ARRIDURAK

Published by DEIA, July 21,2011



Taking a walk by the Biscayan coast and chatting with several friends about how easy or how difficult that it is the co-penetration of two txalapartaris (the persons w ho play the txalaparta) have to work out in order so their combination keeps on rising the magical rhythms of the txalaparta (an ancestral xylophone played by horizontal planks hit with vertical sticks) one of them sees another but not less fascinating combination. Above us 6 seagulls flying in circles, as in taking height, and over them a bird shaped like anchor that was carrying shorter and energetic circles.

"He’s a peregrine falcon", they tell me, and I, a bit incredulous, keep on thinking what it could be similar to, but a falcon? All of a sudden he closes his wings, turns around and, in a beating of wings, he’s already grating on the back of one seagull that, as he can, turns around and shows his threatening peak, in front of the falcon which changes his direction and disappears.

Everything was in moments of energy and an unusual emotion. I could not get out of my amazement. But what most called my attention is that, while we shouted and we were indicating the event, the people that were walking around were not showing neither the least’s interest. And I remembered the words of an Austrian friend that I met at a concert in Glasgow, Peter, that he said to me that we were a fortunate country for the whole wealth of the fauna and scenic that we have in the peninsula and, in that occasion, he explained to me about the cologne of vultures at the mountain Candina, in the easternmost extreme of Cantabria. In this 476-meter peak settles down one atypical vulture hunter with views toward the sea: the northernmost of Spain, and the only in Europe with these characteristics. Some call these vultures, "marine vultures" for the queerness that it seems to observe these birds in the coast.

So many times unique elements lose their attraction and mystery for the human being to become part of what's everyday activity. How it's possible what is to be "normal" loses interest in exceptional things? I do believe that we should put more emphasis in bestowing their true value upon each thing.

We have so many fascinating things that are around us, learning how to enjoy them, even though they are a part of what's habitual, is an obligation. Or, are other people always going to have to teach us?


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PAGASARRI

Published by DEIA, May 26, 2011




Returning from Madrid from a collaboration, several meetings and the Music Award’s Event still in my mind. Just before coming to Bilbo I notice the slopes of Pagasarri and I discover the leafiness and the coloring of a spring in its complete effervescence. Passed a few days I decide to take a stroll around there.

The mountain Pagasarri belongs to Ganekogorta's mountain mass that, with its 1,000 meters of height, which is a natural border between the territories of Bizkaia and Araba. In the trajectory I can clearly see that the Paga is alive and vitality becoming the lungs of such a frantic city like Bilbao. In an article they commented that this area lodges surprisingly a rich fauna that, without a doubt, revalue’s the surroundings with residents like the aesculapius snake, the peregrine falcon or the sparrow hawk among others. With a burning sun on top I continue my walk throw the intense green grasslands and seeing some more and more privileged sights thinking about how difficult it is to me to believe that animal species so savage may inhabit a place so near to a dense urban nucleus like Bilbao than it seems that it would have to have lost his ecological value, as if the same went by human patterns.

Nature does not circumscribe only to distant and paradisiacal places. Animal and vegetal species, that now seem ecological treasures for us, thousand years ago it did not populate our lands exemplifying that nature is somewhat lively, changing, that evolves and develops itself for parameters, I would even say, we are unaware of in great measure. Before sparrow hawks, falcons, etc were species that we only could see in books or visiting very distant and agrestal areas. Today, even in surroundings so humanized like the Pagasarri, we can enjoy them.




Let's not get carried away always of pessimistic and alarming messages, true it is that not all is good but it is not less true that we achieve bigger things. I believe that we have to learn from the animals, because only they get carried away by their instinct, for what they need and what they are. And they always CORRECT. Maybe someday even we will learn, right?

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