I CAN no longer continue living in denial. Today is the day when I must stand up before the world as what I am. For the fact of the matter is that I am a rain god. I have suspected this on many occasions in the past, but now, after I have done it once again in Spain, I am forced to confront the truth.

I have brought brief and unseasonal rain to the Luangwa Valley in Zambia; I have brought more prolonged downpours to the North West Province of that country. Subsequently, I visited the Spanish Steppes, supposedly the driest place in Europe, and brought with me the first real rain in years. This utterly destroyed the point of this expedition — to find the strange and skulking dry-land-loving Dupont’s lark — and it didn’t do much for the expedition vehicle either. This was a hired Seat 600, and it got deeply stuck in the unwonted mud, requiring us to rip up immense bushels of fragile habitat to stuff under the drive wheels.

My masterpiece was probably my visit to the wondrous Jack’s Camp in the Kalahari desert, to which I brought the first proper rain in ten years. Thus my list of desert fauna includes copious numbers of ducks, waders, frogs and an all-consuming superabundance of mosquitoes.

But now I have chosen to take a precious week of annual leave in the beautiful drought-ravaged corner of Spain called the Coto Doñana. And it has simply chucked it down. Self-conscious torrents have hurled themselves down for a solid week. The flamingos have taken shelter, and even the ducks: only the whiskered tern, on arrow-slim wings, dipping to the surface of the marsh to forage in dainty, immaculately controlled manoeuvres, seems able to cope.

We don’t appreciate water in this country. We get blasé about the stuff. For us sun is the bringer of life and when we can’t get it at home, we travel to seek it. But out here they always have sun. For them water is life and the rain has been given a deep and heartfelt welcome. This is a place damaged by the planting of alien water-demanding eucalyptus trees, by water abstraction, much of it illegal, and by unavoidable drought. It was remarkable to see the land looking up, rapt, like my younger boy, trying to catch each and every raindrop in his mouth.

• BUT I HAVE been able to get out once or twice and I’ve seen some remarkable things — nothing more so than a tree full of vultures. This is a sight I have seen many times before, but always in Africa. These were griffon vultures, and they were within easy commuting distance of Stansted.

  The Coto Doñana has many free-ranging cattle and horses and every now and then, one of them dies. So it goes. And where they fall, they stay; so in come the vultures to do the clearing up. They come down out of the sky for a gorge and then make a clumsy, flapping ascent to a handy tree for a serious bit of digestion.

  It does not seem possible that you can see such a strange, atavistic sight in a place that is administered from Brussels. But perhaps that is just a blind view: absurd to be surprised that Europe is so vast and so various and still so full of possibilities for life. Or perhaps it is not my view of Europe that is too narrow but my view of life. Life, given half a chance, is huge, endlessly complex and endlessly amazing. You can watch griffon vulture, and I saw a good 60 of them, and you can imagine them belching with repletion in the tree tops — and then you can still go out for a nice dinner and a bottle of wine, all paid for in euros.

• I KNOW you want to help me in my work as a rain god, and I’ll tell you how you can do it. You know the out-of-season strawberries you can get? The ones that taste of polystyrene? Do yourself a favour, and do the world a favour at the same time, and stop buying them.

  The current No 1 problem in this problem-haunted place is strawberries. The strawberry business is massively expensive in water, is highly inefficient and a great deal of the water comes from illegal boreholes. What is more, the industry has, illegally, invaded land needed by the Iberian lynx, the most endangered big cat in the world.

  I heard all this from a group from the WWF, which is working with great energy to get the strawberry business under control and to keep this marvellous place alive and full of wonders. Good on it: the Coto Doñana needs water to live: and there are limits even to what a rain god can do.