Bustards, Raptors and Lots More

Yesterday we drove just a short way north for another great day in the Baixo Alentejo. It was mostly cloudy and a stiff breeze made it quite chilly at times, so from a weather point of view it could have been better but the birding was excellent.

Our aim, as usual, was to get good views of as many of the areas special birds as possible rather than go for a long list but we still managed to record 77 species during the day. Inevitably, some of them, for instance Quail and Wren, were only heard.

Great Bustard is of course the ‘flagship species’ of the Castro Verde area and at this time of year they’re not difficult to find. We saw about 120 of them during the day. Little Bustards, although more numerous in the area, are much more difficult to see but although we managed only a handful there were some good views.

Little Bustard

There were plenty of raptors as usual. Not only did we see 10 species but we saw all of them very well - Marsh, Hen and Montagu’s Harriers, Red, Black and Black-winged Kites, Short-toed and Spanish Imperial Eagles and both Common and Lesser Kestrels. It was a particularly good day for Spanish Imperial Eagles; twice in the morning we saw two birds together and later three birds gave great views. We saw them from below, we saw one sitting on a fence post and, when we were on top of a small hill we even looked down and saw them from above! It’s hard to say how many different birds were involved in our three sightings; they were some distance apart but it seems unlikely that we saw seven birds.

Red Kite

Although the extensive grasslands were the main focus of attention, the area does have a number of lakes/reservoirs and small ponds. As a result, we saw quite a number of species that most people probably associate more with the Ria Formosa rather than the Baixo Alentejo. Most notable amongst these and a surprise even to us were three Greater Flamingos which looked completely out of place. Others at the same location included Spoonbills, Common and Spotted Redshanks, Greenshank, Northern Pintail, lots of Northern Shoveler and Gadwall and even a female Red-crested Pochard.

Many White Storks appear now to be sitting on eggs but there are still lots of them in the fields and there was one point in the afternoon when we were able to look around us and count 70 birds!

White Stork

Corn Bunting

But the day wasn’t just about the big birds. Corn Buntings are now singing from every roadside fence and we lost count of the Southern Grey Shrikes! We were also quite taken with a Water Pipit that was well into its pink summer dress, a common enough bird but looking very smart indeed. Great Spotted Cuckoos were also among the day’s more popular species, but maybe that's just because of how English people feel about the Common Magpies in whose nests they lay their eggs!

Tavira photographs

We popped down the road with the camera for a couple of hours late yesterday afternoon. We were hoping to photograph one or more of the newly arrived Yellow Wagtails but failed completely. However, all was not lost as instead we found a reasonably co-operative Greater Short-toed Lark.


No more than 100 metres away from the lark we were then able to re-locate a Ruff (or maybe a Reeve) which June had seen the day before.

Again it was a very obliging bird, moving out of the shadows and feeding quite unconcerned at close range. “How many photographs of a Ruff do we need?” June was soon asking!

June’s next question was, “Why don’t you photograph this Short-eared Owl instead?” Sure enough, close to where we had earlier been with the Greater Short-toed Lark, a Short-eared Owl was now hunting, presumably the same bird we had seen briefly in the same area last week. Surprisingly, when the owl dropped into the grass, we were able to approach it quite closely and it seemed quite relaxed.

When it did finally fly off, there was just about enough light remaining to get at least a record shot of a Northern Wheatear that had come within range.

Earlier in the day we had seen Great Spotted Cuckoos, Pallid Swifts, Purple Herons, Barn Swallows and House Martins. At last, the migrants are returning!

Bluetail Tale

Regular readers of this blog will know that we are always on the lookout here for birds with colour-rings and that we have reported many Greater Flamingos, Spoonbills, several species of gulls, Black-tailed Godwits and various other waders. The total is close to 250 birds which have come from Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Scotland and Spain.

This week we have added two more countries to that list with details received of a Ringed Plover found here in Tavira that was ringed in June 2008 at Stykkishólmur in NW Iceland and a Greater Flamingo seen at Olhão that had been ringed in July 2009 in Algeria.

Greater Flamingo from Punta de la Banya, Delta de l' Ebre, Tarragona in Spain

Not yet on our list of countries is Sweden but it’s one that has featured in an interesting story that has been running here for the past few weeks. It concerns a bird that had apparently been killed by a local near Boliqueime in the Algarve on 19th January. It was a bird that was found to have been ringed in Sweden but by the time it came to the attention of someone here who knew what to do, all that remained of it, apart from the ring, was a leg!

However, the ring was duly reported to the Swedish ringing centre and much to everyone’s amazement it turned out that the bird had been a first-year Red-flanked Bluetail (Tarsiger cyanurus), which had been trapped and ringed on 15th October 2011 at Utklippan Bird Observatory in the province of Blekinge. Only 32 Red-flanked Bluetails have ever been ringed in Sweden and this was the first ever recovery! Not only that, but this would also be the first ever record of Red-flanked Bluetail in Portugal.

Straightaway there were people here pointing out how mistakes have sometimes been made in the past during ringing and in the recording of ringing data and that without a description of the bird or a photograph it would not be safe to accept the record and add a new species to the Portuguese list. What if it was a clerical error and the bird was really a Robin (Erithacus rubecula)?

It was looking like the Portuguese Rarities Committee were going to have a big decision to make although as no birder had seen the bird alive they weren’t going to upset anyone whatever their conclusion! But in effect the decision has been made for them. Thanks to Júlio M. Neto and the wonders of modern science, the identification has already been confirmed by sequencing a DNA sample from the bird. Apparently it was a perfect match with a Red-flanked Bluetail from Vietnam! How recently is it that we couldn’t have imagined such a thing being possible?

It’s a surprising record and a remarkable sequence of events and of course the chances are that the bird had been here undetected for weeks before meeting its end! It just goes to show that there are probably always rarities out there if you keep looking...

A Redshank's Story

We first saw this colour-ringed Common Redshank (ring no: H19) at Santa Luzia saltpans on 13th March 2011. We saw it on several further occasions over the next few weeks, the last time being on 5th April.

Subsequently we were able to find out that the bird had been ringed as a pullus in May 2010 at Westerland in the municipality of Wieringen in North Holland in the Netherlands. Later we also learned from the ringer, Wim Tijsen, that having left the Algarve it had returned to the area where it was raised, arriving there on 21st May. Apparently it is typical for young birds to arrive late on the breeding grounds like this; they are too late to breed but maybe they can find a mate for the following year. The site is a wet grassland, a set-aside meadow near the Waddensea that during the freezing winter was full of water and used for skating! Little wonder then that a Redshank wouldn’t want to stay there year round!

It is well known that many (most?) migrant waders, including Common Redshanks, return each year to spend the winter in the same area. We have records of colour-ringed Black-tailed Godwits, for instance, that we have seen in successive winters in exactly the same saltpan here in Tavira. So it was only natural that we should expect H19 to show up here again. The first sighting was on 31st December and since then we have seen it (her?) on about half a dozen further occasions, always in the same saltpan and seldom far from what seems to be the favourite corner of that saltpan. It was there again yesterday and we will be keeping watch to see whether we can establish at least an approximate departure date, which we might expect to be earlier than last year if it is going to breed. We have been told that H19’s father (H16) was back on the breeding grounds by mid-March last year so H19 might soon be heading north. We will also hope for confirmation that H19 is indeed a female.

Black-tailed Godwit - they also show a tendency to return to regular wintering sites

It’s interesting that there is also a Spotted Redshank occupying the same saltpan. It doesn’t have a ring on it but we do wonder whether it is the same Spotted Redshank that spent much of last winter in the same place. What do you think?

Spotted Redshank - probably the same individual that was here last winter

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