A Foggy Morning

Tonight may be Haloween for you, but here it’s La Castanyada, the eve of Tot Sants (November 1), the day when people go to visit the cemeteries, cleaning and decorating the niches of their deceased. For La Castanyada there are parties where people roast chestnuts (castanyes in Catalan) and sweet potatoes and eat as many panellets as they can afford. Panellets are marzipan cookies that come in many flavors, but the traditional ones are covered with pine nuts and are the most expensive. What am I saying? They are all very expensive. And while just about every holiday here has its related special food, often a pastry, for me Tot Sants with its panellets takes the cake.

When I lived in Tarragona, our apartment was across from the cemetery (we thought that would mean it would be quiet, but it didn’t really turn out that way) and we could watch the cemetery fill with flowers from our window. When I came to Figueres, I had to walk to get to the cemetery to see the flowers. And so I went. There are only two entrances to the cemetery and when I got there there were police cars all over the place and the street was closed off. A local gypsy had shot and killed a French gypsy over a drug dispute. In the cemetery. That saga went on for months, with others from the French clan coming here to kill a donkey or vandalize the home of someone in the local clan in revenge. The following year I skipped the visit to the cemetery.

I may go to the cemetery tomorrow, haven’t decided yet. But none of this has anything to do with today’s blog post. Early this morning when I took Cupcake out, it was a normal morning with some clouds. A little while later when we set off for Vilabertran to walk the path, we were fogged in. It is not often we get thick fog here and it turned the usual countryside into an other-worldly landscape.

Irrigation canal

Wetlands in Drought

 Early in September I returned to the Aiguamolls to see the birds. There was visibly less water but there were still birds there feeding. I found the same black-winged stilts, wood sandpipers, moorhens, and little egrets, although maybe fewer than before. I don’t remember seeing ducks.

But when I came back two weeks later, in the middle of September, there was no water and no birds. It was a depressing sight and I haven’t been back since. Where do they go when the ponds dry up?

This is the field where, on one of my first visits,
I found horses and white storks grazing peacefully together.
The greener area was the pond.

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Wetlands in Flight

 All through the summer there has been very little rain. When I went to the wetlands a month ago, the drought was apparent with the pond visibly lower than it had been just a week before and there were fewer birds. But there were still some there having their lunch: black-winged stilts, wood sandpipers, moorhens, mallards, and little egrets.

So I settled in to see if they were just going to wade around and eat, or if something might happen. And as luck would have it, they did decide to fly a little bit, maybe just to please me because I was being so patient.

Black-winged Stilt

Wood Sandpiper

Wood Sandpiper

Behind: Black-winged Stilt
In front: Wood Sandpiper

Little Egrets