Birding Extremadura

Common Tern - a scarce species in Extremadura (Martin Kelsey) Birding is thriving in Extremadura. This is driven partially by the numbers of people visiting through " turismo ornítologico " - the rather formal-sounding Spanish description for people coming to Extremadura for birding holidays  - but mainly by the growth of birding amongst those who live here, especially young people. There is an email forum with several hundred participants. All this translates to a huge increase in the number of person hours that are being spent in the field, both in terms of participating in survey work and censuses (such as the annual Common Crane census), engagement with eBird (now holding over 13,000 submitted checklists) or simply birding. Couple this with digital photography, better optics and access to first class information, the quality of the observations and increasing skills of the observers, are, I am sure, also improving. And through this, so more and more scarce or rare

Bee-eater (John Hawkins) Conclusions of recent research on wildlife populations across Europe make for seriously depressing reading , especially for those of us with memories of what things were. Even in Extremadura, where the populations of larks and Corn Buntings appear still robust, my own notebooks carry testimony of the collapse of species such as Little Bustard and Montagu's Harrier. Rachel Carson's arresting image "Silent Spring" has been retrieved by journalists. And so I face this spring with anxiety, foreboding. The rains only started at the end of February and to date we have already received  since then 86% of last year's entire total of rainfall total recorded in the immediate vicinity of our home. Whilst the landscape now looks luxuriously green, it was striking how the wetter and colder weather delayed flowering of many early species this year and how few butterflies were on the wing in the first half of spring. The result has been bittersweet