TUESDAY 13TH AUGUST 2013 - DAY TRIP

PALMONES SALT MARSH

Today I took out John for a day's birding, it was a glorious morning in Gaucin but extremely cloudy down at the coast. Guess where we were headed?  A light SE wind was blowing the misty cloud away from the village.

We had hoped for a migration passage near the coast but the low cloud ended all our hopes of that. I met John at 7:30am and we drove down towards Algeciras. Our first stop was along the road to San Martin, we thought we might have a look for a Black-winged Kite which forgot to show up!  However we did see a couple of Booted Eagles perched nicely for us, we also found Common Kestrel, Griffon Vulture (4 on a pylon) and a couple of Bee-eaters. In the hedgerows we saw Sardinian Warbler, Greenfinch, Goldfinch and Serin.

Along the road to San Roque we saw many White Storks on their nests and a group of Lesser Kestrels on some power lines. At San Roque crossroads we turned towards Los Barrios and stopped to view a dead tree full of Black Kites. There were 29 in the tree and another 25 soaring over a hill and in the distance we could see another group of about 50.

Our next stop was the huge land-fill site near Los Barrios, it was very smelly and it was covered in Black Kites, Yellow-legged Gulls, White Storks and a few Griffon Vultures.

We abandoned our plan to visit Tarifa because of the cloud and ended up at the salt marsh of Palmones, we viewed the area from the raised hide on the Algeciras side of the marsh. Our timing was perfect, the tide had just turned and was on its way out. As we approached the view point we saw Common Sandpiper, Black-winged Stilt, Zitting Cisticola and John saw a Hoopoe in flight.

From the hide we had excellent views of the whole of the salt marsh and found a good number of birds present. As the tide receded and areas of mud become exposed many waders came down to feed.

We recorded 11 species:

1. Whimbrel
2. Black-winged Stilt
3. Common Sandpiper
4. Dunlin
5. Curlew Sandpiper
6. Redshank
7. Greenshank
8. Oystercatcher
9. Common Ringed Plover
10. Grey Plover
11. Green Sandpiper

many of these species were still in summer plumage especially Curlew Sandpipers, Dunlin and  Grey Plover.

Other species present were: Grey Heron, White Stork, yellow-legged Gull, Black-headed Gull, Mediterranean Gull, Sandwich Tern, Little Egret, Common Kingfisher and Zitting Cisticola. We spent a good 2 hours enjoying these birds feeding on the mudflats. We decided not to go across to the other side of the marsh because there was so much disturbance from holiday makers who were swimming and paddling on the reserve at the river mouth.