Magpies

How well do you know your magpies?  The three photographs below show three different birds; they were taken on three different continents.  Can you identify them?  We can’t say that they are three different species…but they might be!  Even those who identify birds by examining their DNA don’t seem to have reached a conclusion, so what chance for us?  Maybe you can at least suggest where each photograph was taken.

Here is another magpie.  This one’s easy - it’s obviously a Yellow-billed Magpie Pica nuttalli, which occurs only in California and which it seems everyone agrees is a distinct species.  Yellow-billed Magpies have declined in recent years with 50% of the population reportedly killed by West Nile virus between 2004 and 2006.

Not all magpies are black and white birds with long tails!  Below we have Red-billed Blue Magpie Urocissa erythrorhyncha from Asia, photographed in China and an Iberian Magpie Cyanopica cooki or perhaps an Azure-winged Magpie Cyanopica cyanus, photographed in Portugal.  Whether you choose to call the latter an Iberian or an Azure-winged will depend on which taxonomy you’re inclined towards.  We have blogged here on this subject in the past.

And not all black and white birds with a long tail are magpies!  Below is a Magpie Shrike Urolestes melanoleucus, a fairly common bird in savanna-woodland in eastern and southern Africa.  The photograph was taken in Tanzania.  Presumably the English name was given to the bird by a 19th Century European explorer who saw some similarity to the plumage and shape of Pica pica. 

Hot Summer Days

We don’t expect to have much rain at this time of the year.  The average amount for the month of June here in Tavira is only about 8mm.  There was a brief shower a few nights ago but any trace of it was gone by morning and many people won’t even have noticed it.

Recently, temperatures have been rising to around 25ºC most days but the forecast shows an expected high at the weekend of a toasty 32º.  Everywhere the land looks baked and parched, a situation that is unlikely to change until well into September at the earliest.

If you’re a House Martin wanting mud for your nest, it’s definitely not much fun!  Mud is in short supply!  Of course, the breeding season for House Martins started early here; many birds were back in February and some didn’t leave at all, managing to find enough insect food in the Algarve through the ‘winter months’.  By now most will have raised at least one brood if not two.  But still there are birds that are busy collecting mud.  Probably they are repairing nests rather than building new ones from scratch, but who knows?

We always enjoy watching and photographing birds that are attracted to fresh water, whether they are collecting mud or just drinking and bathing.  Migration seasons give more chance for something unusual to show up but even now there can be a good selection of species.  The common seed-eating finches, Serins, Goldfinches, Greenfinches and Linnets, are the most regular but, as well as the House Martins and an occasional Barn Swallow, we have had Spotless Starlings, Blackbirds, House Sparrows, Collared Doves, Azure-winged Magpies and Yellow Wagtails.

It’s been both enjoyable and frustrating to sit watching these birds and at the same time listen to Nightingale, Blackcap, Cetti’s Warbler, Reed Warbler and Common Waxbill, all of them just a few metres away but none showing any inclination to come out for a bath and a photo session!

We haven’t been spending all our time cooped up in the car taking photographs - for one thing, it’s far too hot!  We’ve also spent time in the Castro Verde area watching Rollers, Lesser Kestrels, Collared Pratincoles and more, many of them feeding young.  And yesterday we helped with the monthly count of the birds on the Castro Marim Reserve, where the highlights as far as numbers are concerned were 1,200 Greater Flamingos, 780 Black-tailed Godwits, 147 Slender-billed Gulls, 116 Shelducks, 212 Black-winged Stilts and 175 Avocets.  As well as counting, we managed to read quite a number of colour-rings, mostly on Spoonbills and Audouin’s Gulls.

Winter 'Big Day' in the Algarve

Which is the best time of the year to come birding in the Algarve?  It’s a question that we get asked from time to time but, of course, there’s no simple answer – it really depends on what you want to see.  If Bee-eaters, Golden Orioles and Collared Pratincoles are on your agenda, then you might be lucky in March but April, May and June would probably be the best months.  If raptor migration is what you’re hoping for, then September and October should be your choice and September would also be a good time to take a boat trip to look for shearwaters and storm-petrels.

Azure-winged Magpie

Surprisingly few birders come here during the winter months, which is a shame because they’re missing out on some really good birding.  We know that the weather can be an issue but it’s almost guaranteed to be better than it is in northern Europe.  Today it is cloudless and sunny with a forecast high temperature of 19ºC and that is typical of how it has been recently.  It’s very difficult to stay home and not go birding on days like this!

Black-necked Grebe

To demonstrate just how many bird species are here in the winter, we went out on 1st January 2009 and 2010 to see what we could find.  Anyone who has participated in such a ‘Big Day’ in the winter will know that it doesn’t always pay to travel long distances when daylight hours are relatively short.  Time spent in the car on the motorway is not likely to be very productive.  We restricted ourselves to visiting Ludo/Quinta do Lago, Castro Marim and Tavira/Santa Luzia and on each of those days we managed to find 106 species.  The following year we proved our point by also going to the Parque Ambiental de Vilamoura.  Only four days earlier we had seen four species of hirundines and some Penduline Tits there but on our ‘Big Day’ none of those birds were present and we simply wasted time by going there.  We finished the day having seen only 96 species.

Purple Swamp-hen

On 1st January 2012 we were in Arizona and this year we had already left the Algarve to start our trip to Colombia so we haven’t been able to continue the sequence.  However, we have just had quite a full day out, this one on 1st February.  This time we went only to Ludo/Quinta do Lago and to Tavira/Santa Luzia and the pace was quite relaxed; with the longer hours of daylight we easily managed to see 101 species.  There was time for us also to have gone to Castro Marim and had we done so it’s probable that we would have found at least another four or five species but on such days nothing is guaranteed; when we look at the final list there are always one or two species that it’s hard to imagine missing.  To illustrate the point, yesterday we saw Great Spotted Cuckoo, Short-eared Owl, Southern Grey Shrike, Lapwing, Mediterranean Gull and Pintail that we didn’t see the day before when we needed them!  And for some reason we haven’t been able to find a Linnet or a Jay for several days.

 Slender-billed Gull

Kentish Plover

In a week here at this time of year it should be possible to see around 140 species, maybe a few more with a day trip to the Castro Verde area included.  There are some that are only likely to be found at the far western end of the Algarve (European Shag, Red-billed Chough) and others that are only here in the east such as Slender-billed Gull, so some travelling is necessary if you want to see them all.

Little Owl

But it’s not just about the numbers of species; there are simply lots of birds here in the winter.  And if you’re a photographer, there is the promise of good lighting conditions.  

We call them Az-Mags!

High on the wanted list of most first-time visitors to Iberia is Azure-winged Magpie, a species which, fortunately, is very easy to see here. And what an attractive and elegant bird it is with its blue tail as well as azure wings.

However, it is a species that provokes both argument and debate. To start with, should we really still be calling it Azure-winged Magpie? Or should we now refer to it as Iberian Magpie?

The long-held view has been that Azure-winged Magpie Cyanopica cyanus is a species with a remarkable disjunct distribution with populations in the Far East (China, Japan, Korea, etc) and also in Spain and Portugal. That does seem very strange but it has been suggested that it results from birds being introduced into Iberia by Portuguese sailors returning from the Far East something like 500 years ago. That makes sense and it has certainly been a widely accepted explanation. Others have suggested the less likely scenario which had those same sailors taking birds from here and introducing them into China or Japan! Another theory is that the species originally had a much wider and continuous distribution and that the two current, separated populations are simply what remains after the loss of birds from the central part of the range as a result of the Pleistocene glaciations.

Towards the end of the last century the discovery in cave deposits in Gibraltar of fossilised Azure-winged Magpie bones that were said to be more than 44,000 years old seemed to provide pretty convincing evidence that the species is native to Western Europe and not a recent introduction.

Genetic and morphometric analyses followed (read them here and here if you’re so inclined) which showed a clear distinction between the two populations and so it is that the list of the world’s birds produced for the International Ornithological Congress includes two species, Azure-winged Magpie Cyanopica cyanus, the Far East birds, and Iberian Magpie Cyanopica cooki , the much smaller population in Spain and Portugal. Incidentally, the stated purpose of producing this list was “to facilitate worldwide communication in ornithology and conservation through the consistent use of English names linked to current species taxonomy.”

So that, you might think, has settled the debate. The species has been split into two and we all know where we stand. Well, not quite! Switch now to Birdlife International, another respected authority in the world of ornithology and you will find that their Taxonomic Working Group are having none of this! They do not accept the proposed split into two species and continue to treat Cyanopica cyanus as a species with two separate populations roughly 9,000km apart. In other words, as far as they are concerned, we’re back where we started. Apparently they don’t regard the genetic and morphological differences that have been documented to be sufficient to treat the two populations as separate species. Also, there does seem to be some lingering doubt about the identification of those bones in Gibraltar!

So here in Portugal (and in Spain), what do we have, an endemic species that we should appreciate and protect or an introduced species that is on a par here with Common Waxbill and Black-headed Weaver? Does it matter? Well it does start to be an issue as the number of birds and their range increases. Just as with Common Magpie in the UK, there are now people ready to blame the predations of Azure-winged Magpies for perceived reductions in the numbers of breeding and wintering songbirds. If it were true (and that’s a huge IF) that Azure-winged Magpies are having a serious effect on the populations of small passerines, what should our attitude towards them be? Will they, like Common Magpies in the UK, become demonised and blamed for all the world’s ills or will they remain the attractive, restricted-range species (or perhaps sub-species) that all of our visitors enjoy?