Bird of the Day: GOLDEN EAGLE
A Great Bustard and a Little Bustard seen near Trujillo today at 5pm
Our last full day start cold, wet and overcast, what a change, my shorts are packed away for the winter! We started early and arrived on the open fields near Santa Magasca just after first light. A chilly wind kept our outside activity to a minimum, we scanned the fields from beside the van in the lee of the wind. We quickly found half a dozen Great Bustards and hundreds of Corn Buntings, Spanish Sparrows, Crested Larks, Skylarks and Calandra Larks. The fields were dotted with Lapwing and many flocks of Spotless Starlings, the odd Northern Wheatear joined the Stonechats along the fence lines. Southern Grey Shrikes were quite numerous too, we counted 10 in the first couple of hours. Now for the raptors, A few Common Buzzards sat on poles and posts whilst Red Kites drifted over us, we watched a couple of Common Kestrels before locating a male Merlin sitting low down on a rock, a good bird. Then we found an enormous raptor sitting on another rock, the bird was being mobbed by a couple of Common Magpies which looked tiny in comparison. It was a Golden Eagle, fantastic and our 5th Eagle of the Tour – before long it flew off and was lost behind a ridge, wow, that warmed us up.
We stopped at the bridge over the Rio Magasca on our wat to Talavan where we found a Kingfisher, Crag Martin, Green Sandpiper and Blackcap, three Hawfinches also flew over.
Next we visited the fairly new Reserve at Talavan, this consists of an artificial lake, an embalse, with reed-beds and a couple of hides. As soon as we got there we saw two Otters along a near bank, these normally shy creatures were very obliging and came very close. (see my film on Youtube). We also watched a very obliging Water Rail which fed just below us! Along the lake shoreline we could see Common Sandpiper, Common Snipe, Greenshank, Grey Heron, Little Egret and Little Grebe. We then drove round to the dam ‘end’ of the embalse and found quite few more species which included: Black-winged Stilt, Little Stint, White Stork, Teal, Gadwall, Shoveler, Pintail, Mallard and Great Cormorant. As we left, we stopped to watch a couple of Hoopoes, some very close Thekla Larks and a Black Redstart all found on or near the track.
A couple of pics of the obliging Water Rail seen at Talavan
At the bridge over the Rio Almonte we spent some time looking for Black Wheatear and eventually one showed up, but we located Blue Rock Thrush, Blackcap, Crag Martin, Barn Swallow, Robin, Serin and several Griffon Vultures in the process.
Northern Wheatear - several were seen today
Back on the plains we drove towards Trujillo before turning off to Aldea de Obispo and it was along this road that we found our first Little Bustards, there were 22 of them and we also found 15 Great bustards in the same field.
Our journey back to Santa Clemente was via Monroy and Santa Magasca, we made many stops to look for the elusive Sandgrouse without luck, at one stage we saw a Peregrine which put up a flock of Calandra Larks that must have numbered well above 500.
A very poor picture of a Little Bustard - it was very windy in poor light and at distance
We did find more Great Bustards and a flock of 9 Little Bustards later on and despite not seeing the sandgrouse we were happy to see the thousands of other birds in huge flocks.
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