on a grey* Sunday afternoon

This afternoon matches my mood, grey and not very appetising with the Med. looking more like the North Sea, after a week which has been far from scintillating and, worse, without even a Sunday morning outing to the Guadalhorce in an apparently vain attempt to rest my right knee (so the specialist instructed me) which is not at all right (not a joke at all there), thus restricting me to walking the dog (which nobody else will do) and going shopping for some stuff as the Reichfüherin (look that up) is not well (really) and most birding is from the terrace while I fill myself with analgesics (which don't seem to work unless one goes into flagrant overdose) and coffee (which is replacing blood).

At home, a female/juv. Redstart has been around these past two days although I must say that I think it's pushing its luck with the way the weather has turned this afternoon. The Crag Martins are flying low this afternoon and very close to the buildings, the first ones having made an appearance around 10 days since. Any time now there will be the first Black Redstarts fighting for territory and the first Robins made their appearance a week ago. A couple of mornings since there were a lot of Blackbirds around and there had obviously been an arrival, even though they have gone on.
There have been reports of up to 5 Great Black-backed Gulls in the port area of Málaga, including 2 adults of which I am very sceptical, but at least one of the juv. reports is genuine. Down at the river on my afternoon staggers (walk is too strong word as I go at a snail's pace) with the dog there have been 5-10 Mediterranean Gulls nearly every afternoon, the adults really are persil-white! Gonzalo Lage and Angel López managed to see a Lesser Crested Tern too this past Monday, a good bird to see at any time.


Further afield, Paco Chiclana from Seville found a Marabou Stork (those are the horrible, stork-like, scabby-looking things which one sees in African wildlife documentaries) by a small damp area at Ojuelos, Marchena. The bird had a yellow ring on its left leg, which rules out a wild origin. These damned escapes, some of which bear no rings or wing tags and which then go on to breed are a real pain, I have Red-vented Bulbuls in Torremolinos, and there the ubiquitous and exceedingly noisy Monk Parakeets everywhere (above L) and the Blue-fronted Amazons were in my garden (R). One day I shall write more about these non-autoctonous species and what we have down here in the south, but believe me, it's a long, long list! The photos are, for once, both mine!

PS: For those from across the far side of the ditch, please note the correct spelling of grey.