CHAPTER X
WILD-GEESE IN SPAIN
THEIR SPECIES, HAUNTS, AND HABITS
TO Spain, as to other lands that remain unaltered and “unimproved,” resort the greylag geese in thousands to pass the winter.
In our marismas of the Guadalquivir they appear during the last days of September, but it is a month later ere their full numbers are made up, and from that date until the end of February their defiant multitudes and the splendid difficulties of their pursuit afford a unique form and degree of wild sport perhaps unknown outside of Spain.
Ride through the marisma in November; it is mostly dry, and autumn rains have merely refreshed the sun-baked alluvia and formed sporadic shallows, or lucios as they are here termed. That lucio straight ahead is a mile across, yet it is literally tessellated with a sonorous crowd. With binoculars one distinguishes similar scenes beyond; the intervening space—and indeed the whole marisma—is crowded with geese as thickly as it is on our immediate front. To right and left rise fresh armies hitherto concealed among the armajo, till the very earth seems in process of upheaval, while the air resounds with a volume of voices—gabblings, croaks, and shrill bi-tones mingled with the rumble of beating wings.
Amid the islands of the Norwegian Skaargaard one can see geese in bulk, but there their numbers are distributed over a thousand miles of coast. Here we have them all—or a large proportion—concentrated in what is by comparison but a narrow space.
In their life-habits these geese are strictly diurnal, that is, they feed by day—chiefly in the early morning and again towards afternoon, with a mid-day interval of rest. The night they spend asleep on some broad lucio or other bare open space. That habit, however, is subject to modification during the periods of full moon, when many geese avail themselves of her brilliant light to feed in even greater security than they can enjoy by day. Their food consists exclusively of vegetable substances—at first of the remnants of the summer’s herbage, such as green ribbon-grass (canaliza), and other semi-aquatic plants; their main sustenance in mid-winter consists of the tuber-bearing roots of spear-grass (Cyperus longus and C. rotundus) which they dig up from the ground.
When autumn rains are long delayed, their voracious armies will already have consumed every green thing that remains in the parched marismas long before the “new water” from the heavens shall have furnished new feeding-grounds. In such cases the geese are forced to depart, and do so—so far as our observation goes—in the direction of Morocco; returning thence (within a few hours) immediately after rain has fallen. Their entry, on this second arrival, is invariably from the south and south-west—that is, from the sea.
There are three methods of shooting wild-geese in the Spanish marismas which may here be specified, to wit:—