Spring in Southern Portugal

An entry to our 2019 Writing Competition, Michelle Brown travelled on our 'Spring in Southern Portugal' tour.

The route to Pulo de Lobo is lined, in early April, with nesting White Storks. The huge, prehistoric-looking birds perch improbably in their great shabby nests atop spindly telegraph poles, looking like an optical illusion and circled by sparrows flitting in and out like tiny, feathery satellites. The nests – heart-warmingly enabled by human intervention, the building of platforms upon seemingly every high skinny protrusion in the landscape – delineate the horizon, one after the next, as far as the eye can see. If you squint, it’s easy to imagine yourself back in the Jurassic era, looking at the bowers of pterodactyls.

At Pulo de Lobo itself, we head for the reedbeds for today’s main attraction: a troupe of Greater Flamingoes. Small squabbles break out among them and they peck each other irritably with those unmistakable curving beaks. From time to time, in perfect synchronicity, several birds at once spread their wings, revealing fabulous undersides of ruched black and salmon pink feathers. It resembles some breathtaking, unearthly water ballet, complete with delicate tutus as the breeze fluffs their feathers into fragile crinolines. Black-winged Stilt skim overhead, stretching their impossibly long, knobbly-kneed red legs behind them; this ethereal realm belongs entirely to its feathered denizens, and we bipeds may intrude but briefly, but softly.

I spend pleasurable minutes stalking an Iberian Marbled White butterfly who eventually, obligingly lands and is backlit by the sun and so seems to glow, translucent but for the glorious filigreed tracery of black veins and eye spots. He pauses politely just long enough for me to take a photograph, before taking back to the air and resuming his hypnotic, mysterious dance.

The ground is dotted with Star-of-Bethlehem, the white flowers limned neatly with lines coloured the exact pinky-brown of a fresh mushroom’s gills; and the parasitic Purple Broomrape, making up what it lacks in chlorophyll with its distinctive magenta spikes. On the other side of the reserve, we find humped sand dunes where Pink Campion, sea pinks and creeping Scarlet Pimpernel give way to the lurid, cheery pinks and yellows of Hottentot Fig which merrily swarms onto the beach, clashing gloriously with its own red and green, succulent like leaves in a riot of neon colour.

Above us, an excitable Zitting Cisticola makes its fluting, zippy cry, seeming to tell us that his name is perfect onomatopoeic poetry, and he celebrates this serendipitous fact. It’s hard not to anthropomorphise the birds sometimes; their behaviour seems very human. The little cisticola sounds joyous, and his bouncing flight is joyous too.

These too brief, shining moments amongst the baking dunes, the flowers and flamingoes, ultimately bring to mind the words of that visionary and original flower child William Blake:

‘To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.’

Read more about our 'Spring in Southern Portugal' holiday.