Birding Extremadura

White frost in the Villuercas Mountains (Martin Kelsey) It was the last day of March and as we watched a small group of male Great Bustards on the plains south of home, it was clear that with the rather heavily overcast skies and an unusually chilly westerly wind, they were unlikely to start performing their extraordinary rueda or lekking display. Instead they hautily strode off out of view, leaving us bracing ouselves against the breeze and gazing across an empty field. It must have seemed a crazy suggestion, but stood unchallenged, when I proposed that we drive up high into the Villuercas Mountains, extolling the spectacular landscapes that we could discover there. Thus, we headed east, a relatively short journey, stopping for coffee en route and then climbing through belts of cork oak, cherries and sweet chestnut before entering the gaunt shapes of the bare Pyrenean Oaks. It was as if we had moved back in time by six weeks or more. Half an hour's drive away were decid...

Pink Butterfly Orchid ( Orchis papilionacea ) Martin Kelsey Derek and Zena, Phyllis, John and Peter had asked me for a holiday focused on orchids in Extremadura and thinking about spectacle as well as diversity I recommended late March as the best time. In previous years they had challenged me on butterflies and dragonflies, as well as birds, so I was eagerly looking forward to this new odyssey. However, with the mild winter that we had experienced with some orchids already in flower in late January, I started to get rather anxious that the peculiarities of this year's weather might mean that the best was already over when Derek's group arrived.  I could not have been more wrong.  We have just completed an exhilarating and exciting exploration of our early spring orchids. Sawfly Orchid ( Ophrys tenthredinifera ) Martin Kelsey We started gently, combining birding on the plains west of Trujillo with a walk along a medieval drovers' trail. Here we encountered our ...

Cork Oak woodland (Martin Kelsey) A hush descended on us as we made the gentle descent, provoked partly by an instinctive response to help our ability to pick-up even the slightest brief bird call, but also I think by the shared sense of reverence. Entering this hidden cork oak glade was like walking into an ancient building, from sunshine into a dappled shade with a pull of heritage. Indeed the very structure of the woodland gave a sense of depth as we looked between the trunks enclosed by a vaulted canopy and the architecture strongly reminded me of a cathedral's crypt. This had resonance with an awareness that the trees' trunks were moulded by generations of men. Like two-toned pillars, the trunks were dusky and even-textured up to the reach of the corking blade, and then as the trunks forked and branches spread, they set a contrast, being deeply fissured and greyed by countless lichens. These trees were in the latter stages of the nine-year cork harvesting cycle, witnes...

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...