Turnstones turning over a new leaf

IT is wonderful how nature adapts and turns opportunity to advantage.

I never thought I’d see turnstones behave like sparrows, but I witness this every evening on a small beach near the apartment lent us by a niece on the island of Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands.

Thrush-sized, black-and-white shorebirds, turnstones can be seen on our Irish coasts picking over seaweedy shores, and turning over stones to get at the small crustaceans and invertebrates beneath.

They have turned-up beaks especially adapted for the purpose, and red legs, which have nothing to do with it, I think.

In Lanzarote, this small flock has taken to picking over the sand after the sunbathers leave. They run about searching for crumbs in the stone-walled bunkers made by holidaymakers.

The bunkers are built to protect from the wind, which blew nonstop for four days after we arrived but has now, happily, abated. Easter may traditionally be breezy in Ireland, but here it was non-stop windy — and wind, as we know from the reputation of the Mistral, the Fohn and the Sirocco, can drive one mad.

While the 10-mile-long beaches of Fuerteventura are known to be subject to a constant blast, I had not heard of Lanzarote being so afflicted; certainly, La Gomera, our island home-from-home, and the other southern islands of Gran Canaria, La Palma, Tenerife and El Hierro, are not.

While the bunker-builders of La Gomera were German, in Lanzarote it is possible that they were built by the municipal authority. As anyone who has visited the island will know, Lanzaroteños are experts at building semi-circular walls of black lava stones around their fruit trees, to protect them from the wind. Their small farms must be the neatest and most beautiful on earth.

In the midst of stony desert, one comes upon an isolated, white, one-storey flat-roofed house with its attendant fields and gardens. The fields prepared for planting, or recently seeded, are jet black, covered in raked, volcanic pebbles. Those with crops are green and lush, the plants laid out in evenly spaced rows between low walls or windbreaks of growing wheat.

The conservation of water is the all-consuming task of the Lanzaroteño farmer. The earth is fertile, but there is little rain — 14cm per annum, less than parts of the Sahara — and when it falls the drying winds will soon claim it if it is not conserved in the soil.

Thus, the covering of ‘picon’, black pumice pebbles spread half an inch thick over the red, productive earth. It is a skin that protects it from sun and wind, and a porous mulch that draws moisture from the air, releasing it into the soil beneath. In time, the seeds sprout and burst through. This ‘dry farming’ method is unique to Lanzarote, which lost much of its viable land over six catastrophic years, from 1730 to 1736.

Volcanoes raged, lava poured and boiling magma spewed into the sky, falling over miles of landscape which remains, to this day, a jagged plain of carbonised rocks, torn and convoluted, without a plant or hardly a lichen capable of surviving on it. The obvious comparison is the surface of the moon.

The sea is colder here than I recall it ever being in La Gomera, a few hundred miles south. Our east coast resort was designed by the famous architect, César Manrique, as a re-creation of a typical Canarian fishing village. A breakwater encloses a small beach and paved walks run along the shore. As with all Manrique’s work, the installations are in harmony with the landscape. My only complaint is the preponderance of us foreign holidaymakers, and Chinese and Indian shopkeepers. There are few Canarians. The spirit of the islanders we are so used to in La Gomera is absent. You can make the village, but not the soul.

The Lanzaroteño soul is alive, and robust elsewhere throughout the island. In Puerto del Carmen, one may sit at the old port watching fishermen throw bowls, and listening to their banter as the sun sets behind the mountains of Fuerteventura. Puerto del Carmen is cheaper, too, €7 for two slabs of fresh tuna, native potatoes and salad, and €9 for the wine. And one doesn’t have to eat out every night, anyway. One can eat at home and watch the moonlight on the sea.