After last night's rain we awoke to a lovely clear blue sky. With bags packed we were ready to move at 7:30am, and so our tour began. Birds seen in the suburbs included: Common & Pallid Swifts, White Stork, Spotless Starling, Wood Pigeon, Collared Dove and House Sparrow.
We made good time, after a breakfast stop and another stop to buy our picnic lunch and then another stop to eat it (which produced Greenfinch, Cirl Bunting, Chaffinch and Turtle Dove), we arrived at our first scheduled stop some 15kms east of Belchite at a river. During a 30 min stop we found: Black Redstart, Spotted Flycatcher, Griffon Vulture, Serin, Goldfinch, Great Tit and lots of House Sparrows.
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| The view across El Planeron |
Our second scheduled stop was at the Lomaza Steppe nature reserve near Belchite, it was quite windy but we saw a few birds there. The whole area is managed for the conservation of Dupont's Lark, It is a bit late in the season so our chances of seeing this very elusive character are very low. Lots of Lesser Short-toed larks sang and displayed around us, we also saw Crested Lark and Calandra Lark.
Shortly afterwards we visited the superb reserve called El Planeron, again this is an expansive area of light arable farming and steppe, it is also managed for the Dupont's Lark. We didn't manage one but we found instead: Stone Curlew, lots of the larks, those mentioned above. also Bee-eater, Black-bellied Sandgrouse (1), Southern Grey Shrike and many other larks.
We then drove to our hotel found near Belchite and after checking in we had an hour or so looking over the terraine at the back of the hotel. A fairly good list was amassed in that short period: Hoopoe, Rock Sparrow, Northern Wheatear, Red-billed chough, Alpine Swift, Greenfinch and Linnet.
Our dinner was served at 8am which was enjoyed by he group
we arrived at Belchite around 3pm.
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