Birding Extremadura

Pin-tailed Sandgrouse (Raymond de Smet) Daybreak on the plains north of Trujillo and finally the relief of heavy skies and shrouds of rain. Autumn made us wait this year, but as the landscape turned green in the space of a week, my friends' faces have become brighter: a transformation of mood as profound as that of their surroundings. I stand beside a shower of white Serotine Narcissus and look across the field, the gloaming of dawn extended by the overcast sky. Over two hundred Lapwing are evenly spread in front of me, facing the prevailing weather, taking long pauses between their almost mechanical strides. Beyond them, on a gentle rise, are what I first take to be a scatter of rounded stones, but as I struggle to get a better view through the raindrop-splattered telescope, one object shifts position and provides a view of a white belly, so close to the ground it appears to almost to touch it. Others make little shuffling movements and thus the stones transmute to Pin-tailed ...

Walk towards the Garganta del Fraile near Serradilla (Martin Kelsey) The Almonte River is marked, after four months of drought, by a belt of bleached dull grey pebbles, a fossilised watercourse, with two shrunken still pools as signals of what once was. Crossing the river from the south, the road climbs a sandy, conglomerate ridge to overlook a vast bowl of dehesa , a landscape stippled by innumerable encinas , the indomitable holm oaks of the Mediterranean savanna. It is rimmed by the southern edge of the Monfragüe syncline: the barrier of 500 million-year old quartzites, lichen-toned crags erupting from the flanks of evergreen oak cover. From the ridge I can see my destination, the village of Serradilla, lying at the foot of this rim and to the west of that most emblematic of the ruptures across the quartzite, where the great Tagus River cuts past the massive Peña Falcón cliff: the southern gateway of the Monfragüe National Park. Serradilla is that typical half-forgotten out...

Summer drought in Extremadura (Martin Kelsey) The heat at the start of the month turned the landscape two-dimensional, sucking out depth and leaving it as a flattened canvass. As the shade temperatures hit 40ºC, nothing stirred. All creatures it seemed had found some solace in shade, whilst we retreated indoors.  Early September brought us the hottest days of the year, and sleepness nights too. Then change happened abruptly as we entered the second week, and for the first time I could step out of the door in early morning and become embraced by a shock of freshness. For the first time too, for many days, it was now comfortable to sit out and eat at night and we did so at the middle of that second week gazing at the glorious rhomboidal juxtaposition of a young Moon, Mars, Saturn and Antares. Now we can rejoice a landscape again bearing form and solidity, an autumnal bite to a blue sky across which pass drifts of Spotless Starlings. Parties of these garrulous birds sit in the t...

Juvenile Woodchat Shrike (Martin Kelsey Two birds set the scene at the moment more than any others, by their sheer ubiquitousness and presence. And yet, each summer the almost constant companionship they give takes me by surprise. One is the Woodchat Shrike. On a drive recently through a terrain of mixed habitats, where patches of dehesa woodland were giving way to the plains, it was the most numerous bird to be seen perched on the roadside fences. They perch with a bolt-upright stance, looking bull-headed with a teasingly slowly wagging tail. From the top strand of wire, they are afforded sufficient height to scour the sun-baked earth, with sight evolved to see through the mish-mash of conflictingly-angled dead grass straws for signs of movement. The shrike drops from the fence, becomes immersed in the brittle cover and emerges with a cricket in its hooked-bill, returning briefly to the same perch before taking a bee-line, in typical direct flight away from view. This bird was a j...

Juvenile and female Little Bustards (Martin Kelsey) Finding bustards in early August in a year such as this when the wet spring's legacy has left swathes of tall and brittle grasses is ultimately a question of luck. The first two hours of daylight offers the prospect of yield, for once the sun is high in the sky, the rising temperature forces all creatures on the plains into shade. Crested Larks gather in the dark beneath a manger, an Iberian Grey Shrike will find that wisp of shadow behind a fence post, shuffling into position on its barbed wire perch, and bustards plonk themselves onto the ground and pant. Taking a horizontal view across the fields, the surface bubbles with heat haze, thus converting distant cardoon thistle heads into those of bustards. Add in to this the perfect fusion now in colour of the dry vegetation with that of bustard plumage, then serendipity remains the only recourse. And thus we were blessed yesterday. We made our first stop, just as the sun had ...

Dawn on the summer plains (Martin Kelsey) The wise stay indoors and the heat drives the foolhardy inside anyway, so by mid-afternoon as the sun's force doubles back with even greater intensity with the radiant heat from walls, pavements and the baked ground itself, the villages of rural Extremadura appear even emptier than usual. The maximum temperature is reached at about seven in the evening and it only slowly recedes by the time people retire to bed. These last few nights I have pulled a mattress out onto the terrace and slept under the stars. I lie on my back and watch the form of bats caught briefly in the lights from the house, manoeuvering in different patterns, zigzags and straight lines. At stages in the night sounds awaken me - it is invariably fitful sleeping out: sometimes a dog across the valley, a Scops Owl or, just before dawn, a Little Owl. I might register the tock-a-tock of Red-necked Nightjars, whilst two nights ago well after a midnight the sky became full o...

Long Skimmer Orthetrum trinacria  (Martin Kelsey) The tussocks of rushes were armoured as porcupines, with their quill-like pointed leaves painfully pricking my bare legs as I entered the edge of the marsh. Fortunately I did not need to walk far, as the creature that I had disturbed on my arrival was soon back on the same perch, a fine male dusky blue Long Skimmer Orthetrum trinacria . This elegant dragonfly was first recorded in Spain in 1980, but is widespread in Africa and where I was standing is one of the best places I know for it. It remained perched, and I stood in silence, taking in its slender dark form, set between the two pairs of intricately venated wings. All the time it was moving its head, the thousands of facets in its compound eyes checking for movement in all directions. And then it sped off, unhesitant and direct. I tracked it with my eyes and watched as it darted between and around the tussocks, sometimes rising, but generally keeping on a fixed horizontal, ...