21 September . Fuente de Piedra and a cash appeal

Yesterday' morning's brief visit was more to see Chris Feare who has returned from yet another season in the Seychelles of 40 years studying the Sooty Terns - also colloquially known as Wideawakes because of the noise they make, measured out at 107 decibels Chris tells me, so they'd keep most of Málaga province awake.
With the advent of modern technology, the results that he is obtaining using only geolocators are incredible and show that birds from the Seychelles wander as far as the northern end of Madagascar, to western Australia and to the Bay of Bengal and off western of India. However, as geolocators have their drawbacks (basically an inherent inaccuracy in some cases), Chris is searching for financing to put GPS satellite tracking transmitters on the some Sooty Terns next year. Modern technology and GPS satellite tracking are very expensive but enable birds to be tracked in real time and anyone with a spare 5.000 pounds sterling (or anything lesser provided that it has 4 digits) can contact Chris through myself and help finance next year's even more advanced work and feel that they are doing something really useful with their spare cash.
We did, of course, do some birding (which I know will surprise you greatly) and although the light is always bad in the morning when overlooking the lake at the back. However, the lake has shrunk even more and so have the number of birds. There were a couple of Avocets, a Spotted Redshank and some Ringed and/or Little Ringed Plovers. The commonest wader by far, with a guesstimated 30+, was Little Stint but the light precluded seeing if any were disguised as Temminck's Stints.
The laguna itself is still chock-full of those pinky things whose name evades me for the moments and there were Gadwall, Shoveler and Black-necked Grebes out on the water. A small flock of 6 Shelducks did a flypast - very smart.
We did see a pair of Booted Eagles slowly circling their way westwards but there was a rather notable lack of passerines with the wind keeping them well down in the bushes but we did see a nice Whinchat, my first of this autumn, and when a couple of tractors started disc-harrowing the Stone-curlew field (the one where the tower is) a bundle of Barn Swallows started feeding over the disturbed insects, although how they managed to see them through the clouds of dust is obviously a mystery.
So, just a short entry and do take a look at the piggy bank!