Some Editions about Migrants
Juan del Junco

Some years ago, talking to a well-known ornithologist about the Golden Oriole (Oriolus oriolus)— now known as the Golden or European Oriole although I refuse to change the name because  I consider myself a dilettante— he explained that this yellow bird, fetishized in my artist’s imagination, is one of the last to arrive and the first to depart of the groups of migrating birds.
Indeed the SEO’s (Spanish Ornithological Society) Guide to Spanish Birds, describing the species movements, states:
[…] this is a summer visitor that winters in Subsaharian Africa. The first sightings are made in mid-April with a swift occupation of territories at the end of the month and beginning of May. The male birds arrive 7-10 days before the females and specimens in transit to northern Europe can be observed until the end of May. The autumn migration begins at the beginning of August but the bulk of these take place at the end of the month with occasional sightings at the beginning of September.1

My acquaintance —an ornithologist of the old school of the 60s and the 70s (note the analogy of association with a specific period of art) when ornithology in Spain still welcomed those of the  liberal professions, who walked the countryside observing birds in their spare time, to its scientific embrace — said, somewhat incredulously, that “We believe the birds of Europe go to Africa to winter, but, if these were African birds who  come  to Europe to breed?”.
That phrase, out of the range of what scientific positivism embraces, and contrary to our Eurocentric conception, has been spinning in my head for years, generating this new project in the light of the social commentary it elicits.
This comment, away from the spectrum of scientific positivism, and contrary to our Eurocentrist conception, has given rise to this project on the social comment it provokes. I was born in the province that includes the Gibraltar straits, I live on the Costa del Sol and on this morning in September 2024, in the brilliant end-of-summer sunshine as I was penned these lines, I listened to a flock of bee-eaters (Merops apiaster) migrating to tropical Africa in a group. As the well-known ornithologist told me: “They are heard before they are seen”.