Walter John Buck

A Foreword by Sir Maurice de Bunsen, G.C.M.G., British Ambassador at Madrid.

Among my recollections of Spain none will be more vivid and delightful than those of my visits to the Coto DoÑana. From beginning to end, climate, scenery, sport, and hospitable entertainment combine, in that happy region, to make the hours all too short for the joys they bring. Equipped with Paradox-gun or rifle, and some variety of ammunition, to suit the shifting requirements of deer and boar, lynx, partridge, wild-geese and ducks, snipe, rabbit and hare, nay, perhaps a chance shot at flamingo, vulture, or eagle, the favoured visitor steps from the Bonanza pier into the broad wherry waiting to carry him across the Guadalquivir, a few miles only from its outflow into the Atlantic. In its hold the first of many enticing bocadillos is spread before him. Table utensils are superfluous luxuries, but, armed with hunting blade and a formidable appetite, he plays havoc with the red mullet, tortilla, and carne de membrillo, washed down with a tumbler of sherry which has ripened through many a year in a not far distant bodega.

In half an hour he is in the saddle. Distances and sandy soil prohibit much walking in the Coto DoÑana.

Sand Waste in Coto DoÑana.
Sand Waste in Coto DoÑana.

Sand Waste in Coto DoÑana.
Landscape in Coto DoÑana, with Marisma in background.
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY H.R.H. PHILIPPE, DUKE OF ORLEANS.

Marshalled by our host, the soul of the party, the cavalcade canters lightly up the sandy beach of the river. Thence it strikes to the left into the pine-coverts, leading in five hours more to the friendly roof of the “Palacio.” A picturesque group it is with Vazquez, Caraballo, and other well-known figures in the van, packhorses loaded with luggage and implements of the chase, and lean, hungry podencos hunting hither and thither for a stray rabbit on the way. The views are not to be forgotten, the distant Ronda mountains seen through a framework of stone-pines, across seventy miles of sandy dunes, marismas, and intervening plains. After a couple of hours we skirt the famous sandhills, innocent of the slightest dash of green, which for some inscrutable reason attract, morning after morning, at the first tinge of dawn, countless greylag geese to their barren expanse and on which, si Dios quiere, toll shall be levied ere long. The marismas and long lagoons are covered here and there with black patches crawling with myriads of waterfowl, to be described after supper by the careful Vazquez as muy pocos, un salpicon—a mere sprinkling. Their names and habits, are they not written, with the most competent of pens, in this very volume? We stop, perhaps, for a first deer-drive on our line of march. How thrilling that sudden rustle in the brushwood! Stag is it, or hind, or grisly porker? As we approach the “Palacio” we see the spreading oak on which perched, contemptuous and unsuspecting, the imperial eagle, honoured this year by a bullet from King Alfonso’s unerring rifle. As we ride through the scrub the whirr of the red-legged partridge sends an involuntary hand to the gun. They may await another day. At dusk we ride into the whitewashed patio, just in time to sally forth and get a flighting woodcock between gun and lingering glow of the setting sun.

SPANISH IMPERIAL EAGLE
SPANISH IMPERIAL EAGLE

For no precious hours are wasted in the Coto DoÑana. Next day at early dawn, maybe, if the lagoon be our destination, or at any rate after a timely breakfast, off starts again the eager cavalcade, be it in quest of red deer or less noble quarry. Then all day in the saddle, from drive to drive, dismounting only to lie in wait for a stag, or trudge through the sage-bushes after partridge, or flounder through the boggy soto, beloved of snipe, with intervening oases for the unforgotten bocadillo.

If Vazquez be kind, he will take you one day to crouch with him behind his well-trained stalking-horse, drawing craftily nearer and nearer to where the duck sit thickest, till, straightening your aching back, you have leave to put in your two barrels, as Vazquez lays low some twenty couples with one booming shot from his four-bore, into the brown.

Egret-Heronry at Santolalla, Coto DoÑana. (THE FOREGROUND IS SAND.) FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY H. R. H. PHILIPPE, DUKE OF ORLEANS. Egret-Heronry at Santolalla, Coto DoÑana. (THE FOREGROUND IS SAND.) FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY H. R. H. PHILIPPE, DUKE OF ORLEANS.
Egret-Heronry at Santolalla, Coto DoÑana.
(THE FOREGROUND IS SAND.)
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY H. R. H. PHILIPPE, DUKE OF ORLEANS.

But one morning surely a visit must be paid to the sandhills. Caraballo will call you at 4 A.M., and soon after you will be jogging over the six or eight miles which separate the “Palacio” from that morning rendezvous of the greylag. The stars still shine brightly as you dismount at the foot of the long stretch of dunes. A few minutes’ trudge will deposit you in a round hole dug deep in the dazzling white expanse the day before; for a hole too freshly dug will expose the damp brown sand from below, staining the spotless surface with a warning blotch, and causing the wary geese to swerve beyond the range of your No. 1 shot. It is still dark as you drop into your hole. Gradually the sky grows greyer and lighter, till the sun rises from the round yellow rim of the blue morning sky. Who shall describe the magic thrill of the first hoarse notes falling on your straining ear? The temptation to peep out is strong, but crouching deep down, you wait till the mighty pinions beat above you, and the first wedge of eight or ten sails grandly away in the morning sun. You judge them out of shot. But surely this second batch is lower down? Are they not close upon you? Why then no response to your two barrels? Was the emotion too great, or have you misjudged the speed of that easy flight or its distance through the crystal air? All the keener is the joy when, with heavy thump, your first goose is landed on the sand amid the tin decoys. When three or four lie there, Vazquez will send his fleet two-legged “water-dog” to set them up with twigs supporting their bills, to beguile more of their kind into line with the barrels. If the day be propitious, the sky will be dotted at times with geese in all directions. Now and again they will give you a shot, the expert taking surely three or four to the tyro’s one. It is half-past eight, and you have sat in your hole close on two hours before Vazquez comes to gather the slain, to which he will add two or three more, marked down afar, and picked up as dead as the rest. Never have two of your waking hours passed so quickly. What would you not give to live them over again and undo some of those inexplicable misses? But one goose alone would amply repay that early start. Even four or five are all you can carry, and the twenty or thirty that our expert [who must be nameless] would have shot, will live to stock the world afresh.

SPANISH LYNX
SPANISH LYNX

Among the fauna of the Coto DoÑana, a word must be given to the lynx. Never can I forget sitting one afternoon, Paradox in hand, on the fringe of a covert. I was waiting for stag, rather drowsily, for the beat was a long one and the sun hot, when my eyes suddenly rested on a lynx standing broadside among the bushes, beyond a bare belt of sand, some fifty yards off. Fain would I have changed my bullet for slugs, but those sharp ears would have detected the slightest click; so I loosed my bullet for what it was worth.

The lynx was gone. When the beat came at last to an end, I thought I would just have a look at his tracks. He lay stone-dead behind a bush, shot through the heart.

The eventful days are all too soon over. But the recollection remains of happy companionship and varying adventure, of easy intercourse between Spaniard and Englishman, with the echo of many a sporting tale, mingled with sage discourse from qualified lips on the habits of bird and beast. Who can tell you more about them than that group of true sportsmen and lovers of nature whose names, Garvey, Buck, Gonzalez, and Chapman, are indissolubly linked with the more modern history of the famous Coto DoÑana?

Maurice de Bunsen.

British Embassy, Madrid,
July 1910.

GREENSHANK (Totanus canescens)
GREENSHANK (Totanus canescens)