose that José,
age twenty, wants to marry Rosita, age seventeen. In the eyes of
the law and the Church they were old enough to do so when he
was fourteen and she twelve, but until Rosita reaches the age of
twenty-one she must have her parents’ permission. If they
approve, okay. If they object, Rosita must wait till she’s
twenty-one. Then she can marry José whether her parents like it
or not.’
I pointed out that many countries had similar rules. ‘Ah, yes!’
Don Luis agreed. ‘But what they don’t have is our depositada
process. The girl is free at twenty to marry only if she leaves her
parents’ home. If for any reason—and when good families are
involved this is usually the case—she continues to live with her
parents in order to win from them a dowry, she cannot marry
without their consent until she is twenty-five, but a recent law
has dropped that age to twenty-one. Nor can she become a nun
without their permission. It is in the interest of family continuance
that this law exists, and we observe it. But it is also in the interest
of Church and state that girls marry young and bear children
while they are able. So a compromise is necessary, and here it is.
A girl who cannot get her parents’ permission to marry can throw
herself upon the mercy of the court, which will deposit her, hence
depositada, in the home of a relative or friend so that others can
inspect the young man and supervise the courtship for a period
of somewhat less than six months. At the end of this cooling-off
period, as we call it, if she still insists upon marrying her young
man, the family into which she has been deposited acts as her
parents.
‘Now, if young José fails to win permission from his parents,
he can’t marry either, but what he can do is send his father,
through the offices of a judge, a registered letter setting forth the
reasons why he intends to marry, and at the end of a reasonable
time if he proves to the judge that his father did not respond to
the letter, the court will grant him permission to marry. Again
there’s been the cooling-off period.
‘There’s one more way out. If at any time young José and
Rosita, regardless of their age, can steal away and find some priest
to marry them, they’re legally wed—except that neither has a
right to a share of the other’s inherited property—and their
parents can’t do a damned thing about it except to organize a
hunting party and go out and shoot the priest. It’s rather
impressive how many priests are willing to run this risk. The
Church tends to favor early marriage, and if a couple are truly in
love the priest can usually detect it, but on the other hand, they
don’t abuse the practice because they know that if the people of
the countryside felt that they were going too far, the Church would
suffer. Besides, the new law of April 24, 1958, has liberalized the
system. It’s still complicated, like much in Spain, but it works.’
Señor Ybarra asked if it was working in the case we had been
discussing, and Don Luis said no.
Don Luis had come to the Coto by special invitation and for a
particular purpose. The herds of deer about the Coto had grown
so numerous that they were endangering the sanctuary’s food
supply, so a few huntsmen like Don Luis had been called in to
kill off some of the bucks. ‘Would you like to join me?’ he asked,
and we set off in a Land Rover at thirty miles an hour over the
parched marismas. We passed about a hundred and fifty fallow
deer but by now I had learned not to comment on them. However,
Ybarra asked, ‘Are you going to thin out the fallow deer?’ but Don
Luis said, ‘I’d prefer not to bother with them.’ Later I spotted a
herd of at least a hundred red deer, but they were much too far
away. Apparently they knew this, for they grazed quietly and took
little notice of us except to look up now and then to stare across
the cracked earth.
The sun was beginning to set and Don Luis said he was afraid
we’d not be able to approach any of the herds in the time
remaining, but very far in the distance I spotted a group of about
forty red deer in good position, and we drove to within a quarter
of a mile of them, then descended to try to creep up on them.
When we had reached a point from which I could not yet be sure
that the herd contained bucks, Don Luis said, ‘This is about right.’
I asked if he intended shooting from there, for the deer seemed
to me to be almost two football fields away, and he said, ‘Why
not? Anyway, they won’t let us get much closer.’ As a matter of
fact, the outlying watchers had already detected us and were
alerting the herd, but as one handsome large buck stopped to
sniff the air, Don Luis took careful aim and with one shot dropped
him. Unable to believe that a hunter could be so accurate from
such a distance, I stepped off the measurement, a yard a step, and
it came to one hundred and seventy yards. The bullet had struck
the deer in the head and death had been immediate.
I felt uneasy about sharing in the killing of an animal on a game
preserve, even though I could see from the size of the herds that
it was necessary, so I was gratified when we turned from deer to
the inspection of the lakes to which the aquatic birds of the north
were beginning to arrive. This brought me into the activity of the
Coto and I saw the useful role it played in European conservancy.
The significance of the Coto is best expressed in what one of
its directors told a Danish hunting club which had been solicited
for funds and had been hesitant: ‘Gentlemen, if the lakes of the
Coto are allowed to disappear, within five years there will be no
ducks in Denmark.’ The money was forthcoming, and the same
appeal had proved effective elsewhere in northern Europe.
Consider merely the birds I watched while I was there.
From Denmark came the graylag goose; from England the
robin; from Scotland the woodcock; from Sweden the mallard;
from Siberia the widgeon; from Germany the starling; from
Holland the avocet; and from France the stilt. From Africa and
Asia, too, the traffic was considerable. From Ethiopia came the
bee-eater; from north Africa the hoopoe; from south Africa the
stork; from west Africa the egret; from central Africa the kite;
from various parts the spoonbill; from the Sahara the ruddy shell
duck; from the Congo the purple heron. Destroy the Coto, and
the life patterns of these birds and hundreds of others which I did
not personally see would be altered, perhaps with serious
consequences.
To cross this apparently barren and remote area at night, with
flashlights probing the low cover to spot the lynx or the fox or
the silent herds of deer, is to see nature in one of its most
impressive forms, because wherever you look you see evidence
of wild things living in a precarious balance of water and grass
and dune and tree. By some extraordinary accident these
components are preserved here, in an area that man has not
spoiled.
Next morning Señor Ybarra started introducing me to the
nesting areas of the Coto, explaining the wildlife in Latin phrases
which he later interpreted into English by means of Roger Tory
Peterson’s handbook. In his infectious lisp, highlighted by
fascinating stories of bird behavior, he introduced me to several
birds I had not known before and two for whom I developed a
considerable affection. Before speaking of them I should like to
relate some of the surprises Ybarra showed me.
Along the ground at the edges of the swamps, in trees and
higher shrubs, we frequently saw a gray-brown bird with a
camouflage that could only have been developed as a mask for
the bird as it perched among leaves. The disguise was well-night
perfect, and sometimes I would stare at a branch for some
moments without realizing that the leaves I thought I saw
consisted mainly of this bird. ‘Observe its huge mouth,’ Ybarra
said. ‘
Caprimulgus europaeus
. Flies almost blind, with its big
mouth open like a seine for trapping insects.’ It was the nightjar,
a bird peculiar to Europe and known popularly as the goatsucker
because of the widespread belief that that is how it feeds.
He also showed me a splendid bird of the
Circus
family, a hen
harrier we later decided it was, which flew like our hawks in
graceful sweeps, its black wing tips and white under-feathers
making it a fine sight in the sky. I grew fond of watching its swift
movements and concluded, perhaps incorrectly, that it attained
higher speeds than the hawks with which I was familiar.
I asked if the Coto had any peregrine falcons and after this was
translated into Latin,
Falco peregrinus
, Ybarra said, ‘One pair!
Would you believe that on land which used to nest dozens of
pairs, only one remains? The reason? Too many chemical poisons
spread on the grounds where they used to feed. Also, the old
castles in which they nested are being torn down or renovated.
This rare bird is almost gone from this part of Spain.’ I told him
of seeing four pairs in the ruined castle at Sanlúcar, and he said,
‘Yes, in a few of the old ruins you can still find them.’
In happier vein he told me of the bird-banding experiments
carried on in the Coto. ‘We banded thousands of little egrets. And
what do you suppose? Two of them wound up in the Caribbean.
One in Trinidad. One in Martinique. If we understand correctly,
this is the first time in history that we can prove birds to have
emigrated naturally from the Old World to the New over the full
width of the open ocean. And do you know what these clever
birds did? They followed the same course as Columbus. Who
taught whom?
At the lakes we had an exciting time watching hundreds of
coots and purple gallinules; the latter were the more beautiful,
with subdued colors that shone in the sun, but the coots were the
more fun. They were a heavy, blackish, ducklike bird with
snow-white beaks and white foreheads, and they obviously enjoyed
the water, diving and splashing like a bunch of children. They
were aware of our presence, and if we made an unexpected move,
they would take off in large numbers, tiptoeing across the waves
as if in secrecy but making a huge clatter with their wings; I was
surprised at the distance they required to get airborne, some thirty
times their length. After they had been aloft for a while and were
satisfied that we were not going to harm them, they returned to
the lake and landed like reluctant auks, their feet acting as brakes
amid a noisy screeching. ‘The best water birds we have,’ Ybarra
said. He preferred them to the showier ducks that would arrive
later from Siberia.
The first of the two birds that captured my affection was the
kestrel. ‘
Falco tinnunculus
,’ Ybarra said. ‘A true falcon but smaller
than the ones you’ve seen in America.’ It was a bird that was
handsome in any posture. When perched on a tree at the edge of
the marsh, it was a compact, medium-sized bird about a foot long
with a fine reddish speckled body and a bluish head and tail. For
some reason which I could not explain, it carried itself with a
sense of confidence and was so common throughout the Coto
that I had adequate opportunity to study it. All things considered,
it was the most enticing bird I saw in Spain. In flight the kestrel
is magnificent, swooping in large arcs through the sky or hovering
almost motionless above some suspected quarry. Seen from below,
its wing tips are delicately speckled, so that they reflect light
coming up from the lakes, and its tail has a sharp, clean bar near
the tip. It looks much like the land of Spain, but Señor Ybarra
told me that it is equally at home in England, where it is highly
regarded.
It was not surprising that I should have liked the kestrel, for it
resembled the hawks which nested near my home in Pennsylvania,
so that I was in a sense prepared for it, but if anyone had predicted
that I would find my second choice in Las Marismas so appealing,
I would have laughed at him. When I first saw this creature, for
it was only with difficulty that I could accept it as a bird, it was
standing in a meadow across which we had been riding in the
Land Rover. It was enormous, with a wingspread when it waddled
over the ground of about eight feet. From its clawlike feet to the
top of its apparently bald head it would have measured another
three feet. ‘In English it’s the griffon vulture,’ Ybarra said. ‘It flies
up here from Africa, and without it Las Marismas couldn’t exist.
It’s the scavenger that keeps us cleaned up.’ When we moved in
on the first griffon I had ever seen, we found that it was hacking
away at a dead rabbit. Later we found a dead calf at which some
thirty or forty were feeding. Ybarra said that sometimes as many
as a hundred and fifty descend on the carcass of a steer, but I
never saw that.