The only human inhabitants of the marisma are a few herdsmen whose reed-built huts are scattered on remote vetas. There are also the professional wildfowlers with their cabresto-ponies; but this class is disappearing as, bit by bit, the system of “preservation” extends over the wastes. Though the climate is healthy enough except for a period just preceding the autumn rains, yet our keepers and most of those who live here permanently are terrible sufferers from malaria. Quinine, they tell us, costs as much as bread in the family economy.
We quote the following impression from Wild Spain, p. 78:—
The utter loneliness and desolation of the middle marismas call forth sensations one does not forget. Hour after hour one pushes forward across a flooded plain only to bring within view more and yet more vistas of watery waste and endless horizons of tawny water. On a low islet at farthest distance stand a herd of cattle—mere points in space; but these, too, partake of the general wildness and splash off at a gallop while yet a mile away. Even the wild-bred horses and ponies of the marisma revert to an aboriginal anthropophobia, and become as shy and timid as the ferae naturae themselves. After long days in this monotony, wearied eyes at length rejoice at a vision of trees—a dark-green pine-grove casting grateful shade on scorching sands beneath. To that oasis we direct our course, but it proves a fraud, one of nature’s cruel mockeries—a mirage. Not a tree grows on that spot, or within leagues of it, nor has done for ages—perhaps since time began.
Such is the physical character of the marisma, so far as we can describe it. The general landscape in winter is decidedly dreary and somewhat deceptive, since the vast areas of brown armajos lend an appearance of dry land where none exists, since those plants are growing in, say, a foot or two of water—“a floating forest paints the wave.” The monotony is broken at intervals by the reed-fringed caños, or sluggish channels, and by the lucios, big and little—the latter partially sprinkled with armajo-growth, the bigger sheets open water, save that, as a rule, their surface is carpeted with wildfowl.
Should our attempted description read vague, we may plead that there is nothing tangible to describe in a wilderness devoid of salient feature. Nor can we liken it with any other spot, for nowhere on earth have we met with a region like this—nominally dry all summer and inundated all winter, yet subject to such infinite variation according to varying seasons. It is not, however, the marisma itself that during all these years has absorbed our interest and energies—no, that dreary zone would offer but little attraction were it not for its feathered inhabitants. These, the winter wildfowl, challenge the world to afford such display of winged and web-footed folk, and it is these we now endeavour to describe.
By mid-September, as a rule, the first signs of the approaching invasion of north-bred wildfowl become apparent. But if, as often happens, the long summer drought yet remains unbroken, these earlier arrivals, finding the marisma untenable, are constrained to take to the river, or to pass on into Africa.
Should the dry weather extend into October, the only ducks to remain permanently in any great numbers are the teal, the few big ducks then shot being either immature or in poor condition, from which it may be inferred that the main bodies of all species have passed on to more congenial regions.