Ansó, 18 October
by Isabel Isherwood - 14:26 on 18 October 2016
I have had a mixed ride with my efforts to find work here. Although our reason for choosing Ansó as our home for the year was that we had been here before on a few of our previous trips and loved it, it was also because I’d found what looked like interesting and reliable voluntary work here, on a European Mink reintroduction project. In fact, I got an email three days before we got here telling me that the reintroduction phase of the project, which I’d been scheduled to work on, was being put back a year due to problems with the captive breeding programme. This was quite a set-back, especially as a large part of the reason for this whole escapade was that I was frustrated by the lack of work opportunities in Morvern and wanted to have a go at working on something interesting…… I spent a few stressed-out weeks writing to anyone I could think of asking if there was any work available in the area, and came gradually to the conclusion that fieldwork-based projects seem to peter out through the autumn, stop entirely over winter, and pick up again in the spring. The only winter work anyone could offer was in the Herbarium of the Institute of Pyrenean Ecology in Jaca, where they need volunteers to put plant photographs into a database.
However over the last month things have gradually picked up. A woman in the Brazilian drumming group I’ve joined turns out to be an ecologist and has asked me to help out with some of her projects. The brother of our landlord works for the local government doing a whole range of ecological work including following up records of bears in the area and surveying bats. Another guy I bumped into radio-tracks lammergeiers – among other activities. While there don’t seem to be queues of people asking me to do things they would otherwise be unable to do (in other words I’m not exactly being ‘useful’…), folk here seem very relaxed about making a fieldwork day into a ‘day out’ and it seems to be entirely normal to ask friends to join you.
So I ended up spending today with Maria (from the Batucada – the drumming group), who was herself just ‘going along for the ride’ with a group of ex-colleagues trapping snow voles in the Pineta valley in Ordesa National Park. The project is trapping voles annually, investigating changes to their lower altitudinal limit as part of a long-term study of the impacts of both climate change and changing grazing pressure on the ecology of the high Pyrenees.
It was a lovely and very interesting day, both ecologically and socially. I am aware of the Spanish fondness for being in groups, and of the importance of social time, but I got a couple of real insights today, beginning with our meeting point in a village called Fiscal. We were a group of five, coming in three cars from different locations, and we had arranged to meet at Fiscal at 8.30 am. Maria and I were there almost on time. Nobody else had arrived yet so we went into the village bar for a coffee. About fifteen minutes later two others arrived, and also ordered coffee. Another ten or so minutes on and the fifth guy rocked up. He too had a coffee, and we leaned on the bar and chatted for a while. Then everyone decided that they might need something to eat while we were out, so they ordered sandwiches and we chatted some more while these were being made. After a while Fernando, who had been last to arrive, decided he was already hungry, and ordered a beer and a bit of food and sat down to eat.
Eventually, after over an hour in the bar, it seemed we were ready to move on. As soon as we left the bar the atmosphere changed from complete relaxation to purposeful and under time-pressure. We all got into one car, and headed off to the study area - driving at a terrific and stomach-churning speed up the mountain roads because, having completed the unrelated process of bonding with friends, we now were in a hurry to get started as it isn’t good to leave the voles in traps for too long…..
It was a fabulous bright day in magnificent mountain scenery, with chamois patrolling the crags and lizards skittering over the sun-warmed rocks. We walked for half an hour up through autumnal beechwoods to a high corrie which would have been pasture in years gone by, but which is now beginning to fill in with regenerating trees and bushes. These high pastures have been grazed seasonally by cows, sheep and goats for hundreds of years, but rural depopulation and a drop in new entrants to farming means that fewer and fewer animals are taken up to the mountain pastures in the summer months. This affects the plant species that grow here and in turn the animals that live here, and snow voles are one of the species that rely on a certain amount of grazing to keep the vegetation down. Live-traps had been set the previous evening, under overhanging boulders in the semi-vegetated scree-habitats favoured by the voles. We caught five of the wee beasties in forty traps, subjected them to the indignity of weighing, measuring and sexing, then let them go to streak off across the rocks and plunge into safe dark spaces out of sight.
As we headed down, the group were talking about other work they had coming up. Maria and I were invited to stay and join them again in the next day’s trapping, we both had to get home – so they called around other friends until they found people to go out with them. What I found fascinating was that didn’t really need extra helpers, they just prefered to be in a group. And off the back of this day I’ve been asked to join in with an otter survey in the national park, and also to go and search for desmans – weird aquatic insectivorous beasties with a short ‘trunk’, which look vaguely similar to moles but are more closely related to shrews…… So I have a growing sense of confidence that even if I am not doing ‘real work’, there should be plenty of opportunities to tag along with people who are….. and hopefully get some really useful experience along the way.
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