Ideas MedioAmbiental joins forces with the 'Lord' of Campo de Tejada

Campo de Tejada is not just any land in the province of Huelva. Historians say that Trajan, the emperor soldier, came to their homes in search of the love of his life, Patricia Plotina, a native of these lands called Ituci during the splendour of Rome. Later, the Arabs would name it Talyata and later, after the reconquest, it would acquire its current toponym: Tejada, a historic region with deep roots and uniqueness that treasures one of the richest and oldest cultural legacies in all of Huelva.

Today, shaped by centuries of human occupation, its landscape corresponds to a very extensive plain dedicated, fundamentally, to rain-fed crops; wheat, sunflower and, above all, the famous and appreciated milky white chickpea, a gastronomic ambassador for the neighborhoods of its countryside. A bird's-eye view, Tejada shows us a wide plain mowed a thousand times by the hands of its women and men, watered by the sweat of our grandparents and interrupted only by gentle hills or farmhouses. Without a doubt, a beautiful landscape that could be one more of the vast Huelva, Andalusian or Spanish territory.

However, this calm and apparent uniformity hides a treasure of incalculable ecological value: the most important breeding and breeding colony for the ash harrier (Circus pygargus) throughout Huelva and, without a doubt, one of the most productive in Western Andalusia, housing, at the end of the 90s of the last century, up to 7% of all the nests that the species built throughout the Guadalquivir Valley.

In a generalized context of enormous demographic decline for steppe communities, mainly motivated by the sudden loss of their preferred habitats, the ash harrier colony in Campo de Tejada resists, among other reasons, thanks to the work sustained for 27 years of a small group of local environmental volunteers who, since 1997, have been developing one of the most leading environmental volunteer projects in all of Andalusia.

Volunteers collaborate with Environmental Agents in locating nests, in monitoring the colony, in detecting threats and, above all, in pedagogy through environmental awareness and education aimed at the educational community, local agricultural cooperatives, ranchers, farm owners and drivers of agricultural machinery.

To the non-profit efforts of these people, he added his social responsibility Ideas MedioAmbiental, which gave the volunteer group an all-terrain vehicle for the census of flying chickens and monitoring of emancipated juveniles, carried out in mid-June, a phenology in which chickens leave their nest platforms and begin to become independent from the continuous care of the mother.

It might seem that the fate of a few dozen steppe birds in a region in southeastern Huelva is a minor issue. Even convinced of the contrary, perhaps the most substantial thing is the will sustained over time to find another way of living and to relate as a species to nature to avoid the impoverishment to which the current model of consumption and development is leading us.

In this forge of social conscience and permanent enthusiasm that allows human beings to meet our needs and prosper while respecting the environmental heritage of wild flora and the free fauna that accompanies and surrounds us, the environmental volunteers of the Ituci Verde Ecological Association, want to express their gratitude to Ideas MedioAmbiental for reaching out to us and participating in this shared effort to care for the great natural legacy of the Andalusian rural environment and, specifically, its flag species in the Campos de Tejada, the ashen harrier, love and lord of the cereal fields, a totem of the steppe bird community that finds, still in its untamed and free flight, the irredeeming strength to continue living despite difficulties.

Chema Fernández, Biodiversity