My spouse and I reached southern Spain’s Costa del Sol area on October nineteenth, staying till the 4th of November. Spain, popping out of a multi-year drought, had begun receiving promising early season rains. After which, on October twenty ninth, these rains turned torrential, resulting in Spain’s worst-ever pure catastrophe. To this point after I’m scripting this, 217 deaths have been reported.
We, thankfully, have been staying in Algeciras, a metropolis which skilled no main injury from this week-long storm. The identical couldn’t be mentioned for sure cities uphill from Málaga, the town into which we had flown, Jerez de la Frontera, which we had visited solely two days earlier than, and particularly, the extra japanese province of Valencia.
I really feel extremely shallow and insensitive scripting this, however this storm additionally actually tousled my birding. However, this being a website for birders, that’s what I need to write. Though our journey was work-related, I had had excessive hopes of additionally experiencing, for the second time, one of many world’s nice avian migration spectacles, as a whole lot of hundreds of raptors and storks fly throughout the comparatively slender waters of the Strait of Gibraltar. (That could be a view throughout the Strait, with Africa within the background, on the prime of this publish.) However even earlier than the storm revved up, wild winds meant that no raptors have been to be seen on the mornings I had obtainable. So I needed to content material myself with a lot smaller numbers of a lot smaller birds, flitting round their Andalucian house.
The very morning of the local weather disaster, I headed off to the Cazallas Hovering Chicken Observatory, simply in case there was some raptor motion. No such luck. Then I proceeded to the island of Tarifa, Europe’s southernmost level, within the hopes of seeing some seabirds flying by. Sadly, the already worsening climate circumstances have been accompanied by my discovery you could’t get on the island with out an appointment, which I didn’t have.
Nonetheless, the location gave me some good views of Northern Gannets, in addition to the shock of some strongly marked shorebirds I didn’t initially acknowledge. It appears odd that these 12 birds might be lifers for me, because the Ruddy Turnstone is a cosmopolitan species that I might nicely have seen in coastal Mexico or California. However I had by no means completed so, and lifers they have been.
I favored this picture of Nice Cormorants and Yellow-legged Gulls, because the African mountains, referred to as one of many Pillars of Hercules, completely framed the Spanish rock on which they stood.
Spanish Yellow-legged Gulls might be fairly orderly.
I then moved on to the mouth of the Palmones River in close by Algeciras, the place I noticed a bigger variety of species. I loved managing a pleasant image of a Widespread Chiffchaff. (Which is an amusing title for us People.) My picture of a Zitting Cisticola was not as pleasing, however the chicken made up for it with its much more amusing title.
As all the time, this website provided an excellent variety of White Storks.
By the tip of the day, my grand complete for birds of prey was one Eurasian Kestrel in Cazallas, one other one in Palmones, and a single Booted Eagle and one Black Kite in Palmones.
4 days later, we drove north from Tarifa to the airport at Málaga, previous to flying south to Marrakesh in Morocco. The climate was windy, as all the time in Tarifa, with clouds masking the hilltops. Abruptly, some 40 huge Eurasian Griffons flew over a ridge on the Mirador del Estrecho (Strait Viewpoint) as we drove up. I shortly pulled the automobile over to snap images as they regularly flew increased, till they disappeared into the clouds. Luckily, the Viewpoint has a present store, so my spouse had no drawback with the surprising cease.
Autor Paul Lewis
