June in Spain is a month of intense heat—heat of that fiery high-dried sort that scorches as an open furnace. In June, as a Spanish proverb says—"Nothing but a dog or an Englishman" ventures out of doors; nor from an ornithological point of view is there much inducement to do so. The teeming variety of bird-life which characterizes April and May is now conspicuously absent. Migration is suspended, and there is no movement of passage-birds. There is no longer the accustomed number of large hawks hunting the campiña, and even those birds which remain seem to keep out of sight, sheltering from the blazing heat.
Perhaps the most interesting birds at this season are the newly-fledged young of the Raptores. The young Imperial Eagles are of a beautiful tawny colour, and during the mid-day heat frequent the trees where they were hatched. We also obtained young Kites in the same way—very handsome birds, much ruddier than the old ones in April. The young of M. migrans, on the other hand, are less pleasing than their parents, being, in fact, a pale, rather "washed-out" reproduction of them. Towards the end of the month (June) the young Montagu's Harriers are on the wing; they have dark brown backs, each feather edged with chestnut, a white nape, and orange-tawny breast. Many of the young of the Marsh-Harrier are uniformly very dark, bronze-black, with rich orange crowns—strikingly handsome birds. Some have also patches of the latter colour on the scapulars, others on the breast—they vary greatly, no two are alike. This species is not easy to understand; one imagines that these very dark specimens are all young birds; that the old females are lighter brown with yellow heads, and that the very old males acquire half-blue wings and tail—I shot one of these latter with the whole head pure white, each feather streaked centrally with black. (See photo at p. 242.) But how is one to account for an individual—otherwise uniformly black—having a perfectly developed blue tail and secondaries?
During June we were surprised to find the Green Sandpiper tolerably numerous in the Coto Doñana. It was a very solitary species, a single bird frequenting almost each small pool or water-hole far out among the scrub. We at first imagined the females must be sitting, but all attempts to find the nests were of course futile. The Wood-Sandpiper was observed, on passage, in May.
As the long summer day draws to its close, the infinite variety of nocturnal sounds which, during the short twilight, suddenly awake into being, strikes strangely on a northern ear. During the gloaming the air has been alive with the darting forms of bats, terns, and pratincoles, of swifts and swallows, all busily hawking after insects or slow-flying beetles. But before dark these disappear. Of crepuscular birds, the first to commence the nocturnal concert is the Russet-necked Nightjar, which abounds all over the scrub; a few minutes later, from the cork-trees, resounds the note of the Little Owl, then the sharp ringing ki-yōū of Scop's Owl—both in sight, flickering against the darkening sky; while far and near among the grass the loud rattle of the mole-cricket starts like an alarum and from every pool the united croaks of literally millions of frogs form, as it were, a background of sound resembling the distant roar of a mighty city.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE SPANISH GYPSY.
NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF THE "GITANOS."
The mysterious Rommany race which overruns every nation in Europe, but intermingles with none, has always abounded in Spain, and particularly in Andalucia, a land which is peculiarly favourable to the Ishmaelitish propensities of these human pariahs—as congenial to predatory wild men as to the wild beasts we elsewhere describe. Thoroughly typical objects both on the byeways and deserts of Spain, and of the animated scenes at her rural feasts and fairs, to which the gypsies flock like vultures to a carcase, it would be inappropriate here to omit all mention of this singular race, even though it may be impossible for us to add anything new to the exhaustive description of the Spanish gypsy narrated by Borrow in "The Zincali," a work based on intimate acquaintance with the gitanos and their language. To it we are indebted for much historic and ethnological information respecting the gypsy race, and take the liberty of quoting two or three passages from its pages.[55]
First appearing on Spanish soil during the early decades of the fifteenth century, after being driven from land to land, the Zingari outcasts speedily found a congenial home—if such a term is applicable to nomadic vagabonds—amidst the lone and sparsely-peopled regions of Iberia.