Thus the question remained unsettled till 1883, when a favouring season enabled the present authors to succeed where greater ornithologists had striven in vain.
A venerable apologue attaches to the nesting habit of the flamingo. Owing to the length of its legs, it was assumed that the bird could not incubate in the ordinary manner of birds, and that, therefore, it stood astraddle on a nest built up to the requisite height—a combination of unproved assumption with inconsequential deduction. ‘Twere ungracious to be wise after the event, yet, in fact, this fable passed current as “Natural History” for precisely two centuries—from 1683, when Dampier so described the nesting of flamingoes on the Cape de Verde Islands,[48] till 1883, when the present authors had opportunity of observing a flamingo-colony in southern Spain.
Flamingoes do not nest every year in the Spanish marismas. Their doing so depends on the season, and only in very wet years is the attempt made. Rarely, even then, are young hatched off, so persistently are the wastes raided by egg-lifters, who sweep up by wholesale every edible thing, and to whom a “Flamingo City,” with its hundreds of big eggs all massed together—a boat-load for the gathering—represents an El Dorado. As early as 1872 eggs were brought to us—taken by our own marshmen on May 24—but it was not till 1883 that we enjoyed seeing an occupied nest-colony ourselves.
More than a quarter-century has sped since then, yet we cannot do better than substantially transcribe the narrative as recorded in Wild Spain.
During the month of April we searched the marismas systematically for the nesting-places of flamingoes, but, though exploring large areas—riding many leagues in all directions through mud and water varying from a few inches to full three feet in depth—yet no sign of nests was then encountered. Flamingoes there were in thousands, together with a wealth of aquatic bird-life that we will not stop here to describe. But the water was still too deep, the mud-flats and new-born islets not yet sufficiently dried for purposes of nidification. The only species that actually commenced to lay in April were the coots, purple herons, peewits, Kentish plovers, stilts, redshanks, and a few more.
April was clearly too early, and the writer lost nearly a week through an attack of ague, brought on by constant splashing about in comparatively cold water while a fierce sun always beat down on one’s head. In May the luck improved. Far away to the eastward flamingoes had always been most numerous, and once or twice we observed (early in May) signs that resembled the first rude beginnings of architecture, and encouraged us to persevere in what had begun to appear an almost hopeless quest.
May 9 (1883).—The effects of dawn over the vast desolations of the marisma were specially lovely this morning. Before sunrise the distant peaks of the Serranía de Ronda (seventy miles away) lay flooded in a blood-red light, and appearing quite twice their usual height. Half an hour later the mountains sank back in a golden glow, and long before noon had utterly vanished in quivering heat-haze and the atmospheric fantasies of infinite space. Amidst chaotic confusion of mirage effects we rode out across the wilderness: at first over dry mud-flats sparsely carpeted with dwarf scrub of marsh plants, or in places bare and naked, the sun-scorched surface cracked into rhomboids and parallelograms, and honeycombed with yawning cattle-tracks made long ago when the mud was moist and plastic; then through shallow marsh and stagnant waters gradually deepening. Here from a patch of rush hard by sprang three hinds with their fawns and splashed away through the shallows, their russet pelts gleaming in the early sunlight. Gradually the water deepened; “mucha agua, mucho fango!” groaned our companion, Felipe; but this morning we meant to reach the very heart of the marisma, and before ten o’clock were cooking our breakfast on a far-away islet whereon never British foot had trod before, and which was literally strewn with avocets’ eggs, while nests of stilts, redshanks, pratincoles, and many more lay scattered around.
During this day we discovered two nests of the slender-billed gull (Larus gelastes), not previously known to breed in Spain; also, we then believed, those of the Mediterranean black-headed gull (L. melanocephalus), though the latter were afterwards ascribed by oological experts (perhaps correctly) to the gull-billed tern (Sterna anglica), a species whose eggs we also found by the dozen.