Piscivore party

An unusual concentration of fish trapped in one of the salt pans here in Tavira has been attracting numerous birds these past few mornings. Up to 80 Spoonbills and about 50 Little Egrets have been joined by smaller numbers of Cormorants, Grey Herons, White Storks and a single Great Egret.

The fish seem to have been of a size to suit these larger birds but both Caspian & Sandwich Terns have been joining in and have presumably been able to find some smaller ones. Gulls, too, have been looking for a cheap meal, a few Lesser Black-backs but mostly Slender-billed and Black-headed.

It’s not an ideal site for photography but it has been hard to resist trying to get some images. I used a Canon EOS 7D Mk ll with a 100-400mm lens and a 1.4x extender but would have liked to get closer.

It was no surprise to find that some of the Spoonbills were colour-ringed but the depth of the water made it difficult to record the details. As so often, taking the ring details from the photographs was the best plan.  Full details are still awaited of the five birds reported but it looks as though three were ringed in The Netherlands and one each in France and Portugal.  One of the Dutch birds we have actually seen here before in 2011 and 2013; it's a female ringed in 1999.

No doubt some of these Spoonbills will stay in the Algarve for the winter but many will find their way to Mauritania and Senegal.

Doing the splits!

We spent our Christmas and New Year holiday period thousands of miles apart.  While June divided her time between the UK and Portugal, Peter was in Florida leading a tour for Avian Adventures.  It isn’t what we planned and it certainly wasn’t what we wanted but circumstances conspired against us and that’s what happened.

The tour in Florida was enjoyable enough although the self-styled “Sunshine State” fell some way short of living up to its name.  As with the Algarve, winter birding in Florida gives the opportunity to see lots of interesting resident birds as well as a great many that are from further north and only there to escape the cold.

For many birders, however, particularly Americans, the reason to visit Florida is that there are quite a few exotic species that are now sufficiently established there as permanent residents that they are now deemed ‘countable’ by the American Birding Association.  What that means is that if your motivation is to make a list of the birds that you have seen in the USA, species such as Red-whiskered Bulbul, Spot-breasted Oriole, White-winged Parakeet and Nanday Parakeet will at some point have to be targeted and Florida is the only corner of the country where they can be found.  There are currently about a dozen such species and several more amongst the many other non-native breeding birds are potential additions to the official American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU) Check-List.

Our tour in Florida was most definitely not about searching for exotic species!  However we did want to see Snail Kite and Limpkin that are at the northern edge of their natural range in Florida and not normally found elsewhere in the USA.  Others such as Painted Bunting, Roseate Spoonbill, Crested Caracara and Wood Stork, which all of us had previously seen in Texas, would also be good to find.  And it wasn’t just birds!  West Indian Manatee, a huge herbiverous, marine mammal, was also on everyone’s ‘wish list’.  In the event, all of these targets were seen without much difficulty.

Although we didn’t at any time find ourselves agonising over what was and wasn’t countable, there were a few questions raised, not about ‘exotics’ but about the differences in the way that the various ornithological authorities treat taxa such as Wilson’s Snipe, Common Gallinule, Cabot’s Tern, American Herring Gull and Hudsonian Whimbrel.

Wilson’s Snipe (Gallinago delicata) is regarded as a species separate from Common Snipe (Gallinago gallinago) by the AOU, by the British Ornithologists’ Union (BOU) and by the International Ornithological Committee (IOC) but it is not recognised as such by BirdLife International (BLI).

Cabot’s Tern (Sterna acuflavida) and American Herring Gull (Larus smithsonianus) are treated as separate species by the BOU and the IOC but not by AOU and BLI which list them as subspecies of Sterna sandvicensis and Larus argentatus respectively.

The BOU haven’t so far had to worry too much about Common Gallinule as none have yet made it to Britain.  It’s a bird that looks very much like a Common Moorhen but, mostly it seems because it sounds very different from Gallinula chloropus, the AOU are now, since 2011, calling it Gallinula galeata, a distinct species.  So far, the ever-conservative BLI are not going along with this.

At the moment it seems that only the BOU are persuaded that the Whimbrel that occurs in the Americas should be called Hudsonian Whimbrel (Numenius hudsonicus) and recognised as a species separate from Numenius phaeopus.

It’s all very confusing!  When the so-called ‘experts’ can’t agree, what chance is there for the likes of us?
Of course, there are other pairs that may or may not be separate species.  One thinks of the two Black Terns and Hen and Northern Harriers, for example.

What we do know for sure is that we ourselves were definitely split up over the holidays and we didn’t much like it!  As for all these species splits, you’ll just have to make up your own mind whether you like them.

Incidentally, can you see which of our photographs is the odd one out in that it doesn’t feature the American half of a split? 

Birding by Boat

What better way to spend most of a warm (17°C), almost cloudless day than on a boat cruising around the Quatro Águas, the four waters that come together at the mouth of the Ria Gilao and lead to Tavira, Cabanas, Santa Luzia and the Atlantic Ocean?

For the bird photographer this is a wonderful opportunity when the tide and the light are both favourable. Cormorants, herons and a variety of waders, gulls and terns are the main subjects, but colourful boats and buildings are also hard to resist!

Thanks for a great day are due to Henrique of Tavira-based company, Another Level.

Santa Luzia

Santa Luzia

Great Cormorant

Lesser Black-backed Gull

Cabanas de Tavira

Lesser Black-backed Gull

Eurasian Oystercatcher - colour ringed in the Po Delta, Italy!

Bar-tailed Godwit

Sandwich Tern

Great Cormorant

Yellow-legged Gull

Santa Luzia

Cabanas de Tavira

Portimão pelagic

September is probably the best month for pelagic trips off the Portuguese coast and yesterday a group of ten of us enjoyed an excellent 7-hour 'voyage' from Portimão aboard the catamaran Ecoceanus. The sea was calm and the sky almost cloudless - it was a day when any concerns about seasickness could be cast aside!

This was a longer trip than those we have done in previous years from Sagres. The plan was to go out to the edge of the continental shelf where the depth of water increases to something like 300 metres with the expectation that we would find more birds there. This proved to be successful to the extent that we found many more storm-petrels than previously but the numbers of shearwaters and skuas seen was a bit disappointing. However, there were no complaints - who would complain after seeing countless European and 50 or more Wilson's Storm-petrels? And then there was the Minke Whale, a brief but really close look as it broke the surface less than 50 metres from the boat.







The day's bird list included Cory's, Balearic and Sooty Shearwaters, Northern Gannets, of course, Great Skuas, Sandwich, Black and Common Terns. Perhaps the most surprising species was Northern Wheatear, an individual that landed on the boat for just a few seconds, presumably heading for North Africa.

For most of us the Wilson's Storm-petrels were the highlight of the day; we were able to watch a flock of them feeding and although we couldn't hear them, with the aid of a parabolic reflector and headphones, Magnus Robb actually made some sound recordings. He described their calls as being like those of small waders - Little Stints or Sanderlings.



All in all, an excellent day!

A Day of Sunshine

We had more heavy rain at the weekend, there was even a hail storm on Sunday and, only 150km away to the east, Seville experienced its first snow in 50 years. Today it is not only pouring with rain but the wind is gale force. Amazingly, amidst all this, yesterday was dry, bright and sunny and the temperature reached 18°C - this is climate change on a daily basis!

One of the inevitable side-effects of all this rain is that paths and trails everywhere are horribly muddy and so Praia do Barril was the obvious choice for us to have a walk in the sunshine. Along the pathway that leads from Pedras d'el Rei to the beach we saw the usual common wader species, including Greenshank, Redshank, Grey Plover and Whimbrel. Birds here are quite confiding and it's difficult to resist a few photographs. Even the Bluethroats seem more inclined to sit up and pose here than they do elsewhere.

Greenshank

Bluethroat

There were few birds on the beach itself, just the odd Kentish Plover, plus a few Sanderlings and gulls. A monkfish, washed up on the sand, provided food for one Yellow-legged Gull and when it had finished feeding it washed its bill in the surf. When the gull had left, a Sanderling moved in and also fed on the monkfish.

Kentish Plover

Yellow-legged Gull

Yellow-legged Gull

Sanderling with monkfish

Sandwich Tern

Off-shore there were the usual Gannets, a few Razorbills and several Sandwich Terns but elsewhere along the coast there have been sightings of Leach's Storm-petrels and further north a Madeiran Storm-petrel was blown inland. It's so rough here at the moment that we half expect one to fly past the window any minute!