DUTCH INTERLUDE. 2. RICH MORNING CHORUS IN ZEELAND.
Both Riet and I grew up in the village of Krabbendijke in the province of
Zeeland SW in the Netherlands: a village of ca 2 500 people, surrounded by
orchards and arable fields on sea clay as heavy as the local Calvinism,
with salt or brackish 'sea arms', the Easter and Western Schelde, just a
few km away to the north and south, and with vast mudflats at low time, the
'Drowned Land of Zuid Beveland', lost to the sea in the mid sixteenth
century. I left this area back in 1956!
We are very lucky this week and have been allowed to borrow the house of
Riet's brother just outside the vilage. It is surrounded by orchards (low
trees nowadays, but with high hedges, in our case of willows, all around),
and Danker also has a large and very bird-friendly garden, with i.a. a
broad coniferous hedge, and two ponds.
I sit and write this on the edge of the pear orchard behind the house,
while a Song Thrush shouts his messages from a dead tree at the other edge
of the orchard (as he has done from 5 30 this morning) and rabbits play
along the pear trees. The garden Blackbird clearly has young already and
scouts back and forth from the garden into the orchard.
Here bird life is rich and quite diverse, but for some reason warblers are
far from dominant, although Willow Warbler, Chiffchaff, Blackcap and Common
Whitethroat are all within earshot and I also have heard Garden Warbler,
Lesser Whitethroat and Icterine Warbler not too far away. Instead the
chorus here has, besides the indefatigable Song Thrush, definitely the many
Winter Wrens as main soloists, with Chaffinches, Great Tits, a sole
Dunnock, and Blackbirds (who keep their solo's mostly for the evening) in
supporting roles, and the doves as 'basso continuo'. The latter description
fits especially well the quietly insistent Stock Doves, and 'the voice of
summer', the contented purring of the Turtle Doves, both sounds one can
hear a long time before noticing them; the Wood Pigeon and the Collared
Dove are more wanna-be soloists, especially as they often sing from the
roof of the house.
The orchard is full of Goldfinches and the coniferous hedge of Greenfinches
and their already fledged young (there are also some House Sparrows and
Blue Tits), but they only 'fill in' in the chorus, while the silent Spotted
Flycatcher does not even do that---it is here solely a few months to catch
flies and raise a family! Punctuations from a bit farther afield come from
the Cuckoo, the hoarse echoing croak of Pheasants, the laughter of the
Green Woodpecker, and the angry cries of squabbling Jays in the willow hedge.
Overhead Starlings and Jackdaws pass incessantly with food for their young,
Swifts and Barn Swallows hunt---and in the case of the swallows, regularly
stop to press out their cozy song striphes from the TV antenna--, and pairs
of gulls, mostly Herring Gulls, cruise from one sea arm to the other.
We bicycled yesterday through our old haunts (Our secondary school was 18km
away, so we learned to know the area quite well). Of course a lot has
changed since I left here in 1956: the village is twice as large, and there
are new roads everywhere. Still we found some things pleasurably unchanged;
the fields still have a high density of Meadow Pipits and Yellow Wagtails,
while Grey Partridges flush from the road verge, and the intertidal
mudflats are dotted with gulls , Oystercatchers and some Curlews, and lined
with a band of Greenshanks and Redshanks, the former just a little further
out in the water on average, or with industrious Turnstones. In the village
the Black Redstart that I discovered unexpectedly on a house roof last
year, had returned to the very same roof!
But many things have also changed drastically, and especially the diversity
of road-side vegetation and of its attendant butterflies appears to have
decreased sadly. There are fewer Skylarks now, we searched for days before
we finally saw some House Martins (50m from the house in which I lived!),
and all week we listened in vain for the song jingle of the Yellowhammer,
so common in my youth. On the other hand, Goldfinches are now everywhere,
and I never ever saw this species in the area in my youth; nor were there
Green Woodpeckers around then. And the Mediterranean Gull, that now nests
in the area, in the fifties was just a cherished dream from my trusty 'Zien
is Kennen' birdbook!
There are more newcomers. I just saw the first Collared Doves in the
village before I left in the mid fifties, and now it is one of the most
conspicuous birds in the area, as most other places in Europe. Egyptian
Geese are around, and I also saw a Black Swan, probably the next colonizer
(unless this role is taken over by the flamingoes that also have become
regulars, but that we somehow missed this time). Birds of prey have
definitely become much more common than in the fifties; there are not all
that many Buzzards around Krabbendijke as yet, but they are present, and
harriers (esp. Marsh Harriers) are a common sight; they nest on the
saltmarshes and in reedlands in brackish creeks.
One more thing has remained the same since my youth, and struck me
forcibly: the flocks of carrier pigeons that cruise overhead on Saturdays
(No carrier pigeon here is allowed to work by flying on Sundays), part of
the weekly homing competitions. It is strange that it is often such trivial
details that suddenly bring back the past most vividly!
Wim Vader, Tromsoe Museum
9037 Tromsoe, Norway
until 15 June UCC, Cork, Ireland
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