At our gate the paddy-fields begin. The sugarpalm trees, the other classic feature of this landscape, already started in our garden. Add irrigation waterways, people, bananas, cows and Buddhism and that's more-or-less our local world. Oh, yes, plus dogs.
For someone from northern Europe the wildlife that shares our patch of this Thai countryside is amazing! And yet, it could be so much more...
Turning left from our gate, the view at the moment is that first photo above. Fresh, green and lovely but protected from pigeons at this stage with jarring bursts of fire-crackers. Shame it also chases away the insectivorous birds trying to lend a helpful hand. Then the explosions come back just before the harvest to keep the seed-eaters away...as well as the insect-eaters.
This land is liberally sprinkled with a great many sugarpalm trees. To many people they are Petchaburi and lend the landscape a very distinctive spikiness. That skirt of dead leaves hanging down from the top of the trunk - birds, bats, squirrels and others all use it to nest or hide in. But it gets in the way.
Some very brave men climb these palms to harvest nectar from the male trees and fruit from the females, so these leaves are stripped from most trees - even if they are not actually harvested. I wish more like this one were left alone but people like their tidy habits and the mindset seems to be they look better without.
Walk here and you meet cows (and their dung). But usually not in fields where rice is the priority. They graze the verges, sometimes share the road and otherwise live in sheds. Most farms have a few and if you walk here you will also see many farmers cutting grass and hauling it home to feed their livestock. This means that all unused plots of land and all the verges are regularly shaved of their grass. And why is this rough grass habitat so carefully removed from the landscape? For sport.
It took me a while to realise that these are not dairy cattle and neither are they particularly used for beef. They are mainly kept for the local obsession with "bull-racing" and the photo above is one of the arenas where it happens. There's good money to be won. I haven't experienced the event yet but I know that it involves all ages and genders of cattle tied together in a line and running around the ring with men shouting.
And without grassy areas to hunt, fewer birds of prey spend their winters in the area than used to be the case. I wouldn't mind if they had somewhere else to go. The price of us making increasingly "efficient" use of land.
Away from urban centres dogs are always free to roam and every dwelling has a few sprawled around the road outside. On quiet back-lanes these are very suspicious dogs that quickly challenge strangers and take a lot of coaxing to shut the **** up. They are a very good security alert and in part they are kept to deal with snakes. Unfortunately, they also discourage a lot of other wildlife. Having a dog or two around becomes a cultural habit and people probably think we're strange not having any. But I prefer our wild hares any day!
Our area is covered by a network of irrigation canals and ponds. At their best they are gorgeous like these lotus leaves after rain but they are also managed for agriculture and nothing else. Dredging regularly wipes out everything living in both the canal's beds and banks. Whatever finds its way back is fished out with nets and rods. The "tragedy of the commons" making it impossible to manage a shared resource so that there is more fish for everybody, including the birds.
Heading back homewards brings us closer to town and the many Buddhist temples that act as the traditional focal points for every community. For me, the interest here is the trees.
The "blessing" of a sacred cloth wrapped around the base of a tree gives it protection and temples are almost the only place to see any of the original forest trees that would have once covered the whole area. From a distance temples are often quite obvious as an island of tall trees well before any golden spires are spotted. This highlights the shortage of big mature trees in the wider landscape, which means less deadwood, fewer nesting holes and simply less wildlife. Plus less shade. Unfortunately, the trend is to remove big trees as an impediment to working the land.
Almost back home now. Off to the south, deceptively close, there's a storm brewing. But it won't reach us. They almost never do. Our area is a pocket of dryness in the rain-shadow of the mountains along the Burmese border. And in this El Nino year we've had less than half the usual rainfall with the dry season already on the horizon. I'd love to think of our garden as a green haven but it's going to be hard to keep it like that in the coming months.
Well, at least we've still got some local dragons!
That was a short looping walk from our house and back. I absolutely love this land and its people but at the same time I wish it were better.
