Birding Extremadura

Black-tailed Godwits on northward migration through Extremadura (Martin Kelsey) It is late afternoon towards the end of January. We are driving slowly along a dirt track between small rice fields. In some there are still rows of stubble and family groups of Common Cranes are quietly feeding. A rank of Greylag Geese stick their heads up, periscope-like, as we pass, grey-brown with heavy triangular light orange bills. Most of the fields, however, have already been "mashed" over by tractor, as near as ploughing that you can get in this squelching mud. The result is an expanse of shallow water. Groups of Black-headed Gulls are settled on some of these pools, with their curiously angled necks poised forwards, matching harmoniously their uptilted wing-tips, giving them a dainty demeanour as they bob about, as if they were tip-toeing on the surface.  Many of the fields seem empty, with perhaps a single Green Sandpiper, which freezes as we approach, before erupting in a shock of

Winter dawn on the plains (Martin Kelsey) Mist-grey-toned meadows are spread before me, touched by a hoar frost that had arrived overnight. Only a gentle incline nearby has escaped and looks distinctly lusher green. I muse for a moment about why the frost had not formed there. Had the dry-stone wall beside me offered enough protection from the rolling, heavier, freezing air? There is something almost sinister about the sight of a pre-dawn frost. As we sleep a nocturnal prowler is at large, an invisible slowly moving blanket of cold, gently caressing the folds and hollows of the land. Behind me are the bold Mooresque-forms of the smooth, rounded granites of the berrocal of Trujillo and I gaze across the seemingly vast plains of Belén, gently undulating as the curves in a piece of silk. To the east, the outline of the Villuercas Mountains appears stark, brittle and monochrome whilst the massif of the Gredos to the north, whose peaks are capped by snow, murmur a soothing pale peac