Creature Comforts

There's a large bird of some sort who has taken to sitting on the telegraph cable adjoining our house to the pole across the street. He sometimes sits there for quite some time, especially in the evenings, singing away to himself in a whooping shrill tone to anyone who'll listen. (I keep saying "he" but to be honest, I've not the faintest idea if it's a male or female.) He's not alone here either. The house across the street has a family of at least 3 housemartins living under their balcony. Again, I'm not entirely sure they are housemartins, but I Google'd it and they do look very much like the one pictured on the left here. They dart gracefully in and out of the of their garden, up and round the telegraph pole, swooping over and under the wires and back down into their little nest above the garage door. Sometimes they rest their wings and sit on the electricity cables and sing a while.  Anyway, the point is that I was, for some reason, very much aware the other day of birdsong. And since then, every time I go out I've been listening to the vibrant warblings of a great variety of birds. Sometimes tuneful. Sometimes just a repeated chirp. A trill here and there. The air is full of birdsong. And that, sadly, is something I never noticed in England. Well, that's not strictly true. When I was a young boy I was in the school's Young Ornithologist's Club, but at that age I'm sure we weren't very serious twitchers. What I'm really referring to is my house in Lincolnshire, which was a "New Build" on an unfinished estate with very few, if any, trees and far too much concrete and red brick. I'm sure if I'd have ventured out into the surrounding countryside, armed with a pair of binoculars and a quiet mind I would have seen and heard many birds, but on my housing estate it was a rarity. I do remember a time when flock after flock of Geese were (presumably) migrating overhead, and making a racket about it too, but to attract smaller suburban birds there really needed to be more trees. And that is the difference I think. Here most houses have hedges bordering their gardens, a lemon tree, or perhaps a taller pine. And consequently a veritable plethora of nesting spots for birds to set up home.

And there's a Gecko in my garden. It could be a Gecko. My wife calls it a Salamander. It's definitely a lizard though. Maybe we should give him (or her?) a name. He lives around the back, in among the rafters by the barbecue and wood storage area. I have seen him (or maybe his cousin) around the front of the house too though, skulking about in the shadows of the garden walls and balcony pillars. To be honest I first saw him last Autumn, sitting on the whitewashed garden wall, basking himself in the evening sun. Of course he probably went someplace safe over the winter to hibernate, but he's back now.

Of course there are some creatures I'd rather not have about the place. (Suddenly I sound like a Dr Seuss book!) With the onset of summer brings a plague of flies, constantly buzzing about inside the house. Annoyingly they don't land either, like English house flies do, so I can't splat them with my plastic swatter. Then, there are the ants. Long trailing lines of them marching around my garden and past my front door in an almost comical cartoon fashion. Don't forget the mosquitoes. Thankfully we haven't seen too many of them so far, but the vast array of products stocking the pest control section in the supermarkets are evidence enough that they must be out there somewhere. All these mini-beasts are of course very curious things to my children, especially my 5 year old girl, who has been studying mini-beasts as her topic work at school last month. But not me. I believe the correct internet vernacular to describe my feelings about these insects is "Ew!" Some insects I don't mind so much though. Today my children spotted this tiny green grasshopper on our small picnic table.

Every bar in the area right now is proudly displaying signs saying, "Há Caracóis!" meaning that they are selling snails; To eat of course! The landlord of my local bar even joked (I hope) that he'd harvested them himself, by hand, from his very own garden wall! Well he's not getting his hands on this one that I found hiding away from the sun under our balcony!