Land, Sea and Air

These days I am training a friend’s Portuguese Mastiff puppy, HERCULES, who is smart, stubborn, has sharp teeth and loves me to the point that he moans and moos when I show up at his house.  I am teaching him to heel, sit, lie down, stay and come and he is teaching me Portuguese, which I’ve otherwise resisted, and he plops right down at,“Senta!” and lies down sprawled out at, “Deite.”  Then there’s Fica, Anda and Aqui…the vocabulary is building.  I’ll work them into my existing vocabulary of Good Morning, Have a Good Weekend, Everything OK?, Coffee With Steamed Milk, Please, and lastly, Kisses and Hugs.  This just brings me back to the realisation that the Portuguese are generous and patient…often too patient as in the case of their woeful acceptance of their laughably inept bureaucracies.  But still, we are very fortunate to live here; the good vastly outweighs the difficult.  

That feeling of good fortune always comes to the surface when I drive through the perfect little valley we’ve come to call Hoopoe Valley.   Hoopoe Valley is half a kilometre wide and perhaps three kilometres long.  The Valley is situated between two small riverside mountains.  It starts immediately over the saddle-pass as we head down the mountain into Viana and it is divided into quite small plots defined by stone walls that speak to the centuries of subdivision of farms among succeeding generations. 

Now, the plots are scarcely large enough to provide even a sustenance living, but if you own a few and rent a few more, you can apparently make do…at any rate, you will be seen on a rusty tractor with your sturdy wife hanging on to a fender.  It is history unfolded, defined by stone walls, acceptance of life as it is and respect for life as it was. 

Best of all, these little plots, each one dedicated to something different from its neighbour are a haven for birdlife.

Hoopoe Valley is where we most often find the magnificent Hoopoe Birds, the big colourful Woody Wood Pecker Prototypes I so love to see.  They have unsavoury habits, such as coating their houses and nests with foul smelling fecal matter and teaching their chicks to squirt sickening, well-aimed streams of baby shit at any intrusion, but Gawdamitey they are handsome…extravagant even.  Having said this, in the warm months of 2024 I did not see a single Hoopoe and in ’23 I only saw one.  This is alarming, but the bird gurus on the internet say the Hoopoe populations are safe and stable…I’ll keep looking.  

This valley is also home to several pair of the shy Pileated Woodpeckers.  They are also handsome as all get out and show flashes of bright red and white as they fly in their flap-flap-dip, flap-flap-dip style out of harm’s way and into the safety of more distant vines and foliage. To pay respects to One Flew Over, the Bull Goose Loony of the valley is a huge raptor of some sort.  On some days I say to myself, “That is a Short Toed Eagle!  He’s huge!” and at other sightings say, “It has to be a Goshawk.”  Whatever its species, this bird is the Undisputed Champ and Supreme Authority of Hoopoe Valley.  Bob McGrump we’ve come to call the one who sits almost invisibly with great disapproval on the top of a wooden power pole in the middle of a hay field.  He sits there unmoving if you drive by, even slowly, but if the car stops, to get a better view with my binoculars, for instance, McGrump drops off the pole into the air and flaps away half a span and alights on the wire, shoots me the little middle claw and makes silent threats.  I move along.

Not many days ago as I drove down into the valley on the way home, in bright light under a huge cumulous sky, McGrump brought me back to a magical time in my life.  He flapped off his regular pole and headed down-valley to an invisible (to me) thermal that tipped his near wing up sharply.  He banked tightly into the thermal and absolutely shot upwards in a heavenly spiral that I once knew well.  In mere seconds he’d gained two or three hundred meters without flapping once.  He’s getting up there to hunt, I thought to myself, but in that instant he peeled out of the spiral and blasted in a straight line back up the ridge to the saddle and then came lazily back to the thermal and did it again…three times!  McGrump was having fun, was in his glory, was overflying his kingdom!

The clarity of what he saw was in my mind and memory as he swept past peak and valley, field, ridge and river over and over, and joyfully without question.  The big difference in our experience was that McGrump looked out over his beak as the magic wheeled past again and again and I looked out over the panel and nose of my glider; McGrump wears his own airplane…never takes it off.  Even so, in my hubris I deemed us Brothers in The Thermal….silly I know, but you shouda been there.   During my days as an avid glider pilot, mostly in Eastern Washington, I often thermaled with hawks and every time admired their ability to fly so slowly and gain altitude so much faster than I could.  We also watched the hawks to find new thermals.  So even if they become McGrumpsters in repose, flying raptors are simply elegance defined.   

Back on Earth, there have been devastating forest fires and choking smoke covering a great deal of Portugal.  On the worst days, one simply could not go outside and the sun was a ruddy disk in a dreadful brown sky. 

 

That was all replaced with the remnants of Hurricane Kirk which wandered by in the Atlantic and the last two weeks of constant rain has tilted us back to normal.  The big Atlantic storm showed us its heel in the form of a “Severe Coastal Event”.  Off the seawall in Viana do Castelo the big seas were breaking ashore as high as 12 meters.  That’s a forty foot wave to this little fella from Texas!  I managed to get a few usable pics of this maelstrom.  Enjoy. 

 

 

Next is a long anticipated motor trip around the entire Iberian Peninsula.  Stay tuned.