Spain - Day One

Ahead of my Spain trip I arrived in London to find that I did not have a field guide for European birds there, and that many of the birds on the trip list were not on my gadget! So I headed off on a tour not as well prepared as I would have liked to have been, and also still suffering from jet lag.

At 8:30 on Friday June 19th, guide Pau of Birdwatching Spain Tours met me at my airport hotel and we spent the morning in the Albufera Natural Park and the adjacent rice fields.

Almost immediately I had my first lifer - a Sardinian Warbler – as well as my favourite bird, a Hoopoe! I had not seen one since Delhi in 1990. Our first stop was at a tern colony, with Sandwich and Common Terns and their chicks, with a few Slender-billed and Mediterranean Gulls. We also saw a pair of Elegant Terns - a rare bird for Europe but one which I had seen many of at Bolsa Chica, California - and two flying Black Terns. 

Common Terns

Sandwich Terns

Our next stop gave us Little Terns, two Kentish Plovers and a Curlew Sandpiper, as well as several Collared Pratincole - a bird that David and I had narrowly missed at Minsmere a year earlier. There were many types of heron – including a Squacco,  a Glossy Ibis and all three egrets, as well as Pied Avocets. Black-winged Stilts and Greater Flamingos.

Black-winged Stilt

A third stop at a deeper pond yielded some ducks, coot and a Common Kingfisher. Zitting Cisticolas moved around in the reeds and a Great Reed Warbler sang his song with the power of an operatic tenor. We finished the morning with a circuit of some of the rice fields adding Purple Swamphen and Gull-billed Tern to our tally. I had last seen these two birds in Australia.

After lunch near a school in Corrales housing Pallid Swifts in its vertical roof tiles we headed to the mountains above Gandia to pick up several passerine species, Coal and Crested Tits, Short-toed Treecreeper, Serin, Melodious Warbler and Alpine Swift.

The day ended with a stop at Gandia Harbour where we first found a couple of Audouin Gulls and then watched as a large flock of Yellow-billed Gulls followed a fishing boat home.