the vultures are coming down from the tree

The February man still wipes the snow

 From off his hair and blows his hand

The vultures were looking really woebegone.

We were sitting on a bus from the small French town we were staying with friends in and heading up towards La Mongie to get a last bit of skiing in. The clouds were low in the sullen sky. The fields were covered in a white sheet, the snow had been falling all night in what in Suffolk is called a “blunt”, and it didn’t look like it was planning on stopping for a while yet. Mostly the snow was newly lain and undisturbed by any feetings as yet. Later, at the top of the mountain, the sun will shine brightly and the snowflakes will take on a psychedelic hue - like a glitterstorm during a frantic tango on Strictly Come Dancing. Whilst the skis and boots rattled and rolled in the hold, I took a look around at the winter scene unfolding in front of me. The landscape here in this part of the Pyrenees is familiar from our visit last year. 

Last year our friends drove up the mountain in their hire car but this year in their own car, they can’t put snow chains on, so we are using the bus. Buses in France are cheap and, although only one or two a day, regular as clockwork. It’s nice to sit on a bus for an hour or so to take in the landscape. A fast-flowing river of clear water - in Gaelic a sgor-shruth - runs parallel with the road for much of the journey so Dippers flitting from rock to rock before diving in and running and swimming downstream hunting for insects, larvae and small crustaceans are a common sight. Often herons slowly launch themselves up from the riverbank with their haughty demeanour almost with a disdainful tut at being disturbed. Last year egrets sat quietly meditating in the damp fields ignoring the rest of the world but this year, there were none. 

We approaching the village where we bought live trout from a farm and watched three griffon vultures circle quite low overhead whilst on a trudge through a fine drenching in the woods and hills. They never come low enough to get a good look at them without really good binoculars (which I didn’t have, needless to say).

 I looked out over the fields and saw half a dozen dark shapes, short and slightly hunched over. I looked with more intensity and I could make out their shapes more clearly. The shadowy feathers, slightly ragged at the ends, and the white serpentine necks that suggest a more wyrmish ancestry were more visible. Six Griffon Vultures sitting in a field looking decidedly fed up with their lot. To be used to soaring high above mountains, seeking the corpses of large dead animals, if lucky, with those precision-honed eyes. If you’ve never seen one, they are quite large birds, about three foot high weighing in at about ten kilos. Pretty impressive in flight but morose and snarky on the ground. They reminded me of the vultures in The Jungle Book* but less like the Beatles and more like the Fall. They have large pale sandy wings, broad plank-like wings and a bare goose-like neck. Real vultures. 

These ones I was seeing looked much darker so they could have been younger but the weather was fairly atrocious in its Christmas card way out in the near distance of a pightle** and Everything looked darker. Ahead of us arose the possibility of what Gerard Manley Hopkins called a wolfsnow, a dangerously heavy and wind-driven snowfall on the mountains. We didn’t really know whether we’d be actually skiing or not. As it happened, the sun came out later and we had a pleasant afternoon skiing but at this point, the jury was still out. As the bus climbed higher over the verglass*** the mood in the bus seemed a little gloomy but nobody looked as dejected as the griffons.

Seeing vultures in the wild would normally be considered an experience available to those who travel to exotic locations like Africa but there are three types in Europe. Lammergeiers andEgyptian vultures are resident too but only griffons have the classic look. Still, the point here is that seeing something this, yes, exotic is out of the ordinary.

As pleased and surprised as I was in being able to observe these chaps so near to the bus perhaps we should be taking more pleasure in the familiar too. Given how much devastation we have created in nature, some more familiar species we are used to seeing everyday are actually disappearing. As an example, take the greenfinch. As a child I must have seen thousands of them and, up until recently, we have had many sitting on the aerials of neighbouring houses offering their fairly boring “zhou” call. The greenfinch is the Lorraine Chase of the avian world: they look like they’ve wafted in from paradise but when they open their gobs, oh dear . . . However, the poor old greenfinch is in decline. The avian disease Trichomonosis has leapt from species to species and is fairly quickly wiping them out. This disease was prevalent in pigeons but now affects chaffinches and house sparrows too. The sheer ubiquity of chaffinches in their tremblings (or, indeed, charms) may make them seem over-populous but they seemingly are dying out too.

In his book A Patch Made In Heaven, Dominic Couzens makes the case for taking pride in our own patches - “somewhere near to where we sleep at night”. I’ve probably been doing that since I was a kid. I’m not an avid birder, I won’t shoot off to other parts of the country to tick a rare visitor off on a list. I do regularly walk the same few areas nearby: the Grove, the seashore and the marshes. Often I see familiar birds. Cormorants and egrets are commonplace but I still get excited seeing them. Recently on a walk I heard a buzzard and recognised its call a few minutes before spotting it.

In the garden of the house we were staying is a bird feeding area set up as Neal is an avid birder and photographer. He feeds birds to bring them into the garden to photograph and is very successful at it. Regular callers at the feeding station include great, blue, crested, coal and marsh tits, nuthatches, tree creepers and, of course, chaffinches. Goldcrests and firecrests are fairly regular callers too. Whilst on walks Neal was trying to photograph an elusive black woodpecker (we tried last year too) and a middle spotted woodpecker. These to a regular birder are rare finds. I would love to have seen them but I am very pleased with the birds I did see. The crested tit we saw was a first as were the six alpine accentors we saw on a Chateau (a Joy of accentors, I believe). I came away feeling that I had seen some unusual birds - the accentors had to be pointed out to me!

Back home now I am aware that I have to keep any bird-feeding equipment clean and disinfected to try to keep the risk of infection down. I am going to be pleased next time Lorrai a greenfinch makes its silly noise and I am aiming to get up to the marshes to see some common (or garden) ducks and waders next to the more unusual shovellers and wigeon. In short, taking pleasure in the more mundane, I guess.

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got 
'Til it's gone

*   cheers for the correction Mike
** a word from Essex meaning a field next to a house

** black ice in French but to mountaineers, thin blue water-ice formed on rocks