Birding Extremadura

The first Black Vulture arrives (Patrick Kelsey) It has taken me eleven years to finally get to spend a morning in a photographic hide to watch vultures come to carrion. It had been on my bucket list ever since this type of service started to be offered in Extremadura. So it was great anticipation that I booked in for my son and me at the La Cañada Hide just south of the Monfragüe National Park. Jesús met us at the rendez-vous spot just after seven in the morning and a few minutes later he welcomed us into the hide. From the information I had read previously I had already dispelled any notion of sitting on a stool in a cramped canvas structure, with the camera lens poking out of a slit in the fabric. This was a bricks-and-mortar construction, with plenty of space. Curtains divided the hide into two: at the back the entrance, with a table with bird notes and a cubicle with a chemical flush toilet. Beyond the curtains, a long window covered almost the entire width of the building, ...

Calandra Lark forms large post-breeding flocks in the summer (John Hawkins) The summer heat has been fiercer and more prolonged this year, pushing folk indoors for most of the day as temperatures hit 40ºC, thus the exhilaration to be out in the relative freshness of dawn. It was especially so this morning following a night of distant thunder, with the emerging rays of sunshine blushing the pink-grey clouds. On the plains the spring mosaic has been transformed to an almost monochrome blonded-yellow with pasture now indistinguishable from cereal stubble. The only fields that stand apart are those that have been ploughed and now rest. In one, where the ground had been turned over months ago, there was an incongruous green: the indomitable Heliotrope with its rounded grey-green leaves and tiny furl of white flowers, a plant that somehow flourishes in bare dry soils and the dessicating heat of high summer. The first birds airbourne were the parties of Cattle Egrets, radiating purposef...

Short-toed Eagle with snake (John Hawkins) The juvenile Blackbird was adopting a curious stance on the ground. It held its body erect and alert, its wings dropped, so that their tips almost brushed the earth and, most striking of all, its dark new tail spread wide like a stiff fan, also pushed downwards. Indeed so widely opened was the tail that the shafts of its twelve pristine-perfect feathers were countable. Adjacent to the young Blackbird was a Nightingale, cocking its tail skywards and giving a dry harsh alarm call. A posse of House Sparrows charged noisily onto the scene, scenting danger. In the bush above an Azure-winged Magpie swooped in to join the frenzy, uttering its menacing nasal drawl. It took me a little longer to figure out what the commotion was about. Just a few centimetres in front of the Blackbird lay the greyish-brown form of a Ladder Snake, almost a metre in length and with the diagnostic parallel dark lines running from head to tail along its upper surface. I...

Gull-billed Tern colony (Martin Kelsey) Hit by the heat of summer, now laden upon us, a soporific solstice, I feel a lull across most of the landscape. There is a tidyness across the sun-bleached plains, with hay stacked in bales and stubble fields in lieu of crops. They are dotted by White Storks, foraging for youngsters which any moment now will vacate their nests. Around the smallholdings and gardens in the village, the withered yellowed stems that remained of the spring flush have been cut and gathered. We are all fire conscious and have used last few weeks in trimming and tidying. The dehesas are neat with each tree defined in shape against the dry golden pasture below. Summer sounds different too. The Nightingale now croaks like a frog, its song period over and we hear merely its call note from the bramble cover. Dawn is quieter, save for year-long House Sparrows' conversations. There are flurries of Spotless Starlings passing by whilst small parties of Bee-eaters slowly ...

Southern White Admiral (Martin Kelsey) I guess it is a gut feeling that signals that something has potential, is special. Thus so a path through decidous woodland that I have only ever walked along six times so far and, only once, indeed, have made significant progress along it. It lies in the Ibores Mountains of eastern Extremadura.  It starts unprepossessing enough, like any number of the rutted dirt tracks that finger their way across the countryside here, access routes to smallholdings and traversed by old Citroen vans. It climbs, mostly gently, with a stream at its side, which provides irrigation for little vegetation gardens on terraces on the opposite bank. It makes its way through ancient coppiced Sweet Chestnut groves, small clearings where side paths set off and tracts of dense Pyrenean Oak. Banks of brambles tumble alongside the path in places. Pyrenean Oak glade I had first visited this track a few autumns ago, surrounded by glorious Fall colours and made note...

Hawfinch feeding on milk thistle seeds: a photo through the kitchen window (Martin Kelsey) They stand tall, some over two metres high, and carry now a dense white star-burst tuft of parachute filaments, crammed together within a stockade of dry needle-sharp bracts, and each holding a large, blackish seed. The Milk Thistle, which bears the gloriously cheeky scientific name of Silybum marianum , is now reaching the culmination of its annual cycle. The stand growing behind a low wall in front of our kitchen window has now almost completely hidden the rest of the garden from view and by default now is my centre of attention as I wash glasses at the sink. And I wait in anticipation as I know, thanks to eleven years now of watching these thistle treasures of late May, that these white fibrous cups hold a valued resource for one of my all-time favourite birds. I do not have to wait long before I hear the short metallic " chink " call and see movement of the stems just beyond the...

Bug Orchid (Martin Kelsey) For those who can tell, the colour of the plains and dehesas on this, April's last day, gives a signal. There is a realisation that the course is now set and the arid gold of summer is but countable days ahead. The landscape is still green, but the flowering grasses has pigmented the spring lushness with a lighter, softer, yellowish green...and it is irreversible this side of autumn. Spring feels intense, but short in Extremadura, a dizzy cascading unfurling of events and cycles. There is a visible succession, a phenology, across all life at this time. Wintering birds leave as summer visitors arrive, the different flight times of butterflies, the rolling sequence of colours of the flowers in the dehesas.  In a matter of just four weeks, the cycle of orchids has intensified: emerging spikes, flowering, setting seed and withering. Species that accompanied me just a month ago, with their luring names: Sawfly, Mirror and Early Spider, gave way to Bug and ...