13/6/13
12/06 : Cabo de Gata & Rambla de Morales
Before letting you loose on Dave's account of Cabo de Gata and Morales, some of you might remember that earlier in the year the Spanish Ornithological Society (SEO) asked me to conduct a bit of market research about the possibility of magazine of some sort for English readers. First, thanks to all who did reply with comments/ideas, which were looked at carefully at a meeting I had with the powers in Madrid back in March. Planning is now under way following the lines of your ideas, material is being gathered together for an edition zero and I hope that within another month I will be able to give you a lot more details. So, the idea is not just sitting on a shelf gathering dust.
On the birding front, we are now in to the slack season when birds are generally busy rearing young (those of you are parents will know how debilitating that is!), recovering from having done so and will soon be starting moulting in some cases. As Dave notes, roll on migration but that is, at its earliest, at least 4-5 weeks away before the first birds start coming back down.
That doesn't stop rarities turning up, such as the Grey-headed Gull in the Albufera de Valencia earlier this week, so keep eyes open for anything odd. Mind you, with the beaches being inhabited by things other than birds now the weather is warming up, there are some very odd things to see!
The sea was almost calm which made it easy for
us to see there was no birdlife out there! We wandered over to the
second hide, feeling the heat as we did so. Gilly counted 266 Greater
Flamingos. Kevin spotted Little Ringed Plover on the weed rafts. Some
Slender-billed Gulls were also seen.
Upon our return a small flock of Slender-billed
Gulls flew in. We then saw two new bits of bird behaviour. First a Bee-eater flew low over the water and had a quick dunk. Did it a few times.
Then a small flock of Gull-billed Terns arrived. One, with a fish in
its bill, flew low over the water like a skimmer, presumably washing its
lunch before devouring.
We ended up with 42 species for the day. Not bad, but roll on migration time!
Suscribirse a:
Enviar comentarios (Atom)
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario