Sandgrouse
Strangely unfamiliar birds bring a shadow of the Sahara Desert to the Spanish Plains...
The high plains of Extremadura seem to run forever in all directions above Santa Marta de Magasca. It’s a baffling landscape; vast and unvaried with a relentlessness which can feel exhausting - the kind of place where a person can see further than they’re able to walk in a day, and travel is simply a matter of setting off and waiting for the distance to pass. I have no problem with the open sky, but in big country like this, the price of being able to see where you’re going is a heavy awareness of how slowly you move.
As atmospheric pressures change during the course of a day, a ridge of distant mountains comes and goes on the furthest northern horizon. It sometimes looks like they have snow on them, but they might easily be nothing more than clouds. At sunset, the light is bloodied by a cast of air-suspended sand which hangs in the breeze like the gentlest powdering of snow. It’s sand which has been drawn up from the Sahara Desert and falls upon Spain in a soft, persistent glitter that is too fine to perceive in real time - it’s only when you walk to your car in the morning, you find the windscreen dressed in rust-coloured sediment, as if Africa was gradually creeping northwards, ounce by ounce.
There are cows at work on these plains. Trembling in the day’s warmth, they’re like fleets of far-flung ships in full sail. Others are more blunt and prosaic, standing in threes and fours by the roadside without any expression of curiosity or desire. Between their knees, sheep are being driven through the hip-high grass, and you’ll sometimes see the mark of a farm with its eucalyptus trees and the movement of storks from its chimneys. Away from these occasional flags and putting greens, it’s just a grand fairway of freshness and larksong; a jingle of buntings from the roadside wires and the crunch of grit beneath tyres.
We drove in the rut of a road as the sun sank and cast the grass in a worn-out, dusted light. There was a hare ahead, and the barcode shadows of short scrubby trees which grew from the verges. We could easily have been in Africa then, somewhere on the veldt above Sun City, or the hammocked roll of Natal towards Pietermaritzburg. In a sudden burst of movement, birds rose from a roadside field and looped overhead in a single, driven rush. There might have been fifteen or twenty of them, flush and giddy as gnats in the sunset. They landed and vanished at once in the grass between the knees of several ponderous sheep, then they rose again from standing and turned several times overhead in an escalating spiral which finally took them out of sight to the west.
To the naked eye, they were never more than silhouettes and a silly, growling call – but afterwards they were identified from photographs we’d briskly taken as sandgrouse, and so little like our own red grouse that the shared name seemed downright silly. In truth, they’re hardly related to British grouse in any way at all. The name is only relevant for a shadow of reasons – perhaps for the sake of the shape of a beak or a simple, dove-like vulnerability. They’re beautiful in a zigzag of gold and caramel, but perhaps that’s just the novelty because red grouse are also beautiful; they would also strike a stranger squarely between the eyes.
Even from the first beats of flight they’re something different in attitude and poise; the decision to go is taken in the context of “up and away”, like plover or snipe which never seem to grudge wingwork. Measure this against the irritable resignation of a red grouse who will take off only under duress, pursuing the shortest, briskest possible route to safety. Our grouse are fast and assured when they fly; their movement is clever and bold, but it’s always driven by a prior failure. You know that if they could have escaped on foot, they would have done. You can hardly say the same of sandgrouse, which rise and fly like crumbs shaken briskly from a tablecloth.
Dozens of charismatic birds contrive to catch and amplify the richness of Extremadura – each one more excessive and extraordinary than the last. In this distant and thorn-scented corner of Europe, there are soft and welcome strangenesses blowing in from the south, and I could write at length about the neon blare of rollers and bee-eaters and great bustards which toil and pound through this place like aircraft. Even half-known species seemed to shine in the dew-soaked, eldritch evening, and the yellow eyes of little owls and stone curlews were never more butter-bright and ghoulish than when I saw them in Spain. But those sandgrouse caught my eye in the cooling day; they reached down across the Mediterranean for the dusty old blankets of Africa, and they pulled them up to my throat.
First Published on Bog Myrtle and Peat - May 6th 2024