Manuel Aguilera surrounded by vultures on the rocky ground of Santa Cilia de Panzano, in the Sierra de Guara, Huesca.Juan Millás
When I come alone I go to sleep and the vultures lie around me.
Rarely do they eat a fresh carcass,” says Manu Aguilera.
He puts on a red vest and walks through the Sierra de Guara, in the Aragonese Pre-Pyrenees, to his feeder, a crag of bare rock between bushes.
A group of onlookers followed him to see him summon the griffon vultures and the bearded vultures (“vultures”), two of the four species of vultures on the Peninsula, along with the black vulture and the Egyptian vulture.
You see 5 vultures, 50 and then cover the sky 100, 200. They fly in a circular path, synchronized and silent to the inclined clearing.
It is the breakwater where the quebrantas
crush
bones and digest the marrow.
Aguilera asks for silence and approaches the meek group of vultures pushing a green wheelbarrow full of goat's feet.
She scatters her paws across the hillside, and scents of goat and thyme waft through the air.
A roar of giant wings and squawks shatters the peace of the mountain.
He puts on some gloves and sits between them.
“Covid,
leave
Ram.
Did you wash for the photo?
She wraps her hands around an egg and leaves an opening where a crooked beak protrudes.
“Nothing happens here until they take a tourist away,” she jokes.
Manuel Aguilera goes to his appointment with the vultures bringing them food in a wheelbarrow on the rocky ground of Santa Cilia de Panzano, in the Sierra de Guara, Huesca.
John Miles
90% of the population of griffon vultures
(Gyps fulvus)
lives on the Peninsula.
In its last census (2018), the NGO SEO/BirdLife considered the species safe.
It was in danger in 2001, when the mad cows, because it was forbidden to throw carcasses into the field and the vultures were starving.
But Aguilera says the griffon vultures will disappear.
He censuses two colonies in Guara and records fewer offspring each year.
A colony of 100 pairs hatches 29 chicks;
the other, 90, 38.
—And two years ago they hatched 80 eggs.
We'll see those who are born and those who reach adulthood.
He jots something down in his notebook and turns his cap over, gripping the brim with his thumb and forefinger.
The sun reflects off her black sunglasses and lights up her green neckerchief between the folds of her blue fleece.
She is 69 years old.
The vultures are clumsy on the rock: they kick like divers and buck humps with their absorbed, gallinaceous gaze.
They have the air of detectives in ocher trench coats with white fur collars.
Their beaks are hard and curved.
With them they pierce the skin, tear the meat and dislodge the viscera of the corpses.
They barge into the guts with their long, retractable necks and stick out their bloody heads.
In the area there are legends about some voracious beasts that kidnap babies at dawn.
Manuel Aguilera at the observatory of Las Pichillas de Binaced.
John Miles
A tender sound is heard, like a baby's sneeze.
Someone asks if they have colds:
“No, it's to clean up.
They breathe through a small hole in the palate”.
She grabs a beak, brings it closer to her, and hums an impromptu tune to the vulture.
“They're like children, huh?
If he gets caught by one of those terrible journalists, bah, worse than dragons."
He says that vultures are the most social birds, the only birds of prey without prehensile force in their claws and that is why they regurgitate food for their chicks.
He says that it is impossible for vultures to kill a cow or a lamb.
That the ranchers blame the vultures to collect the insurance.
"Let them go tell milongas somewhere else," he says to himself.
Vultures walk on two legs.
Aguilera throws food at us and the vultures chase after her, but they stop their momentum.
They fear us.
“Well, these are the evil vultures.
The Witch Vultures!
We leave, but he gets five minutes alone with them to undo the spell that's holding them.
I take one last look and Aguilera, thinking he's alone, whispers to the birds: "The bugs are gone."
Manuel Aguilera surrounded by vultures on the rocky ground of Santa Cilia de Panzano, in the Sierra de Guara, Huesca.Juan Millás
We retrace a rocky path that creaks to a pile of stones.
We are in “the sanctuary”.
It is the sacred territory where Manu Aguilera and his friend Pepe Chávarri created the feeder in 1979. At that time it was believed that there were no vultures in the area.
But they saw a
vulture,
then they found a chick, and for the next 15 years they fed an entire colony.
Chávarri died, but Aguilera fed them every Thursday for another 25 years.
The sanctuary smells of rosemary, sprouting among gorse, tremoncillos and bushes from which dangle pelvises, femurs and cracked ram skulls.
Aguilera lovingly handed over the corpse of her dog,
Marlon, to the vultures.
She then hung his clean skull on one of the bushes.
—When the children see hanging bones, I tell them it's the quebranta's Christmas tree
,
just like they hang chocolates.
What are you going to tell them?
Five minutes later the remote motor of the electric cart is heard.
Upon arrival, Manu Aguilera points to the pile of stones.
It is a milestone in memory of his friend Pepe Chávarri.
—A landmark is a custom in Tibet: they pile up stones when a climber dies.
They don't pick flowers.
And whoever visits it puts a stone.
I pick up a brittle stone to place it, but I am in a hurry to desecrate such an intimate corner, and I return it to the mountain.
Wrapped in the cool breeze from Guara, Aguilera stands looking out at the Pyrenees.
He narrows his eyes and smiles:
"Do you know what I did as a child to get close to the vultures?"
Guara is an empty shell.
Inside the mountain lies an aquifer that snakes between galleries.
The mountain is filled with rainwater through sinkholes.
When it overflows, the rivers sprout: the Formiga, the Alcanadre, the Calcón, the Ésera.
In 1966, farmer Gregorio Santolaria committed suicide in one of those sinkholes, La Grallera.
In the corners of that dark mouth he left his identity card, his wallet and a bottle of cognac.
The aquifer was discovered by trying to recover the body from him at 280 meters.
Guara is wonderful for descending ravines.
"In the summer it fills up with tourists." The self- taught
vulture specialist
drinks a decaf and eats a French omelette sandwich.
That is terrible for the vultures because they breed on the walls of Guara, 200 meters high.
They are very deep canyons.
Squeeze the sandwich, crisp the hot bread, overflow the inside.
Pluck off a tender pinch and eat.
—Young vultures have vertigo.
They are always at the bottom of the nest.
They are terrified to look out.
And the parents stop feeding them so that they jump into the void.
Some are very weak and fall down a gorge from which they do not come out.
But that's nothing.
Aguilera finishes the sandwich and explains that young vultures migrate from Spain to Gambia, back and forth, once in a lifetime.
Nobody knows why.
She calls it the great migration.
The House of the Vultures, a naturalist outreach center in Santa Cilia de Panzano.
John Miles
He says that the vultures use air currents to cross the Strait, but that the blades of the wind turbines suck them in and guillotine them.
He says that those who cross the Strait face Moroccan hunters, thirst in the Sahara and poachers from Gambia, who poison them so that the birds do not pounce on their prey.
He sips the coffee and says that his odyssey is not over, that the survivors must return to Spain and those who manage to do so face starvation and diclofenac, a veterinary anti-inflammatory toxic to them.
—The vultures will disappear in 10 years.
During the missions to recover the body of Gregorio Santolaria, the vermin law was still in force (from 1953 to 1979).
The vermin law protected game fauna.
The rest were expendable.
By 1958, more than half a million genets, foxes, ravens, wildcats, wolves, vultures, falcons, eagles, magpies, and otters had been killed.
The poachers sold vulture feet or fox tails for a peseta a piece.
The griffon vulture was on the verge of extinction.
Vultures reach maturity between the ages of five and eight and lay one egg a year.
They live about 45 years, so they lay about 40 eggs in their lifetime.
How many survive the great migration is unknown.
In 1989 there were less than 10,000 pairs of griffon vultures in Spain.
In 2018, the last census, 30,946.
Aguilera narrows her eyes, smiles, raises a vulture feather and looks at it against the light:
"Do you know what I did as a child to get close to the vultures?"
Something you should not do if you appreciate each other a little.
When I was nine years old, my grandfather showed me the vultures in the midden.
They impacted me so much that at 12 I went alone to see them, but I couldn't get close because they were scared.
At that time they said they were vermin and I wanted to know why.
I couldn't find anything written about them, only that they were bad and ugly.
They did not look like animals that clean the field.
So I went to the dump, where they dumped corpses, and I saw a dry cow: skin and bones.
I got between her ribs, put up some twigs so they wouldn't see me, and spent the afternoon with a little notebook.
I waited hours.
When the vultures came down, I put out my hand and touched them.
I came home with a smell that I couldn't hide and they spanked me with the batán that they folded for me.
I caught typhus.
I almost died, but it's the same,
and when I recovered I took the bike and went to see my vultures.
I learned a lot of things that were unknown, like that they were unable to grab.
Be careful with the claws of any other bird of prey because they pierce you.
I put my hands between her legs and nothing.
I don't know why they didn't write it in the books.
The car bounces along because of the stones on the way back and Aguilera says that she couldn't go to university, but she got a pen, a notebook and a corpse to observe from.
She has recorded data for six decades that is now being tapped by intern biologists,
National Geographic
documentarians, and the readers of the four books she has co-written:
Bird of Clay,
Silbido de Cierzo,
Uña de
Cristal, and
Las rapaces Ibéricas
.
She sometimes collaborates with academic research.
We are going to Las Pichillas de Binaced, the first feeding trough that Manu Aguilera and Pepe Chávarri built on the dunghill of their town.
Today the old garbage dump is a field of peach trees.
There it throws carrion daily to the same Guara vultures.
They fly 40 kilometers between the two feeders.
The journey continues for 70 kilometers to the statue of
Leonardo.
During the journey, Aguilera tells that he is an anarchist like the vultures.
She was a
hippy
and she abandoned that life because free love was fine, but there were some who did everything and others who did nothing.
She climbed mountains to scream at the peaks, alone and free: "Shit!".
She climbed when he wasn't working at the
pub,
located below his business, Casa Rural Sanz.
"I used to say that as long as there were drunks, the vultures would eat," he laughs.
Then she changes to a serious face.
This has cost me many things in my life: broken cars, separations, I have given up my family for the vultures, but when I am with them I feel happy.
At the base of the trough of Las Pichillas de Binaced there is a scrap metal sculpture.
It is a vulture on a stone pedestal.
Aguilera molded the sculpture in 2003 with the remains of the traffic accident in which Pepe Chávarri and Alberto Alamar, 28, died at the age of 35. The pedestal reads: “Tomorrow, when I die, don't come crying to me.
I will never be underground, I am the wind of freedom”.
He says that he would like the vultures to take his body away when he dies, like the Celtiberians, who believed, like him, that the vultures are angels in charge of taking souls to heaven.
There is a carabiner on one of the iron claws.
The sculpture represents
Leonardo.
—In 1983 a shepherd called me because he had a young vulture, one of those that falls and doesn't fly.
Pepe Chávarri and I went: "We came to look for the vulture," I said.
Then I heard the lady from the kitchen:
"Leonardo, Leonardo!".
Some screams.
She opened the door and the guy walked up the stairs.
We flip.
He was like a son to them.
They raised him.
They ate together.
We believed that he would return to nature.
He was on the loose, but he ate in my little field, climbed the church tower, played with the children.
In short, what a vulture would never do.
And well, Pepe and I decided to tie him up there and feed him at night.
We thought that way he would fall in love with a vulture and leave.
But such was the story that one night two men shot him dead.
They looked for the butchers to ask for explanations, to find out the reason.
A gentle breeze carries the fragrance of peaches.
The trees sprout from the same soil where the dunghill of the town where Aguilera met the vultures spread.
The sun sets and the silhouettes of some red kites stand out in the sky.
Aguilera releases the carabiner from the sculpture.
She screeches iron against stone, looks at it for a second and explains that she placed it because
Leonardo
could have been saved if he hadn't chained him up.
Suddenly it seems clear why Aguilera was yelling "shit" at the summits.
'We found Leonardo
's killers
and asked them why they did it.
-And what did they say?
—Why yes.
—eps