Spain 2016 - spring in the marshes.

It is about 3 weeks since I last did the 2 hour walk around the marshes at Punta del Moral so today I did it again. It was an "at home" day, after our day of driving yesterday, so this morning was spent in doing laundry, walking to El Jamon for milk and reading by the pool. I set off to walk right after lunch.
Wildflowers were in evidence on the marshes too.

Yesterdays research into wildflowers in the hills resulted in me knowing that this is a Pea Flower.

This bush was covered in little white flowers with yellow centres.

On this one the new growth was distinctly yellow.

I think this is Pincushion Gorse.

This is planted all over the place in gardens and public spaces but it is growing wild in the marsh. I learned from the internet that it is native and grows in the hills like a rock plant.

Today this was the star of the show. I saw it on an information board listed as "Pojo" but cant find it on the internet. It starts out like a fat asparagus spear (I found some but the pictures I took are blurry). There are not that many out on the marshes but enough to find if you search for them (gives me a purpose for my walk).

They seem to grow more prolifically at the salty end of the marsh (closest to the  ocean).

Yesterday I posted a picture of a dirty stork and today I caught one in the act- picking up garbage.

When he realized he'd been caught in the act, he took off - with the garbage.

At the point that I was trying to get an incriminating picture of the stork I was standing beside a waterway. I must have been still for a long time because when I looked down at the muddy bank it was full of holes and emerging from them; crabs. We had mentioned the other day that we hadn't seen much of crabs and that they didn't seem to fish for crabs here. Only seen it once on the menu. And here there were hundreds of little crabs.

Some of them had the one big claw of a Fiddler Crab but not all of them did.

But all of them dived back into their holes at my slightest movement.

Cormorant drying his wings.

The walk took me about 2 hours and when I got back to the start I found Dad in the car (he had walked 1/2 hour) and Mum coming back (she had walked an hour). We decided we had earned a wine and they drove back to Dante's and I walked.

Walking back across the causeway, the tide was coming in, the water was whirling down through the culvert and the fish were clustered around the whirlpool it caused.