Birding Extremadura

Our olive grove (Martin Kelsey) I pause in my labours, as is the time-honoured privilege for those who work on the land, straighten my back, breathe deeply and let breeze-licked sunshine smoothe my face. Clouds gently cruise the sky and as I hear the fluid notes of Woodlark I shut my eyes in a brief meditation. Thus refreshed, I look back along the erratic lines of our olive trees. My relationship with our garden and orchard is complex, reminding me of someone breaking-in a bold and stubborn horse. There is a sense of attrition, a struggle of domination, and moments when I feel I have the upper hand. One is that point in early summer when, as a fire-prevention requirement, I have cut back and strimmed the dry vegetation around our plot's peripheries. The anarchy of long, yellowed-grey stems thwarted and borders once again defined. Another is triennial, following the pruning of the olive trees in February. For a couple of weeks each tree was encircled by the cut branches, with o...

Spanish Imperial Eagle and Griffon Vulture (Tom Wallis) As winter closes it is eagle time and the pair of Spanish Imperial Eagles at the Portilla viewpoint in the Monfragüe National Park are at their most flamboyant - and the Griffon Vultures, now incubating on the nests on the ancient quartzite outcrop must think they have neighbours from hell! Sometimes it must be triggered by a perceived and instinctive sense of threat. As a vulture glides close to the vicinity of the eagle's nest site, a blunt barking warning call is heard, followed almost always by the appearance of the eagle to mob the larger vulture. But sometimes, to our eyes there seems no provocation and as we watch the Spanish Imperial Eagles and Griffon Vultures, rhythmically and gently spiralling together in the uplift, it becomes an almost therapeutically relazing sight. Suddenly this is broken by some invisible stimulus which leads the eagle into a diving mobbing attack onto a hapless vulture. My companions that ...

Stone Curlew at winter roost (Martin Kelsey) The cues are coming in now thick and fast, there can be no denying it. Winter is being nudged away and the unstoppable forces of spring are stirring. It was not a delusion derived from the extraordinarily warm and sunny weekend that we enjoyed - I am too long in the tooth to be fooled by weather's fickle vagaries. No, by late January in Extremadura there are messages galore that we are now embraced by a transformation. Winter's days are truly numbered. The Stone Curlews are still in their winter roosts and they stood, semi-comatose, hardly blicking in the sunshine because most had their eyes closed. But whilst I watched these motionless birds, I was absorbing both the warmth of the sun on my back and the sound of Barn Swallow song above me: a liquid, stroking cheer. In the villages, House Martins are already busily visiting their nests. There is further evidence of birds on the move. On my visit to Alcollarín Reservoir I was s...

Hawfinch (Martin Kelsey) Overshadowed by the zany, ecstatic whistling whoops of the Spotless Starlings or the continuum of Serin tinkling, there is a hesitant, almost nervous addition to the morning soundscape in mid-January. It carries no sweetness or melodic flow, no accomplished songster this. But the bird plugs on regardless, modestly adding an almost random pitch into the late winter air. The jumpy, pause-laden chinking notes remind me of a forlorn occupant of a lonely window-seat in a cafe, absent-mindedly tapping his saucer with a tea-spoon, forsaken by his date. Looking up to the bare almond tree in front of our house, with its haphazard twist of twigs, old swollen almonds and buds on the verge of bursting, the stocky bird responsible for this modicum of song is revealed: a Hawfinch. It is perched rather stiffly, its massive triangle of a bill at a rigid right-angle from its bull-necked body. The bill opens and other dull metallic note is hit, a pause and then a slightly hi...

Sociable Lapwing (Marc Gálvez) As I look east from our gate, the cleft that is visible between the thousand metre high mountain of Pedro Gómez and our own more modest Sierra de los Lagares, is the pass which carries the road heading south-east of Trujillo onwards to Zorita and Guadalupe. This also marks the point of a hydrological divide. The steady drizzle gently massaging the soil where I stand and right up to the pass itself, about a kilometre and a half away, is now irrevocably teamed to the great basin of the Tagus River, spread over 80,000 square kilometres, feeding Iberia's longest river. The water molecules carried in these tiny droplets will explore an extraordinary diversity of routes: some entering the soil and draining into my vegetable garden will become part of me, whilst others may escape absorption into the myriad biotic cycles across this catchment and become part of the watercourses heading to the Tagus, with an eventual arrival into the Atlantic at Lisbon. Y...

Dehesa sunset (Martin Kelsey) Springtime weather in deep mid-winter, barely any rain for weeks but swathes of yellow crucifers in flower, a flavour of February indeed, coating the ground of the olive groves. In places even Gum Cistus has been bearing flowers, not to be expected until well into spring.  Tree frogs give their slow, measured grating croaks, unseasonally vocal. A confused and messed-up December it seems. The Barn Swallows I saw a week ago, hawking in the bands of sunshine across a placid pool are most likely to be overwintering birds: there are always a few lingerers right through winter, House Martins as well, and it will another four or five weeks until we start seeing genuine arrivals. A Yellow Wagtail we saw last week was a surprise, and most likely too an overwintering bird. But the adult Great Spotted Cuckoo seen this afternoon by a friend nearby must surely be an early migrant. It predates my first ever by ten days (and equals the earliest ever recorded). Th...

Adult Griffon Vulture (Martin Kelsey) The Griffon Vultures were busy. As we stood before the vertical strata of quartzites at the Portilla del Tiétar in the magical Monfragüe National Park,  two dominant impressions started to pull on our senses. First the purposeful movement of Griffon Vultures, which was a striking contrast to their loafing behaviour as we arrived. Then the very border of the rockface was marked by hunched figures, perched vultures which, reptile-like, appeared to need to draw on the winter morning sun's insipid warmth. Slowly some spread their wings and tilted carefully to maximise their exposure to this energy. A few then rose, seemingly without effort, to rise in the fluid currents developing in the air, a medium of gradients and forces invisible to human perception. But most when taking off headed in a level, flapping flight to the hillside. This directed our attention there, andwe could see numbers of vultures dotted on the grassy slopes, hopping towards...