Senhor Zé’s cork crop matured this spring. Eleven years have passed since the last harvest—the customary 10, plus an extra on account of drought—and the silvery charcoal oaks are swollen with cork so thick and dense it splits to accommodate its own girth. A crew of 33 has been working since early June on this 5,000-acre estate. The men have a month down, a month to go. Coming upon them out here on the sunny hillside, among the low, open-crowned oaks and the aromatic rockroses, far from farm building and blacktop, the little troop seems a natural part of the landscape. They flow from tree to tree, working them over the way a flock of songbirds does.
Tiradores—cork strippers—work two to a tree, swinging their small axes from the elbow hard and fast with a rhythmic, cork-muffled thwack, thwack, thwack. A good tirador cuts precisely through the outer bark and no deeper, slicing a narrow door-size rectangle into the broad side of the tree. For the final few cuts, the tirador chops and pries, chops and pries, twisting under the waxy bark in a squeaky-shoe counterpoint to the cut. Thwack-squeak, thwack-squeak. He discards the axe, grabs the turned-up corner with two hands, heaves back, and the plank slowly rips away from the trunk with a long, reluctant, scratchy groan. When all the bark lies below the tree in stiff curls, the men shoulder their axes and the eucalyptus-pole ladder and move on after the rest of the flock.
Exposed, a newly fleeced cork-oak trunk is a startling yellow-orange, with the grainless texture of a slab of gyros on a spit, only wonderfully cool and moist. This paler color will redden in a day or two; the inner bark will seal itself and take on an opaque, stuccoed look, as if finely plastered in paprika. As the years pass the bark will thicken and darken once again, to reddish mahogany, to chestnut, and back to silvery-charcoal gray.
All is quiet in the tiradores’ wake. A honey-yellow butterfly makes the first move, ascending from a rockrose like petals taking flight. There’s twittering from the crown of a tree. Small birds flit invisibly among the oak leaves. Finches drop to the wild oats—verdilhões: green finches, I think. A European nuthatch steals down an orange trunk. A nuthatch is a common sight in the montados, as these ancient Portuguese cork-oak savannas are called. And common is precisely the point, says Domingos Leitão, an ornithologist with the Portuguese Society for the Study of Birds. “Birds that are declining or rare elsewhere in Europe are still common here in the cork-oak montados of southern Portugal,” he says. “Common and abundant.”
“Because the native cork-oak woodlands around the western Mediterranean were never completely cleared, they still have some of the richest biological diversity in the Mediterranean,” says Jose Tavares, Portugal program manager for the U.K.-based Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). More than 100 songbird species breed in the montados, he says, including the brilliant, hummingbird-like bee-eaters; hawfinches and chaffinches, with their seed-cracker bills; and big, azure-winged magpies, little rock buntings, and cirl buntings. More than 160 other birds occur here, including many species that overwinter, such as lapwings and golden plovers; millions of wood pigeons and doves, from all across Eurasia; booted eagles and short-toed eagles, honey buzzards and black kites. A handful of very rare species find refuge here, too. Iberian mixed oak forests support the majority of Europe’s Bonelli’s eagles (now numbering fewer than 1,000 pairs), the last 180 breeding pairs of Spanish imperial eagles, and fewer than 100 Iberian lynx. Cork-oak forests across the Mediterranean, in Algeria and Tunisia, harbor some of the world’s last Barbary deer.
Laws of one kind or another have protected Portuguese cork oaks since the year 1259. As a result, montado still covers 1.7 million acres here, mostly in the Alentejo region of southern Portugal. But it would be a dangerous mistake to assume that abundance today assures the montados’ safety in years to come, conservationists say. The slow-growing cork oaks are the “gold of Portugal,” a tirador told me. They’ve been preserved because they provide an invaluable source of income for the farmers who own them. But 70 percent of cork revenues come from the wine industry; flooring, insulation, and cork’s myriad other uses barely pay their way. And now, increasingly, the wine industry is turning to alternatives to cork.
“Because the native cork-oak woodlands around the western Mediterranean were never completely cleared, they still have some of the richest biological diversity in the Mediterranean.”
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