Charles Clover, Environment Editor, witnesses an ecological disaster in the Spanish wetlands of Coto Donana
A DOZEN white storks appeared not to have noticed the sickening smell which blew down the Donana wetlands yesterday, nor the black toxic silt at their feet. They picked their way across the fields beside the Guadiamar river, every now and then darting forward to pick up something which they then swallowed.
Closer to the channel, where small dead carp floated belly upward, it was clearer what the storks were doing. Small, dead crayfish lay amid the blackened wild flowers and tamarisk trees which looked as if they had been dipped in ink.
The storks and black kites flying overhead were enjoying a potentially lethal banquet.
Only a handful of birds have yet been found dead along the river, where a cocktail of heavy metals, including cadmium and mercury, and sulphuric acid flowed last Saturday when a dam belonging to an iron ore mine upriver burst. But almost every fish in the river between the mine and the sea is dead.
It remains to be seen how lethal the tide will be for the birdlife of Europe's largest wetland, home to dozens of rare species, including the spoonbill, avocet, marbled teal, greater flamingo, squacco heron and glossy ibis.
Yet the danger is palpable: a black-winged stilt, which would cause a major twitching incident in Britain, ran past the storks we were watching on the poisoned mud.
The national and local authorities have yet to decide what to do. In the meantime, masked workers from the council of Andalucia are picking out dead fish which lie along the banks and placing them in plastic bags to prevent birds eating them. A full bag lies every hundred yards along the road but the corpses of more fish can be seen out in the lagoons where white egrets, night herons and grey herons wade.
Juan Criado, an official of the Spanish Ornithological Society (SEO), said: "The birds won't die unless there is a huge quantity of heavy metals inside them. They accumulate until the levels are high enough to kill them.
"Heavy metals affect the kidneys, testes, oviducts and the blood cells. They affect the eggs. The breeding will be much lower next year. And if the toxic level is too high the birds will die."
That is why, he says, it is so important to remove the mud as soon as possible.
The task is immense. The authorities have estimated that the potential cost of the clean-up is £1billion. Under Spanish law, the Canadian-Swedish Boliden company, which caused the pollution, is liable. But Senor Criado said: "I have serious doubts that they will get the money from this company."
Local volunteers from the SEO who have been monitoring the damage said yesterday they had seen purple herons and purple gallinules feeding in the swathes of black mud on either side of the river as well as the species we saw ourselves.
Technically, the Spanish Environment Minister, Isabel Tocino, was right to say that the main threat to the Donana National Park, one of the last places in Europe where there are lynx and imperial eagles, has been averted. The sludge was stopped by four dams built across lagoons, though polluted water has seeped right up to the boundary of the national park itself. There were dead fish within 10 yards of it yesterday.
Park officials said the pollution had entered the lagoons, but was guided down a canal which passes through the park itself. However, the park is only a small part of the Coto Donana, once the hunting ground of the Dukes of Medina Sidonia.
It includes also a protected area known as the Natural Park which is overseen by the local government of Andalucia unlike the national park, which is run by the Madrid government. The natural park, and much farmland around, has been completely devastated. And the birds of the Donana are not aware of the official boundaries.
Hundreds of greater flamingos were feeding peacefully in a lagoon 300 yards from the blackest ooze. There can be little doubt that the birds are being slowly poisoned as they feed on the blackened land.
The damage to agricultural land has already been estimated as pounds 6 million. The damage to the shrimp and eel fisheries at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, by the tourist town of Sanlucar de Barrameda, has not been counted.
This catastrophe was predicted both by a former manager of the mine, who said the dam was unsafe, and by conservationists, who complained to the European Commission as long ago as 1988 that the Spanish government was doing nothing about potential sources of pollution close to the World Heritage Site. But the EC closed the file in 1995 saying it was satisfied the Spanish government had made the park safe.
That complaint is certain to be revived by conservation groups and it is difficult to see how the commission can now avoid taking the Spanish government to the European Court. It will be under pressure to do so for this is not just a national but an international disaster. The Coto Donana is a stopping off place for ducks, waders and plovers which migrate northwards to Britain as well as storks and spoonbills which fly to other parts of northern Europe. Tens of thousands of pochard, widgeon, gadwall, teal, shoveller and black-tailed godwit have already departed. But they will be back in six months time.
That is all the time there is to clear up a spillage of awesome proportions which may prove, because of the persistence of heavy metals, much more deadly than an oil spill. The black tide's cargo of poison will remain a threat not just for now but for generations to come.
