Farewell Sunday

I woke up before dawn this morning, and made an effort to get out of the house and visit the charco bridge to catch the Egrets leaving for the day. Half of the hundred or so birds had already left for the day, and my efforts to catch groups of  them on the wing weren't very successful. The HX300 works well in bright light, but in low light, it takes several fast frames at different light settings, then blends them to produce a composite shot. The processing takes a couple of seconds, ruling out quick repeat shots, needed when aiming at birds on the move, so fleeting opportunities are missed. It's a good camera for normal purposes. I got a few good shots of the early rising sun, for example, but it's under-powered for exceptional conditions. I wondered if my DSLR would perform any better, but didn't bring it with me, so I'll never know.

After breakfast, I took my last trip along the coast road to celebrate the Eucharist at the Ermita San Pascual de Baylon. There was a congregation of sixty, with couples I recognised from last year lately arrived to stay for the winter, attending for the first time since their return. As others return to the UK to spend Christmas, or visit family beforehand, others come out for winter sun. It was bright but cooler, like a British spring morning without the chill wind, and I enjoyed the 'hail and farewell' of the occasion, feeling satisfied that I'd given them of my best, and been appreciated.

Early rising left me quite tired, however, so rather than join the people gathering for a coffee at the Koi ice cream parlour cum restaurant in town, I headed back to the apartment to cook lunch take a siesta, pack my case, tidy up and clean the apartment. As sunset approached I made my final visit to the charco bridge in time to watch the Egrets return and settle for the night. It's a marvellous sight, but one which really calls for a more powerful camera to get the best shots. The past two months of daily bird-watching have been very special experience and opportunity for me.

   

Egrets' return

I planned to get up before dawn and go up to the bridge to watch the Egrets fly away for the day, but woke up in the middle of the night, couldn't get back to sleep for a while and then overslept. By the time I got there at ten, there wasn't a single Egret on the charco. Then, I walked up the track on the north side, to see how the remodelling of the river bed was progressing.

The heavy bulldozer and excavator have cleared another couple of hundred meters stretch of cane grove from the river bed, and sculpted earth banks five metres high on the south side. Work is now starting on rebuilding collapsed areas of the north bank. How much further cane clearance will go toward the open water of the charco, I won't be here to see. The change is unlikely to show up on Google Earth any time soon.

Following my afternoon walk along the beach and back to get supplies from Mercadona, I returned to the charco bridge, as the sun was disappearing behind the sierras. There were already sixty Egrets settling in for the night in the usual places. I stood there until dusk, and watched another forty odd fly in. Some were on their own, others flew as couple, still others were in nuclear family groups of three to six birds, and then there were a couple of larger groups, ten to twenty in number.

I wonder if this flying pattern reflects the genetic and social relationships? Or is it shaped by their dining habits in distant fields where they forage during the day? Or, is it just random, or a hitherto undiscovered relational pattern?

The more time I spend routinely watching birds, the more I learn, the more I realise I don't know.
  

Birding app discovery

My home-bound travel arrangements are all now fixed. Tony is ferrying my to the Hostal Pensimar in El Altet on Monday afternoon, a short taxi ride from Alicante Airport, and an 08.30 check-in. It gives a cheap, clean, quiet, bed for the night, with shops and restaurants a few minutes walk away for an evening meal. All I need, before facing up to the British cold and damp.

Before lunch yesterday, I visited the bridge over the charco, and saw that there a few more egrets were roosting along the banks. From a family of three over the past months, the number has grown to ten. The pair of Dabs and their growing chick were out together, and I narrowly missed getting a photo of all three in the same place at the same time. They move quickly and are so busy diving for food, even the chick and more so as it develops. No wonder the little nuclear family is hard to snap. 

The visiting cormorant with a white front is still there, but on its own. If it was a breeding female, it would normally be with other females. I believe it's too well developed and too large for a juvenile that can also have a white front. So what is it? 

Among the countless warblers and handful of white wagtails seen daily darting in an out of the cane forest along the banks, I got a good photo a bird directly below me, paused on a patch of reed. I took it for a white wagtail, until I looked at the resulting photo. Another puzzle, as the colouring is not the same, and the tail longer and broader, with a black stripe near the tip. Again, what is it? 

I hunted for help with identification online, and found the excellent Ornithopaedia Europe Android app. It's a huge database of over a thousand bird species which can be searched by country, and presumed bird name in over thirty languages, with photos and bird-song samples. I remember this time last year meeting a Spanish visitor on the bridge and attempting to chat with him in Spanish, trying to identify a bird across the language barrier. He had this app on his iPhone, and I didn't bother to check if there was an Android equivalent. How foolish of me. It's free to download as well. Such a public spirited offering of high quality data, and no intrusive advertising either.

Anyway, the Spanish app selection showed me the possibility that the mystery Cormorant could be the White Breasted variant. When breeding is done, Cormorants tend to want their own space, like Herons, not like little Egrets which often hang out together and travel in family groups. Mallard couples are often seen together, and with their chicks. Multitudes of Coots inhabit the same space, and seem to spend a lot of time noisily aggressing each other. So many behavioural differences, just like humans.

The other discovery from the app was that my other distinctive mystery bird is a grey wagtail. Glad to have that sorted. I can see this piece of software is going to come in very handy in future.

Bird surprises

A quiet start to the week so far, with not even a sermon to plan for next Sunday, as Margie, one of the Chaplaincy Readers-in-training is going to preach while I celebrate at Llanos. She showed me an early draft of her sermon when I was there last, so this will be an opportunity to listen and give her feedback. She certainly has the right kind of enthusiasm for working with biblical material, and I've already heard how much she's appreciated by the congregation.

Yesterday, after a visit to Lidl's for supplies, I went and inspected what new birds could be seen on the charco and just missed snapping that elusive picture of a grey heron coming out of hiding and landing in a prominent place. I find it curious what while the large number of coots moorhens stays roughly the same, mallards and pochards vary considerably. They may well all be hiding away in the reed beds and emerge from cover to dive and feed according to minor variations in conditions which a casual observer cannot be aware of. The more I have time to watch, the more curious I am about this. The visit highlight was utterly fleeting - the distinctive iridescent flash of a Kingfisher flying at high speed under the road bridge. Just once before I've caught this here. The first time, so quick, I wasn't sure if I believed my eyes, but this sighting confirms it.

Walking back along the beach from the shops this morning, I saw a flock of a dozen Sanderlings in their winter plumage, foraging in the gravel for small invertebrates washed ashore by the waves. Apart from gulls pigeons and straying starlings it's unusual to see other birds along this shore-line. The beach is a mixture of sand and gravel, and doesn't seem to support much plant life in the first thirty metres from where the waves crash in, so it's rare to see birds pecking among the stones for insects. The sight of the Sanderlings dodging the surf, running as they do along the waters edge, was a surprise, to be followed by another later on. I had no camera on me to record it, however.

The few egrets and herons that frequent the charco nature reserve aren't to be seen every day I visit, but at midday one of each was perched at a usual roosting place of dead trees and stones projecting from the bank into the water, about fifty metres from the road bridge.

In addition there was a large black bird, the size of the grey heron with a white front, and distinctively different beak. I checked on-line later and learned it may be a juvenile Cormorant, although to my mind it was rather big for a young bird. Back in Cardiff Bay, I've seen large-ish cormorants with white fronts, groups of them, in fact, identified later as being females in the breeding season.

There are certainly plenty of fish in the charco waters. It'll be interesting to see if any others turn up in days to come.

  

Caring for the watercourse

After a good long sleep, Monday began with a walk to Mercadona to shop for groceries. Then came a call about a funeral on Friday, another bereavement in the hamlet of Los Corrascos outside Arboleas, in the early 1990s urbanizacion I was called on to visit about a funeral last week. My tea time bird watching walk was interrupted by a call from Ashley. We spent a long time on the phone which led to me drafting a statement for publication about recent BCRP changes for emailing by Julie to the CBS user base not long before I went to bed. 

Today it's been mainly cloudy and cool, good walking weather. First I went to the nature reserve and saw an egret for the first time this year. Curiously, it was roosting in a waterside reed bed a couple of metres away from the one grey heron I've now seen a couple of times.

I continued walking up the north side track along the bank of rio Aguas. Where the river bed bends at the top of the valley, a large tracked vehicle with a mowing arm was attacking the tall thick forest of reeds and cane that has taken over the surface of the river bed where water runs underground. Last time I walked up here, I noticed that extensive clearance of the watercourse had recently taken place. 

Further up towards the pueblo, the dry river bed seems free of this kind of vegetation. Gravel bedding whether natural or artificial, I don't know, seems only to permit a scattering of small bushes there. It may be that subterranean water runs under bedrock or at least too deep for reed and cane to flourish in that section. It makes sense to clear the watercourse, as dense vegetation would impede the immense if occasional flow of storm water and cause a low lying area to floor. Prevention is better than cure. The marine wetland area will suffer damage any time there's a huge amount of storm water but as I've seen, following last winter's coastal floods, the ecosystem is indeed resilient.

I climbed up to the top of Mojácar Pueblo, right to the mirador on the site of the mediaeval castillo. The imposing 1970s hotel El Moresco dominating the north face of the hill on which the town stands has been 'closed for repairs' for the past seven years, its glass front entrance doors and walls have graffiti on them now. An early victim of recession, refurbishment fund-raising or investment beyond reach, it's slowly turning into an eyesore, in contrast to the rest of the pueblo, which looks well kept and prosperous.

When I was here mid November last, I arrived to find that the huge north facing mirador terrace had been closed and was being excavated. I believe the condition of the car parks underneath the terrace was the reason for this unexpected activity, at the end of the autumn holiday season. Sure enough, the terrace had been restored, and its neighboring restaurants were open for business. It looked, however, as if the car park restoration is still a work in progress. More parking nightmares for locals, sadly.

The walk back down to the apartment took another hour despite taking a shortcut on tracks away from the main road to Mojácar Playa, and I made it before twilight. A walk of about 10km in all. I'll sleep well tonight.

Finally, I got around to remembering to look back at blog entries made during my stay here last year, in an effort to recover the forgotten local Spanish word used to describe the nature reserve's water enclosure. It's charco which translates as 'puddle' rather than pool or pond, perhaps because by nature it may grow or shrink according to weather conditions, so its boundaries may be somewhat fluid. A nice little linguistic curiosity.
    

  

Happy prospects

Alwyn and Pam dropped by this morning and took me out for coffee and a catch up chat. They were on holiday in Egypt just before I arrived, but when they returned to the UK, were caught out by the collapse of Monarch Airlines, and had to wait several days until they could get a flight back home to Alicante where their car awaited them. Both are looking happy and relaxed, and not just because they had a lovely holiday with the family over there, but also because the search for a new Chaplain has been fruitful, someone has agreed they want to come and minister here. Just knowing that much lifts a great burden from their shoulders. People will speculate and gossip, but it'll be a while before the name is announced here and elsewhere synchronously, but never mind. Most of the wait for a new priest is over. I'm happy for them, and happy to be out of another locum job, in effect.

I walked back from town via the Consum supermarket, after chatting with Alwyn and Pam, and bought a few sampler packets of dried meats to try. After a siesta, I walked inland along the north side of the rio Aguas and back along the south side, crossing at the point where there's a track over the river course, but it runs several metres underground. I got several photos of birds in a flock of white wagtails that comes down to the river as the sun sets to catch their supper. When the sunilight is at a certain angle, it may make insects easier to see. Their aerobatic flight path is bizarre, a succession of zig-zags in tight formation, not nearly as gracious as that of swifts, but more difficult to sustain, as they don't glide much. After a short series of aerial manouvers, wagtails set down on a branch or a reed to recover, before taking off again. I observed and photographed a few last year. This year there are many more of them.

  

Ministry in Arboleas

As I was driving along the coast road to Garrucha on my way to today's funeral in Arboleas, there were three bulk carriers riding at anchor off-shore and one about to leave port. It's more usual to see one ship docked and loading and only occasionally another out in the bay. Why the increase in traffic? What's going on in another part of the world requiring so much raw construction material, I wonder? Or is this all a regular part of a cycle of commerce I know nothing about? It's intriguing.

I took the route to Arboleas on the back country road past Concepción and through Zurgena, having left early enough to have time to take photos on the way there and on the way back. The site of this rural village has been in occupation since neolithic times, with fertile soil, access to water and marble quarrying in the vicinity as an economic resource. It's the centre of a municipal area that reaches north across the valley as far as Llanos del Peral. Down on the floor of the valley is the village of La Alfoquia, which seems bigger. When the railway came to the Almanzora valley in the late 19th century there was a station there, a goods yard and warehouses. Some of the buildings survive, but alas, nothing more.

I arrived in Arboleas an hour early, found the church and a place to park, then had a coffee, in a bar nearby. In this place, and another around the corner, I heard mostly English being spoken, as I passed by. Indeed, since I've been in Mojacar, I've heard more English spoken on the streets, than Spanish, followed by French. The funeral director and his wife had arrived with the hearse by the time I left the bar. The church, however, was locked.

Slowly the space in front of the church filled with cars and people arriving for the funeral. Nobody seemed to know when the church would be unlocked or by whom. The widow and a few mourners were beginning to fret about not being able to get into the church. The funeral director called the priest with whom he'd made the booking and I gathered from him that he'd be along soon. It seems he was the other side of town officiating at a funeral in the Municipal Thanatorium, and was the only key holder available. I found myself briefly in the role of interpretor. It seems that few of the expats had more than rudimentary Spanish.

The young parish priest arrived at twenty to twelve and opened up. The churches in this area are fortunate to have young clergy, with so much ground to cover, so much to look after. We spoke in Spanish, and he was most welcoming, and expressed relief that a priest had been found to conduct an English service. He spoke some English, but like others, lacks confidence to use it unless really necessary. Bit by bit, however, necessity is proving to be a virtue for me, as I find that I can make myself understood quite well, except when I get learned vocabulary 'blank-outs'. The insistence to 'use it or lose it' is certainly true.

There was a congregation of about eighty for the service. The selection of popular songs from Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra seemed to fit, as a contrast to the quiet reflective mood it was so easy to facilitate in a beautifully decorated and well cared for neo-baroque 19th century building. There are rows of double columns in the arcades supporting the nave. Although painted to look like marble, these are made of local cast iron, a homage to local industry.

There was no gathering immediately after the funeral, so I took my leave of the widow, aware that she's living in a neighbourhood of expats that's long standing and close knit, so there'd be informal visits and socialising going on later in the afternoon. I re-traced my journey to the A7, and was back in the apartment cooking lunch by half past two.

I didn't go out for my evening paseo until it was almost dark. I walked as far as the Repsol garage near Garrucha and back, which took me an hour. As I passed over the Rio Aguas bridge, squadrons of egrets were flying in to roost for the night. Reed beds either side, nearest to the sea were a mass of white blobs, once they given up jostling for position or changing their resting place. It's hard to estimate just how many egrets roost there but it's got to be over five hundred.

Ornithology surprises

In a mood of industriousness this morning, I wrote two sermons, one for the Aljambra Eucharist on Thursday, in honour of St Simon and St Jude (about whom precious little is known),  and another for All Saints' Sunday. While preparing the former, I discovered there's an ancient church at Maku in northern Iran, in the region where Iran meets both Armenia and Azerbaijan. It's possibly one of the world's oldest Christian sites where the apostles are said to have been buried, martyred nearby, after evangelising in Armenia and Iran. Under islamic rule today, the church is said to be only accessible to pilgrims on their festival, one day a year, rating this as the world's most inaccessible Christian places of pilgrimage.

After lunch I had a phone call to tell me this this Sunday, it'll be Bible Sunday readings at the Mojacar Eucharist, and not All Saints. It didn't take me long to re-edit last Sunday's effort for Llanos, so now I am a week ahead! What shall I do with myself? There are no weekday services here next week - so far, but it was possible there could be another funeral, after all. I quite enjoy being in a position to pick up on anything that comes my way. It keeps me on my toes. It does my mind good. Heaven help me if I ever run out of things to do!

Later in the afternoon, I made myself go out for a walk. The weather is warm, but overcast, just like Cardiff, except that the clouds are a bit higher. Blue sky is such an incentive to get outdoors, a day like this is a temptation to turn in on myself. Anyway, I decided to explore the road on the north side of the Rio Aguas nature reserve. On the way over the bridge I got some good shots of a moorhen and a reed warbler, one of several pairs active in the reed beds, expressing itself occasionally with a noticeably loud distinctive call. Several pairs of moorhens were there before, but I'd not identified them, but confused them with the gallinules that are also present. There's this tiny diving duck with scruffy plumage. It might be an immature something, though what, I can't begin to think. Earlier I identified it as a teal, but now I'm less than sure. Its behaviour rules out it being a coot or a moorhen. For now it's a mystery bird.

The walk up the un-metalled road took me was the end of the golf course which is part of a golfing resort occupying land between Mojacar and Garrucha. I've walked around sections of it before, but have never seen anyone playing a round, and just one person on the driving range. The weather is great right now for a round of golf, so why is the place deserted? I wonder. 

After tarmac ran out, I followed the un-metalled track for another kilometre, as far as the cement works, and then crossed the dry river bed for the return leg. The entire length of the arroyo, both the section where there's water, and where the watercourse is underground, is rich with a variety of small birds, very hard to identify. At one point a flock of several dozen took to the wing at the same time. The energetic sound of the birds taking off surprised me. I would have needed the camera to be on, and set to video record to capture what I saw. 

It wasn't a flock of sparrows, the sight of which I am used to, but of even smaller birds, whose flight pattern was both erratic and distinctive, the entire group flew in patterns to avoid and confuse predators in a way I don't recall seeing before. I wonder how many more time I'd have to return to their territory to see that again.

So glad I made the effort to get out of the house for an hour or so.

   

History puzzle solved

Today is a national holiday in Spain, so shops and banks are shut. It's also been overcast and dull, so little incentive to get out and go anywhere special. I took time to write my Sunday sermon in the morning, and after cooking lunch, I settled down to see if I could find out anything about the very large mysterious ruined building by the coast road outside Garrucha.

Eventually, I tracked down an old website, many Google search pages deep, recounting the history of an industrial railway line, built around 1890, running from lead mines 17km inland at the small town of Bédar, down to the shore at the southern end of Garrucha. The site has photos taken at the turn of this century of the ruins of what had been a lead smelting plant. Its product was loaded on to boats on the sea shore another hundred meters away. The mines closed in the 1920s and with them, the railway disappeared. 

The land above and beyond the smelting plant had other industrial buildings on it, now long gone. A large area of old industrial land has cleared, maybe with housing in mind in the long term. What remains of the old smelter has been been tidied up, and enhanced with gardens. But curiously, no easily available information publicises this aspect of the town's heritage, whose wealth creation, over a century ago, helped transform a small fishing town with a mineral shipping business into a stylish resort with reputable restaurants and small hotels.

I'm so pleased to have solved this little puzzle. My initial conjectures about a vaulted roof were far from the truth. The neatly laid stone blocks over the site behind the standing end walls were most likely to cover a mound of rubble from the demolished side walls of the building - perhaps cheaper than the cost of taking away the demolition rubble, but maybe also securing toxic waste contamination from furnaces originally housed there. Re-purposing land after industrial use is just as complex and potentially expensive a planning issue as any other form of waste processing with environmental impact.

When I went out at tea time to get some fresh air, I found there'd been light rain. Pavements were still drying, and the air smelled fragrant and fresh. I went down to the beach and walked around the periphery of the nature reserve, exploring paths through the bushes and tall grasses surrounding the lake above the sea shore where the Rio Aguas stops, and seeps water through the sand into the beach. I've come to the conclusion this uncommon environmental feature is not entirely natural. 

If it was there originally on its own, it's been enhanced by constructing two metre dykes along a kilometre of its length inland. On the beach itself the sand bar rises only half a metre from the water level. But this has been sufficient to foster vegetation growth in an extensive area of beach around, thanks to colonising plants. I noticed among the tallest grasses and canes growing shore side, lots of pebbles, washed up with sand at high tides in stormy weather, helping to re-enforce the enclosure of river water to create a lake.

On the north side, I found a path beneath the road bridge over the lack which led through the vegetation to the water's edge, under the bridge. A man was fishing there. There was no need to acknowledge each other as we both needed silence. Then a host of egrets returned to roost for the night, attaching themselves to waterside rushes where they could, hundreds of them. Hordes of swifts came, bats as well, to feed on myriad insects, while coots fought over space in the water below. I realised that in the evening and early morning, days earlier, I'd been mistaken about the waterside plants, viewed from a distance. They were not exuding any white cottony substance. All the white blobs on reeds which were in my field of view in low light were birds roosting, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. Well, they fooled me.

While I was there, I heard several different bird calls I couldn't identify any more than I could see them. I got one new bird photo, however. I think, a reed warbler. If you know differently, tell me

     

Dawn delight

I woke at first light, aware that Clare would soon be on her way to the Heath hospital for day surgery eye appointment, thankfully with support from a good neighbour, with me so far away, and only able to message her good wishes. I couldn't get back to sleep, so with a little effort, I got up, dressed and made my way to the road bridge overlooking the nearby Rio Aguas nature reserve, to watch the sunrise, and anything else that might happen.

It seemed that there were even more coots out in the open waters of the lake than I saw last night, dozens of them, dabbling, fighting, calling to each other. Then there were bats on their odd jagged flight paths just over the water, with occasional intrusions from more elegantly aerobatic swifts. The big surprise was fish 20cm long jumping clean out of the water, several times in a row. Also insect hunting I wondered. A spectacular morning twilight dance. 

There were several kinds of birdsong unfamiliar to me coming from tall grasses either side of the lake. I caught sight of a reticent Purple Gallinule browsing for food among waterside reeds, then a few egrets appeared, then a few more, then a lot more as the sun appeared over the horizon. At first, they attached themselves to reeds or nearby trees, and roots for a while. Then without warning, groups of them would take to the air and fly west inland up the valley, to wherever they expected to find their next food. At a guess, there were several hundred birds hiding overnight in the surrounding reed beds. 

At this time of year reeds produce a white cotton like puffball on the stem. I think it may contain seed. At a distance in the half light, there could be no better hiding place for the egrets. Although larger than the puffball, they are equally as plain and white, clinging to a reed.

Just as I was about to leave, I spotted a group of six Mallards, and then tiny diving duck, probably a teal. I took a burred photo of this, plus a few more of Purple Gallinules feeding, and then, too quickly for me to react, the vivid blue flash of a Kingfisher, flying under the bridge, the length of the lake. Such a blessed morning hour. You can find my photos here

After breakfast I spent the rest of the morning editing and uploading photos, receiving and sending emails. I was ready for a siesta after lunch, but made the effort to walk later in the afternoon. This time I went south along the promenade, further than I went before, until I'd done 6-7 km or so. I was looking for a shop, well most probably a Chinese supermarket, selling cheap sun hats, as I'd left mine at home. I got lucky just as I was about to turn for home, and purchased a white sombrero, for 5€ a bit too small for my big head - it'll need stretching - but it's necessary. I've got used to wearing a hat this past few years, and even though the sun is less strong than it was last month, I won't risk over-exposure.

The south end of the promenade seems from its buildings to be the older part of Mojacar Playa, with many more smaller shops, restaurants and a few houses on the beach side of the road, and generally not looking as neat and tidy or as up-market as the northern reaches of the town. Around the junction of the road up to Mojacar's pueblo viejo is the most developed, with a shopping mall, some gardens, the Post Office, and some posh shops and bars. So, development seems to have extended a good 4km from the 'centre' to the north over the past few decades. Eventually, I guess, the entire sea front from Mojacar to the neighbouring mineral exporting port of Garrucha will be a built up area, but hopefully developed according to the same coherent planning concept that has made the north reaches of Mojacar Playa fairly pleasing to the eye.

Walking the streets this past few days, I've heard as much French spoken among holidaymakers as English. What I find puzzling is the large number of Italian themed eating houses, offering pasta or pizza. Few unashamedly English, French or Spanish for that matter, unless this exists as a default but isn't promoted. The built environment and landscape says 'Spain', but the cuisine less evidently so. I wonder what's the reason for this?

  

Beach surprise discovery

I had a meeting this morning with churchwarden Pam and Fr Alan, the retired priest who been living in Mojacar permanently for 12 years. He's acting as Interim Priest in Charge during the interregnum, to provide much needed continuity, as he is well known in all four worship centres, and throughout the widespread pastoral area the chaplaincy covers. If was good to hear them speaking about the many challenges and opportunities which present themselves, and in the privileged position of having my duties organised for me during my stay.

When we'd finished, I had some washing, and then, having located the nearest Mercadona some shopping to get done before lunch. It's necessary to drive to a supermarket, as it's almost half an hour's walk, too far to carry a full week's basic purchases in one go. Mojacar Playa is well spread out over six kilometres of sea shore. There are a handful of small convenience stores, the nearest is ten minutes from the apartment. The resort and all the satellite urbanizacions are planned around the presumption of car usage for the long term residents. I understand that in summer vehicle congestion is a terrible problem. A journey which now takes me five minutes can take four times as long.

There are, however, frequent busses along the coast road catering for visitors, or residents that are no longer able to drive. It will be necessary to use the car more than I'd prefer to, in order to perform all my duties, and look after myself. I don't mind at all, except that it will be vital to make sure that I get out and walk every day for an hour, as well as go places by car.

After lunch and a siesta, I decided to go and find the chapel where I'll be celebrating the Eucharist on Sunday next. The Ermita de San Pascual is not in Mojacar itself but 11km from the apartment, just off the coast road as it weaves though the mountains, in the hamlet of Agua de Enmedio overlooking one of the several golf courses in the area.

The west front of the building, which accommodates over sixty people, is tiled in large roughly hewn slate slabs with a silvery grey colour. This isn't typically local, but apparently an idea originating with the benefactor who had the chapel built, who'd lived and worked in South America, and imported this architectural feature, imitating capillas rurales in the Andes.

On the drive back, I stopped to look at Castillo Macenas a mid-eighteenth century coastal defence fortress which stands on a beach, fifty metres from the shore. There's a promontory a kilometre further south with a round watch tower, the Torre del Pirulico. The beach is several kilometres away from the conurbation, with unpaved parking areas between road and beach. On the sand beneath the fortress walls, goodness knows how many people had made small piles of stones, found laying about in the vicinity. I made one too. A spiral design, a peace sign and a yin-yang symbol were also laid out in a mosaic of white marble pebbles and black slate pieces on the sand.

The beach has an element of natural unkempt wildness about it, until you look back towards rising ground where there's a bend in the road. Here the concrete skeleton of long low rise building complex sits, looking neglected and ugly, a sad blight on the landscape. It's one of several large unfinished projects hereabouts, a legacy of the past decade of economic crisis. Good cheer arrived, however in a pair of lapwings, one of which sat quite still for long enough to allow me to take three good pictures, quite close up, before flying away.

Immediately after returning, I went out for that essential walk, this time, heading north on the beach towards Garrucha. A few hundred metres along there's a large area of reeds, bushes and trees that makes a huge green patch on the otherwise quite bare shoreline. It's where there's usually a dry river bed, an arroyo, with underground water seeping into the sea. Here, however, the sand has created a barrier over ages, so that instead of water spreading out and dispersing in the sandy subsoil, it has formed a shallow lake of brackish water, on which certain kinds of vegetation and wildlife thrive. 

The lake is about half a kilometre long, spanned by a road bridge. This is the outflow of the Rio Aguas, as the bridge signage informs the world. I walked back along the road to the bridge, and from there had a fine vantage point to take photos of an egret, some coots and a remarkable if shy wading bird with red legs and red cheeks and beak - a Purple Gallinule - my first sighting. There were other smaller birds as well, but they moved too quickly for me to identify.

Another man was on the bridge with camera and binoculars, another bird watcher. He approached me and we started chatting in Spanish, and comparing photos. He showed me an app on his smartphone which not only gave a photo of a bird, but its name in four languages. He was a visitor from Madrid, I think, and had only discovered this remarkable jewel of a conservation area, right in the middle of a major holiday resort in the previous week. A conversation about birds exclusively in Spanish plus the discovery of this place really made my day.