House Martins

The familiar calls of House Martins were a welcome sound that greeted us when we stepped outside yesterday morning. We’ve been seeing a few birds over wetland areas this last week or so but yesterday’s were the first that we’ve seen around home.


In our previous winters here, at least a few House Martins have stayed around here through January and by early February they have been a fairly common sight returning to their nests. In fact last year our first around home were on 27th January. This year we’ve gone weeks without seeing any at all and even now their numbers are very few.

With no significant amount of rain falling here for quite some time we would assume that this must be having an impact on the food supply available to House Martins in the form of flying insects. Perhaps their absence is simply because there is insufficient food. It has been estimated that a House Martin may eat up to 3,000 flies each day!


Another result of the very dry winter is that the ground is baked hard and unless we get some rain these birds are clearly going to face a challenge in finding fresh mud for nest-building. Repairing a previous year's nest would be the easy option for them, perhaps taking no more than a couple of days but if starting from scratch they can take up to 18 days to build a new one.

It was a little disappointing that yesterday’s return of House Martins should prompt someone to put a leaflet in our letterbox (and presumably every other letterbox in the area) offering ‘professional help’ in deterring them from nesting. There’s no escaping the fact that breeding House Matins do make a mess and we can accept that preventing them from nesting is much better than knocking down their nests later on after all their effort in building them. However, it does seem a shame that there should be this immediate adverse reaction when we ourselves were so pleased to hear those buzzing pr-prt calls.

Alentejo Day.

Our visit to the Castro Verde area yesterday was our first of the year. The morning was bright and sunny and warmer than we expected but cloud built up later and back here in the Algarve we ended up having some rain overnight.

Although early migrants such as Barn Swallow and Great Spotted Cuckoo may have led us to think that spring has arrived, we were still able to find Common Cranes and flocks of Corn Buntings, Meadow Pipits, Northern Lapwings and Golden Plovers all provided further evidence that it is still very much winter.

European Golden Plover

Great Bustards are easy to see at this time of year and during the day we counted at least 90 of them. In contrast, Little Bustards proved elusive and we managed to find only one small flock numbering 11 birds.

Great Bustards - as so often, with an unattractive wire fence behind them...

...and then unfortunately spooked by a passing truck just as they were coming within range!

It was a reasonably good day for raptors. Red Kites, another winter bird here, seemed to be everywhere and Common Buzzards and Common Kestrels were also numerous. Other species seen were Black-winged Kite, Hen Harrier, Marsh Harrier, Peregrine Falcon and Spanish Imperial Eagle.

Red Kite

Peregrine Falcon

Iberian Grey Shrikes (as some would have us calling them now) were also numerous. They're hard to miss as they perch on roadside power poles and cables but elsewhere it's often their far-carrying song that draws them to our attention.

Southern (Iberian) Grey Shrike

Black-bellied Sandgrouse are also birds that are very often heard before they are seen. We saw about two dozen of them during the day but all of them were flying and we didn't find any on the ground.

White Storks have been back on their nests for some time now. One day we must count the number of nests in this area!

A happy couple!

With so many waders on our doorstep here on the coast, we don't normally go out of our way to look for them in the Alentejo but still we recorded seven species, a list that included Ruff and Wood Sandpiper, two that we might not have predicted.

Wood Sandpiper

All in all, it was decent day's birding!

A Mixed Bag of Birding

It continues to be dry and sunny here with temperatures rising as high as 18º C most days. It’s a little over two weeks since we returned to the Algarve after our tours in Ethiopia and the USA and during that time we have seen mainly clear blue skies. That kind of weather makes it hard to resist going out birding and there have been only a couple of days when we have even thought about resisting! There's been guiding, survey work and lots more...

Yesterday we spent the whole day working on our Atlas square, carrying out timed counts of the birds in six different tetrads. That’s the Atlas Aves Invernantes e Migradoras or Atlas of Wintering and Migratory Birds, a project co-ordinated by SPEA which started last August and will continue until February 2013.

Our survey area is a 10km square in the rolling hills north of Tavira. It’s not far away and there are parts of it that we have regularly driven through, but we haven’t really done much birding there until now. Visiting and birding in new areas are the bonuses that come from atlas survey work.

Green Sandpiper – one of four wader species that we found along a short stretch of the Ribeira de Beliche

Spanish Festoon – just one of several butterfly species seen yesterday

Earlier in the week there was a cross border trip to the Doñana area, the highlight of which was finding a really wet and muddy ricefield that was just teeming with birds. There were thousands of waders of at least ten species plus Glossy Ibises, Yellow and White Wagtails, Little Egrets, Purple Swamp-hens, Meadow Pipits and probably more. Nearby, La Cañada de Rianzuela was also full of birds but otherwise much of Doñana was very dry and rather birdless. It’s a bit ironic that the birdiest area should be outside the National Park!

Little Ringed Plover – many were seen in the flooded ricefield and there was one in our Atlas square

We spent one morning last week near Castro Marim helping to make artificial flamingo nests. They have been sited in a protected area where there is no public access and the idea, which has been successful elsewhere, is that such nests might stimulate some of the Greater Flamingos that occur there to stay and breed. There was an unsuccessful nesting attempt at Lagoa dos Salgados in 2010 that was widely reported as being the first in the Algarve but there is actually a record of successful breeding at Castro Marim in 1987. Maybe they will try again...

Making mud pies to encourage Flamingos to nest!

Otherwise we’ve been birding at the regular sites along the Algarve coast. We were pleased to find that the two long-staying Snow Buntings were still in more or less the same spot along the beach at Vila Real de Santo António where they were first seen before Christmas. Debate continues concerning their subspecific identity!

Nivalis or insulae? You decide!

At Vilamoura we were able to find only four Ferruginous Ducks but there have been reports recently of as many as 17 of them there.

Ferruginous Duck

Short-eared Owls continue at the Tavira saltpans but it has been a while since we saw more than two of them.

Short-eared Owl

Mediterranean Gulls have been a feature of the saltpans at Olhão. More than 200 of them were counted this week including several with colour-rings, birds originating from France and Belgium it seems. There are also two pairs of Common Shelducks displaying there, a species that appears to be increasing in number in the Algarve.

Mediterranean Gull

In the last few days we’ve also seen a Dutch-ringed Black-tailed Godwit, both French- and Spanish-ringed Greater Flamingos and a ‘rescued’ Yellow-legged Gull that acquired its colour-ring here in the Algarve at the Centro de Recuperacao e Investigacao de Animais Selvagens where it was presumably treated successfully.

Dutch Black-tailed Godwit

Projecto Arenaria 2011/12

Projecto Arenaria (the ‘Turnstone Project’) is a survey of non-estuarine coastal birds here in Portugal that is similar to the Winter Shorebird Count carried out in the UK in 1984/85 by the British Trust for Ornithology. Living at the time in Staffordshire, about as far from the coast as you can be in the UK, Peter was an unlikely volunteer to participate in that survey but that’s what happened with round trips of 300 miles being made to count shorebirds along the coast of North Wales. Madness!

Arenaria began in 2009/10 so this is its third year. Counts have to be made between 1st December and 31st January, a period for most of which we were away in Ethiopia, the UK and the USA, so we weren’t expecting to take part this time. However, we returned last Tuesday to find that there was a stretch of coast not too far away that still hadn’t been surveyed.

Lesser Black-backed Gull

So this morning we walked along the beach from Praia Verde to Cacela Velha and back. It was another beautiful morning with a clear blue sky and temperatures that at times exceeded the forecast 16°C. A three-hour walk in the sun was exactly what we needed! As part of the survey, we counted not just the birds but also the people and any dogs that weren’t on a leash and as it was Saturday there were plenty of both.

By far and away the most numerous bird species was Lesser Black-backed Gull totalling just over 500. There were only a handful of Yellow-legged Gulls and a single Slender-billed. A few Sandwich Terns flew by, Northern Gannets were diving off-shore and just off the beach there was a single Razorbill. Waders were represented only by Kentish Plovers and Sanderlings and there were few of either.

Slender-billed Gull

Sanderling

Single Spoonbill and Cormorant flew over but probably the only real surprise was when a flock of 22 Common Pochards passed over, heading east to and from who knows where.

Will our data be of any use to anyone? Well, of course we hope so but more importantly we enjoyed collecting it and what’s more we didn’t have to drive 300 miles to do it!

Snow Buntings

When we received an email on 6th January telling us that three Snow Buntings (Plectrophenax nivalis) had been found on the beach near Vila Real de Santo António in the south-east corner of the Algarve, we were still enjoying ourselves in Arizona!


Snow Bunting is a rare species in the Algarve, particularly so at this eastern end of the coast. So, although we were having a great time in the USA, it was just a little bit disappointing not to be able to go and look for them.




Still, we did put a trip to VRSA high on our list of things to do once we were back here in Portugal, hoping that the birds might just end up being long-stayers. Today that trip reached the top of our list and on a beautiful, bright and sunny morning we headed for the beach.


The report had been of an adult and two 1st-winter birds and within just a few minutes of our arrival we easily located the two 1st-winter individuals feeding along the tide line. From their differing plumage, we took them to be a male and a female. We can claim no great expertise in the identification of Snow Buntings down to subspecies but it has already been suggested that they are birds of the nominate race, nivalis, and we could find no reason to disagree with that. Wherever they are from, they are a long way further south than their normal wintering grounds.

The beach looking towards Monte Gordo.

We stayed and watched them for about an hour and a half during which time they fed more or less continuously and didn't seem at all bothered by our presence. At one point, one of them actually approached to within a couple of metres of June. Unfortunately, at no time was there any sign of the adult bird.

Let's hope the two of them stay around for others to enjoy.

Back in the Algarve

It was still dark when we set out this morning. It was about as warm as you might expect it to be in the UK in January and it was raining. In short, we didn't need any persuading to be heading for Portugal.

We arrived at Faro airport on yet another on-time Ryanair flight at about 2.00pm; by 4.00pm we were in Tavira and another half an hour had us unpacked. Having stood for two months the car needed a bit of encouragement before it burst into life but by 5.00pm we were down the road watching four Short-eared Owls flying over the saltpans. We were supposed to be shopping for essential supplies but it's easy to get distracted even on such a short journey! A couple of House Martins were the only other birds of note seen before we reluctantly accepted the need for just a short visit to the Minipreço, our local supermarket.

Short-eared Owl - one of last winter's images that we hope to improve on during the coming days.

Doubtless there will have to more serious shopping tomorrow...but also more serious birding!

Arizona

After our few days birding in California we moved just a short distance east and spent more than two weeks in Arizona.

Arizona is the sixth largest of the United States behind Alaska, Texas, California, Montana and New Mexico and covers an area of 295,254 square kilometres. That makes it substantially bigger than the UK but with a population of only 6½ million people! In terms of the number of bird species recorded, it ranks third, behind only California and Texas, two states that have the obvious advantage of a coast line providing lots of seabirds and shorebirds.

We restricted ourselves to the southern portion of the state where we visited many of the well known birding sites that are familiar to us from multiple previous visits (this was Peter’s 19th time in Arizona). Some of this was part of an Avian Adventures tour but we spent a week on our own after the tour which included a few days spent with friends in Tucson when we even had some time off from birding.

Without doubt, Tucson is one of our favourite cities, not least because of its location close to such good birding areas. Sweetwater Wetlands, a wastewater treatment facility on the edge of the city is just the sort of place you would like to have on your doorstep. The nearby Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is another must-visit attraction and then there are the Santa Catalina Mountains, notably Mt Lemmon. The city itself has several small parks that regularly turn up interesting birds and within easy reach there are countless other places to find birds.

Ruddy Duck - common on most lakes and not causing any problems!

Yellow-rumped Warbler - birds of the Audubon's variety were common.

There was plenty of snow left on Mt Lemmon.

In winter, the Sulphur Springs Valley, located between the towns of Willcox and Douglas is a great place to be birding. It’s a huge area and we made a couple of trips down there. It’s famous for its raptors and Sandhill Cranes. More than 16,000 Sandhill Cranes were counted while we were there – quite a spectacle!

Thousands of Sandhill Cranes

Red-tailed Hawk in its natural habitat, a power pole.

The San Rafael Valley is another area that is probably best in winter. The attractions here are again birds of prey but also sparrows, lots of sparrows and longspurs. It’s an area of extensive grassland with limited access but where a surprising number and variety of birds can be seen from the narrow road. We looked hard for Baird’s Sparrows but without success on this occasion. As it was, Chestnut-collared Longspur was probably our highlight here.

Horned Lark - a regular species in grassland areas.

The San Rafael grasslands are best approached from the small town of Patagonia where Patons’ Birders Haven is always on the itinerary. Wally and Marion Paton unfortunately passed away some time ago but for the past couple of years the feeders in their yard have been maintained by Michael Marsden and have continued to attract birds all year round.

Another must-visit site in this area is Patagonia Lake State Park. Always trying to avoid the crowds that result from its recreational uses, particularly at weekends, we always expect to see a few species that we don’t find elsewhere. In the past we have seen a wintering Elegant Trogon here and we were fortunate this time to find what may well be the same bird somehow making a living along the Sonoita Creek that feeds the lake from its eastern end. This was probably the bird of the trip for the Avian Adventures group.

The swellegant, Elegant Trogon.

We also spent a couple of nights in the Chiricahua Mountains in the extreme south-east of the state, even crossing briefly into New Mexico. Everyone we’ve ever taken to Arizona has loved the ‘towns’ of Portal and Paradise and nearby Cave Creek Canyon and although they're not at their best in winter we couldn’t resist going for a rare chance to be there on our own.

White-breasted Nuthatch - this one at the George Walker House in Paradise.

Out to the west of Gila Bend we had a good look at part of the 68,000-acre Paloma Ranch where we found a remarkable number of Burrowing Owls as well as plenty of Mountain Bluebirds, Western Meadowlarks, American Pipits, Horned Larks and a variety of sparrows. These and flocks of Red-winged Blackbirds and doves at the cattle feedlots were a ready food supply for the Northern Harriers, Red-tailed Hawks, Ferruginous Hawk and Merlin that we saw but it was less clear what an Osprey was doing there.

Burrowing Owl - always a favourite.

We also took a look at Madera Canyon and Florida Canyon (now a regular site for Rufous-capped Warblers); we had a walk along the San Pedro River and puzzled over empidonax flycatchers; we took a drive out to the famous ‘Thrasher Spot’ near Buckeye where we managed to see Sage and Bendire’s Thrashers as well as the main feature, Le Conte’s Thrasher; in the Community Park at Anthem (north of Phoenix and the furthest north we went), we were successful in finding the long-staying Rufous-backed Robin, one of several of this species present in Arizona this winter. Unfortunately, on a Saturday afternoon when the park was, to say the least, rather crowded with people, we failed to locate a Rusty Blackbird that has also been a long-stayer there.

Sage Sparrow - a sideshow when looking for Le Conte's Thrasher and much easier to photograph.

Rufous-backed Robin - braving the crowds at Anthem.

The Santa Cruz Flats, west of I-10 was where we went to find what we regard as one of the must-see species of a winter trip to Arizona – Mountain Plover. We managed to find a few and, in fact went back for a second look on our last morning before heading for the airport. We do like our plovers and sandpipers! Crested Caracaras were also notable birds in an area where, as in several places we went, the cultivation of cotton seems to have taken over, probably to the detriment of wintering bird populations.

Not snow, but cotton.

Eastern (Lilian's) Meadowlark

Vermilion Flycatcher - this one out on the Santa Cruz Flats.

All in all it was a great trip – great birding, beautiful weather and good company! What’s not to like about Arizona?