Welcome to the village of Agios Ioannis, or Saint
John if you want a rough English translation. It’s a village very much in slow
transition at the moment. Once an important hub of life in the area, over the
past few decades people have gradually moved down to the seaside villages of
Ferma and Koutsounari or the nearby town of Ierapetra. I read recently that in
the last census the official population was somewhere in the region of eleven,
all of them avid vehicle collectors judging by the number of cars I see parked
around the place at times. However, the place seems to be coming back to life
with newly refurbished dwellings standing cheek-by-jowl with tumbledown relics.
This looks like the path down into the village so let’s follow it and see what
we can find.
As you’ll notice it’s very steep but it affords
wonderful views of the Lybian Sea and the lower part of the Milonas Valley that we’re going to
explore (if you can see through the riot of flowers that seem to be taking over
the village like triffids). The birds
that are lined up along the wires with the pretty red faces are Goldfinches.
They’re resident here, as they are in most of western Europe but tend to be
more noticeable when they flock together in the winter. They’re particularly
fond of thistle seeds and in Christianity they’re associated with the crown of
thorns placed upon Jesus’ head at the crucifixion. A painting by the Italian Renaissance artist
Barocci shows John the Baptist (after whom, presumably, this village is named)
holding a goldfinch out of reach of a cat who is eyeing it up in a most
unchristian manner.
A scene which is very easy to visualise here as,
like in most Cretan villages, cats are legion.
These three (there’s a third one hiding by the potted pelargonium) look
reasonably well fed and are probably semi-domestics. Cat ownership in Greece is
a little different to that in northern Europe. Generally they’re not allowed
indoors, they’re not spayed or neutered and lead semi-independent lives. This
leads to unchecked breeding of the street-wise taverna beggars who thrive in
the summer but face great hardship in the winter when the tourist season finishes.
The question is: to feed or not to feed? Difficult to resist a cute looking cat
mewing at your feet when you’re tucking into your fish supper but if you feed
‘em you breed ‘em and the problem escalates.
Cats aren’t the only one of man’s imports to the
island. We’ve also brought quite a variety of fruits with us over the years.
The ubiquitous olive came to us from the Middle East, the pomegranate from
India/Iran and oranges were brought in to the Mediterranean from south west
Asia by the Moors in the tenth century. The ancestors of this magnificent
quince, making an escape bid from this derelict building to our right,
originally came over from South-West Asia, Turkey and Iran. We are very much in
a man made environment here but is it unnatural? Birds distribute plant seeds,
beavers substantially alter their environment and rats move fleas about so are
we just another animal doing essentially the same with fruit, houses and cats?
I can resist it no longer. I simply have to poke my
nose into one of these derelict dwellings and see if there’s anyone in
residence. Look, a Marbled Cellar Spider. These are great spiders who build
their webs in the same ramshackle way that pigeons build their nests. The webs
aren’t sticky but prey gets entangled in the very randomness of the threads
which seem to go every which way. Not that they rely on trapping as their sole
means of finding a meal, they’re quite prepared to go out and hunt for their
prey. One of their favourite tricks is to sneak up on an unsuspecting house
spider and vibrate its web. When the house spider comes running to see what
he’s caught he suddenly finds himself on the receiving end. Underhand maybe but
it keeps us from being overrun by house spiders.
The Extra Bit
We seem to have reached the church at the bottom of
the village and, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going into the churchyard to pay my
respects to my neighbours Sofia and Yannis who have both passed away in recent
years. In the summer a new birth has graced the family. And so the cycle of
life and death continues, as it must, for all of us like every other living
thing but isn’t it wonderful to be a part of it?
Last week we were chatting about air and nitrogen.
If you’d like to delve a bit more into the story and find out what happens when
too much nitrogen gets into the landscape
(and no prizes for guessing which species is putting it there) then you’ll
find this post from Martyn Kelly of interest: https://microscopesandmonsters.wordpress.com/2016/12/07/part-of-the-problem/
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LINKS:
Naturalists
(the facebook page that accompanies this blog)
See detailed pictures at
http://www.inaturalist.org/login (search - people-stevedaniels-observations)
Thanks Steve. Keep em coming.
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