24 July 2009 – Ovče Polje

Descending from Šar Planina's delightful montane cool with rushing water and sweeping pines we found ourselves in the hot dry oven of Eastern Macedonia. Heading for a plateau called Ovče Polje, or field of the sheep as it would be translated, we happened by complete good chance on the village of Orel nestled in a dried out river valley under an impressive cliff of rock. Resting in the shade of some trees around what once must have been the school we felt as if the world had been abandoned. Not a dog moved. Even the birds seemed to rest while the plain's hot breath scorched everything around it. Wandering around the village of beautiful cut stone houses and farm buildings it seemed to be mostly deserted, a theme we became used to everywhere we went in rural Macedonia. But by around 1700 there were some signs of life. Soon there were flocks of sheep coming to the spring and a chance to catch up with the villagers.

It turns out that the village had 100 houses, 25 people and 1000 sheep plus plenty of dogs kept busy by an increasing population of wolves. They once had water from their own wells and the river didn't dry up in summer, but now they had to come to the spring with a wheelbarrow and dozens of bottles to fill up with drinkable water. One villager told me that his well was 38m deep and still dried out. We had noticed both irrigation on the plain around Sveti Nikole and several borehole drilling rigs. The story is clear; the extraction of water is depleting the ground water and making life even harder for the villagers who want to stay. The flocks came back in the dark. But by 0430 in the pre-dawn dark they were out again, the shepherds whistling constantly to keep them moving out onto the stubbles to graze from first light for several hours before the sun was high.

We watched their return from the top of the rock above the village. There was birding business to do. As life had begun to stir again the previous evening there was a shout “Eagle!”. There up above the rock in the early evening a pair of Golden eagles appeared, eventually joined by a youngster. When the adult pair headed off to hunt over the plain and the young eagle stayed put on the cliff we realized we had certainly found a nesting site. Expecting and hoping for an Imperial eagle in this open stony steppe we had found Golden eagles. There were many beautiful sights; on one large willow at the end of a reservoir we watched a kingfisher hunting, bee eaters flocking and dipping to drink like swallows and a lone hoopoe. Everywhere we found the graceful Red-rumped swallow; often we heard the Rock nuthatch, and when we drove south to Demir Kapija where the Vardar river springs out of its gorge we saw Booted eagles and Short-toed eagle (Snake eagle in Serbian). A magnificent sight was a stony scrubby waste of old orchards were we found Rollers, those azure and chestnut members of the crow family with their graceful swooping flight. They like hollow trees to nest in, but here seem likely to be nesting among the many abandoned stone houses where the roofs were still intact. There was also the Masked shrike, very much a southern species, with its long waving tail.

Macedonian left me with a sense that the country had been abandoned, flight from hard stony poverty. In Europe I have never seen such a close connection between the condition of the land and the poverty of the villages. One is looking at a degraded landscape. It must owe its condition to timber cutting, burning and over-grazing in ancient times. This would have led to erosion and soil loss. For certain, it was a harsh land. Yet there were old people who had returned with their pensions to shepherd sheep and tend orchards, and put roofs back on houses. The Macedonian government is offering half salary for 10 years for any woman who will have a 3^rd or a 4^th child to try to halt the disheartening decline in the population. It would be good to tempt people back to the land where ultimately we must all depend for our bread and eventually for our fuel. We were welcomed by good people in this stony land of sheep and wolves and eagles, of sacred rocks and pagan oaks, of churches and minarets under a bronze sky.