Birding Southern Portugal

European bee-eaters—freshly arrived spring migrants —n southern Portugal following a winter in Africa.

At the start of April I found myself on a plane flying from Tel Aviv, Israel, to Istanbul, Turkey. Ataturk Airport in Istanbul was just a short layover stop before flying to my eventual destination of Lisbon, Portugal. I had been in Israel for the Champions of the Flyway bird race in which teams of birders from all over the world compete during a 24-hour period to see the most species. Our team, the Way-Off Coursers, sponsored by Bird Watcher's Digest and Carl Zeiss Sports Optics, didn't win the birding competition, but we did win prizes for doing the most to promote the event and for raising the most money (our team raised more than $12,000!) to support the efforts of BirdLife International in combatting the illegal killing of birds in Greece. I'll post more about Champions of the Flyway in the future here on BOTB.

I was a tad weary from a week of heavy birding in the desert, and now I was headed (and happily so)  to another week of birding, but this time in Portugal—a new country for me.

My friend João Jara, of Birds & Nature Tours in Portugal, had invited me a few times to visit his country, but our schedules had never meshed. This past spring they did, and what a trip it turned out to be!

I was looking forward to a relaxing week of birding in warm, sunny Portugal. Little did I know, my spring 2016 streak of bringing crappy weather with me wherever I went was to continue for at least another month. And I was about to get the mother of all colds from a sneezing seatmate on the flight. But enough of my whining!

João met me at the airport at mid-day and we drove in the rain, across the Tagus Estuary to a small town opposite Lisbon known as Alcochete. I settled in to my charming room in a small hostel and then we headed out for a bit of afternoon birding on the Tagus Estuary. What followed was a week of stunning looks at amazing birds delivered by the expert guiding skills of João. While many of the birds were not lifers (in other words, I'd seen them before, elsewhere) most of the looks I got were the best ever. And there certainly were a number of ossum life birds, including blue rock thrush, azure-winged magpie, Iberian imperial eagle, rock bunting, and little bustard, to name a few.

João Jara at our first birding stop, a cork oak grove on a farm along the Tagus Estuary.ã

The week passed in a happy blur, despite my horrible cold and the windy, rainy, unseasonably cold April weather. João kept apologizing for the weather but there was no need. The birding, the food and wine, the people, the landscape, and the cultural history kept me enthralled with Portugal.

We birded three main regions in southern Portugal: The Tagus Estuary, the Alentejo, and the Algarve. We started with the Tagus Estuary, which is just a 30-minute drive across the river from Lisbon. The Tagus is one of Europe's most important bird habitats, lying as it does, along the primary Eurasia-to-Africa migratory flyway. We saw huge flocks of greater flamingos, all manner of shorebirds, ducks, and wading birds such as storks, herons, egrets, ibises, and bitterns.

View of the Tagus Estuary at dawn from Alcochete.

Mixed habitats along the Tagus include farm fields, riparian areas, and salt pans with a rich variety of birds.

After spending two days birding the Tagus Estuary region, we drove about an hour south into the rolling plains habitat of Alentejo. This massive steppe region is home to some of Portugal’s most sought-after birds: the great bustard, little bustard, black-bellied sandgrouse, plus a spectacular guild of raptors.

We soon found ourselves in the wide-open spaces of the Alentejo, scanning the wildflower-adorned fields for great bustards. 

Great bustard habitat in the Alentejo. The white dots are displaying males.

We found more than 20 of them, mostly males, displaying in a low swale, out of the wind. This fantastic bird stands more than three feet tall, and when a male is displaying for watching females, he lowers his head and flattens his tail along his back, exposing and flaring his undertail feathers. He then walks around slowing in this jouncy, foamy-looking display mode hoping to impress the ladies.

Male great bustard.

While in the Alentejo, we toured a large ranch where the crops are being planted and managed to attracted bustards and other special birds of southern Portugal. Joao's friend George specifically caters to birders and bird photographers by putting up nest boxes for European rollers, little owls, and Eurasian kestrels, and putting up hides (blinds) near lekking areas for bustards and near feeding areas for vultures.

Speaking of feeding, I probably gained 10 pounds in Portugal. But it was worth it, because the food was that good. The Portuguese people put great emphasis on food and I felt it was only polite of me to sample as much of it as I could, being an invited foreign guest.

Our breakfast most days was some fantastic baked pastry and a serious cup of coffee.

Fresh-caught fish on display for dinner in Mértola.

Small fried fingerling fish, a delicious appetizer in Tavira.

Our home base while in the Alentejo was the ancient river town of Mértola. This town has been home to Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths, Moors, and Christians and the architecture, culture, and people reflect this history. Dig a foot or so into the earth anywhere in town and you're almost certain to find some of the town's past. 

A view of Mértola.

We toured ancient ruins being excavated and restored  inside the citadel, a combined church and castle that looms on the mountain high above the town. While touring we encountered lesser kestrels, blue rock thrushes, white storks, little owls, pallid swifts, and many other birds—perhaps the modern-day relatives of birds that nested here thousands of years ago.

Walking up the road to the church in Mértola.

Our final day was spent in southernmost Portugal in a coastal region known as the Algarve. It was here that Portugal's close relationship with the sea was most evident. Salt pans, where seawater is drawn in and evaporated off to gather the salt left behind, were everywhere. Those pans not being worked by humans were full of shorebirds and waders. A brief drive along the oceanfront got us a number of new species including great skua.

Our lodging near Tavira in the Algarve, was in a former tuna-canning factory now transformed into a luxury hotel. The hotel was surrounded by salt pans and a small tidal river basin with both working and pleasure boats swaying in the tide.

Alas, we soon had to head back north to Lisbon for my return trip home. João treated me to a short city tour of Lisbon the morning of my flight, further impressing me with the rich history and culture of his native country. I was only in southern Portugal for a week, but those days were ample time to land this country on a short list of places I am eager to visit again.

Here are a few other images and birds from Portugal...

Birding the mountains outside Mértola.

The hoopoe is the one bird most of João's clients wish to see.

Little bittern in a wetland complex in the Algarve.

The landscape in Portugal is incredibly alluring. This is from the Alentejo.

Blue rock thrush digiscoped at the Wolf's Leap near Mértola.

BT3 and João Jara, along the Guadiana River, near Mértola.

If you've read this far and are interested in taking a tour with me and Bird Watcher's Digest to Portugal in 2017, please visit this link at the top of our Reader Rendezvous page to sign up for our events notifications. We're planning four to six Rendezvous in 2017—one of which is an 11-day birding tour of southern Portugal with João Jara. Registration details will be available soon, so please add your name to the notifications list so we can keep you in the loop! 

Target & Wish Birds for 2014

It's that time of year again, birders. Our year lists all click back to zero and we start with a clean birding slate.

I'm off looking for new birds! Image by Mary Ferracci.

I'm making my 2014 Wish List of Birds. These are birds that I am hoping to see or planning on seeing in the new year. Most of them would be life birds, but a few are just birds that I totally dig for one reason or another. Here's what's on the 2014 Wish List thus far*:

Spruce grouse ©Washington Dept of Fish & Game

Spruce grouse: A bird I've sought repeatedly in Maine yet remains unseen by me. I've found feathers, though. It'd be a lifer. Best shot: Minnesota in February during the "Owls with Al" Reader Rendezvous event with Bird Watcher's Digest.

Northern hawk-owl: Hoping to find this one in the Sax-Zim bog. I saw one briefly and in silhouette in northeastern-most Pennsylvania in about 1989 and I've been in BVD-mode ever since (that's Better View Desired, by the way—get your mind out of the gutter). It'd be a make-good lifer.

Snowy owl: We're taking the Bird Watcher's Digest staff on a half-day trip here in Ohio to search for a snowy owl later this very week. Since this bird was my spark bird way back in the late 1960s, I feel a special affinity for it. Wish us luck! Not a lifer, but always impressive.

Snowy owl ©Bill Thompson III

California condor: I've wanted to see this bird in the wild since they captured the last free-flying individual years ago. Now that they are breeding in the wild again, I'm even more determined. This is a long-shot for 2014 however. I'll be in Arizona in January at the Wings Over Willcox festival, but not in the right part of the state. It'd be a lifer.

 

 

California condor ©NPS

Ivory gull: I missed the ones that were seen well south of their normal range in the winter of 2009. I had a hunch I'd regret not going after one. It'd be a lifer and it's a species that may go extinct in our lifetimes. And no, it's not because they were all captured and melted down to make Ivory soap.

Barnacle goose: This one is going to have to show up near me. Lifer. Best chance might be at the Winter Wings Festival in Klamath Falls, Oregon in February.

Black rail: Have heard them but have never seen one. I have no planned trips in 2014 that are ideal for finding this bird, but I'm still holding out hope that we will cross paths. Not a lifer, but a visual lifer.

Steller's or Spectacled eider: I'd settle for a sighting of eider one. Both would be lifers. Best chance, though still a long shot, is at the Kachemak Bay Shorebird Festival in May in Homer, Alaska.

Gyrfalcon: I've never chased this species because I've never been near enough to one to do so. But if the phone rang right now and one was seen within a 12-hour drive, I'd probably go. Lifer. Best shot is a drifter that comes well south and terrorizes pigeons in an old rock quarry, grain elevator,  or some similar setting.

Bicknell's thrush: I'll need to scale a high peak in the Adirondacks to get this species—something that's not currently on my schedule for 2014. It would be a lifer, though one of those AOU-taxonomic-split lifers that happens when the DNA of some individual birds within a particular species gets sufficient spinning in a centrifuge to turn one species into one or more new species.

Smith's longspur: I am planning to go after this species in western Ohio in late winter/early spring. There's a three-week window during which northbound Smith's longspurs stop over in the muddy agricultural fields of far-western Ohio. I plan to be there, scanning with my spotting scope.

Smith's longspur ©Tom Johnson

Eurasian tree sparrow: It's a long shot that I'd get to see this species in 2014. I'd have to go to St. Louis, Missouri to have the best chance to see one. I'm thinking a road trip to see my beloved Pittsburgh Pirates play their arch-nemesis St. Louis Cardinals might offer the perfect opportunity. Lifer. Besides, I am both a baseball and a birding lifer myself.

What are YOUR Target/Wish-List Birds for 2014?


* I reserve the right to change my mind arbitrarily as to the contents of this list.

Roadside Attractions

In January 2010 I took daughter Phoebe to Florida for The Space Coast Birding & Wildlife Festival. We did a number of speaking gigs at the festival and at local schools. It was really cool to see Phoebe interacting with kids her age from the Florida schools, showing them, without a doubt, that birding is not just for nerds.

It was a highlight of my years as a Dad to be able to show Phoebe her life alligator, armadillo, manatee, bobcat, and a score of birds, including the endangered Florida scrub-jay. But there was one Florida lifer that eluded us: the giant roadside attraction.

On Sunday, when the festival was over, we headed for the Orlando airport by a roundabout way. A giant alligator at a roadside attraction provided a perfect memento for Phoebe. We stopped, she got out, and we took a few photos with this big-as-a-tractor-trailer gator.

I love this image because it shows my little girl, who is no longer a little girl, in full "hurry up and take the photo, Daddy!" posture. What a gator! What a trip! And what a girl! We really need to do another daddy-daughter trip before fledges into the wide world on her own two wings.

Lifer #684

On Monday, June 27, at approximately 7:55 am Central Standard Time, I saw my life golden-cheeked warbler—an adult male—at a small cluster of ponds below a windmill-powered pump in Friedrich Wilderness Park, north of San Antonio, Texas.

This was my 684th North America life bird.

I'll tell the entire story about this lifer quest soon. Just wanted to share the news with my bird-head peeps out there in Interweb-land.

Two Words

Yes! and....

Yes!

Those rather poor photos represent my two latest life birds: the black-capped vireo and the lesser prairie chicken. I got both of them while attending The Woodward Lesser Prairie Chicken Festival in Woodward, Oklahoma. This small-sized birding fest is a keeper. And the birds are stupid ossum.

I'm going back for better chicken photos tomorrow, if the weather gods comply. Got great looks at both species, though, and that counts most of all for me. Just love being out here in the land of the big sky—it does one's heart some good.

Bankable Lifers?

Indian hill myna

On a recent quick trip to South Florida, I was shown two new, but currently uncountable, life birds. The Indian hill myna, and the chestnut-fronted macaw are established exotics here in SoFla. We saw them nesting and making babies, so we know they are establishing their North American populations, however neither species is currently on the North American Bird List as an accepted, countable species.

Chestnut-fronted macaw.

So I am tucking these sightings away for the day when some enterprising ornithology student decides to do a study on these species for his/her PhD thesis. We're calling these species "Bankable Lifers" until they are countable.

Chestnut-fronted macaw. This one is for Charles.

Bohemian Quest: The Final Day

Dawn breaks over Harbor Springs, Michigan.

After spending the night inside my wrapped Christmas-present box of a motel room, I got up early, put on every piece of clothing from my duffel bag, and loaded up The Back Breaker for another day of looking for our target bird (also known as tilting at windmills). We thought we'd get on the road by 5:45 am, grab an early breakfast at a local diner by 6 am, and probably nail the Bohemian waxwings by 7. At the latest.

Wearing eleventeen layers of clothing for cold-weather waxwing chasing.

Minor detail: there is no diner open at 6 am in Harbor Springs. So we lowered our sights and grabbed a couple of convenience-store belly bombs and two cups of hot battery acid (with hazelnut creamer). NOW we were ready to go birding.

Down to the harbor we went, arriving well before the sunrise. Gazing out over the frozen harbor, I noted the distinct lack of bird life. No crows, no starlings, no Canada geese. It was 2 degrees F. I couldn't blame them.

We drove around the old familiar places, getting excellent looks at bare fruit trees, piles of snow, and some ice-fishermen out on the lake, still frozen in the same positions they'd been in the day before. We even went back out to the land of snow buntings, where some waxies had made sporadic appearances. We scanned the open water on the lake. Nada.

Heeter scans the open water of Lake Michigan.

The day was slipping away.

I'd sent out another plea for help on the MI-birds listserv and got some good leads on BOWAs both farther north and farther south. Since we were running out of time, we needed to make a strategic move, and fast.

By 10 am I was getting both restless and slightly annoyed. So Heets and I decided to head south to a hopeful-sounding sighting in Traverse City. A kind soul named Holly had e-mailed me to share her day-before sighting of a sizable flock of BOWAs in a neighborhood with ornamental fruit trees. It was time to man up or clam up.

Man up it was. I took a nap while Heeter drove us down the lakefront highway to Traverse City.
We stopped at several places where fruit remained on the trees. No dice. We spotted some tundra swans. And a ring-billed gull. And a pile of rock pigeons. Yawn.

And then we pulled into the un-gated gated community where Holly had seen many, many Bohemian waxwings the day before. We began driving the roads, hoping for a miracle. First street: nothing. Second street: nothing. Third street...

"THERE THEY ARE!!!"

Those dots at 1 o'clock in the tree are Bohemians.

They were just seven or so dots in the top of a tree, but I knew, KNEW, that they were Bohemian waxwings. It's possible that I caught a whiff of their diagnostic aura of patchouli. After gawking at them for three seconds in my binocs, I began scrambling for my various cameras. First the Canon 30D. Clickclickclickclick.

Two shots taken with my big rig Canon 30D.

Then the Leica spotting scope for some digiscoping.

Two shots taken with my digiscoping rig.

And then, like leaves blown by the wind, they lifted into the air and disappeared into the distance. Gone! But we'd SEEN them. How sweet! Figuring we'd find another flock or that this one might return, we left the perfectly manicured neighborhood and went looking for a lunch spot. We found a great little deli a half-mile away and settled in for our first real food of the day. Four spoonfuls into my soup I felt the irresistible urge to check Bohemian waxwing off on my checklist. Geoff caught the moment on video.



And so the journey ended successfully. Sigh of relief.

We headed southward so Geoff could visit his family in Big Rapids and Grand Rapids (lots of rapids in these parts, nearly all frozen solid). We made a stop at Geoff's boyhood home.

Geoff Heeter, 2009 or so model. (photo by Jeffrey A. Gordon)

And I took the opportunity to capture a photo of a photo of good ol' Geoff (I'm OLD GEOFF!!!) from "back in the day." It was on the wall of his parents' house, so I am sure I'm violating some sort of bro-code by sharing it here, but....it's simply too amazing NOT to share.

Geoff Heeter, late-70s model.

So here's to you, Heets! Thanks for making the trek with me, bro. And I've gotta say, dude, if you'd been a singer, with your flowing mullet, you could have given Shaun Cassidy a run for his money.

And that's the story of The New Brohemians and their birding victory over the itinerant Bohemians.

The New Brohemians Head North

The unrelenting winter was slowly turning my mind space to slush and mush when I realized, in a rare moment of clarity, that the perfect curative prescription was adding a life bird to Ye Olde Life List. You may recall, gentle blog readers and lurkers, that I have previously broached the subject of the life list.

I'd recently broken my self-imposed ban on list-serves dealing with bird sightings and the two that I subscribed to represented opposite ends of the spectrum. The Ohio Birds list-serv had reports of great birds from around the Buckeye State, but very, very few species that would require a new check mark on the life list. And NARBA, the North American Rare Bird Alert gave me great birds that were at least 2.5 million miles away in places like Caribou Sac, Yukon and Blown-out Flip-Flop Key, Florida. Most were a bird too far.

What I needed was an attainable goal. And there it was, right there (unchecked) in the middle of my life list and making regular appearances on the Michigan Birds List Serv: The Bohemian waxwing.

I posted on Facebook that I was planning this quest and my friend and fellow birder Geoff Heeter (see photo above) sent me a message asking if I needed a co-pilot. The Heets is a fun dude. So of course I said "Sure." [If you'd like further insight into the humanoid critter we call Geoff Heeter, visit his business website, or his birding festival website, or my earlier post here in BOTB about the trip.

So it was all set: the Brohemians were going after the Bohemians.

Massive amounts of gear.

Geoff arrived late on Sunday afternoon at my mom's house in Marietta. He bolted a plate of food, and we loaded up all of my gear (weighing several tons) into his vehicle. Then I folded myself into the passenger seat like some contortionist getting into a Houdini submersion box. The level of discomfort I was to experience during the next three days nearly wiped out the gratitude I owed Heets for agreeing to drive. We could have taken the Birdmobile, but its track record on snowy, icy roads is scary poor.

So, riding uncomfortably in Geoff Toyota truck, now known forevermore as The Back Breaker, we hit the highway headed north to Bowling Green, Ohio, where my friend Annie had agreed (surprisingly) to let us crash for the night. On the drive we spoke of many things, of cabbages and kings, of bees with no stings, of LeBron with no rings, of caged birds that don't sing, and so on.

Birding junk in the trunk.

We passed through Toledo and then Detroit mumbling our respects, respectively to Jamie Farr and Eminem. The farther north we got, the fewer birds we encountered. In fact our bird list, upon stopping for gas and tire air in the town of Old Gregg, Michigan, was:
European starling
Rock pigeon
Mourning dove
American kestrel
Red-tailed hawk
American crow
Snow bunting
Canada goose
some flying ducks
sky pepper

It was not looking good. Yet we pressed on, blindly optimistic that ours was a quest worth taking.

By late in the day we reached the town of Harbor Springs, MI. This is the home of our my friend Sally, who had responded to my query on the MI-Birds listserv asking about Bohemians. She had seen a huge flock of them in Harbor Springs that very day and we were welcome to come up. She, however, was wisely leaving town with her husband before we arrived.

The Michigan birders from the list-serv were very helpful and generous in sharing their BOWA sightings. Geoff and I mapped all of the sightings and concluded that Harbor Springs gave us the best shot—recent intel, plus it was not as far north as Sault Ste. Marie, where MOST of the sightings were clustered. And, being a Michigan native, Geoff was somewhat familiar with the area. [During the next 36 hours I would hear about every youthful misadventure young Master Heeter was involved in during summers spent in Harbor Springs. We'd go past a house and he'd wax nostalgic about some young lassie and a warm can of Hamm's beer. Lucky for us, the statutes of limitations on most such escapades were expired.]

We followed Sally's directions to the letter and found the fruiting trees the waxwings had been, apparently, occupying non-stop for the past month. Most of these trees were along the lakefront streets and nearly all were stripped almost bare of fruit. Not a good sign.
But we could see ample evidence of the carnage—of the raw masticating power of the roving Bohemians.
The snow was stained from the juice of thousands of crushed berries.


We loafed around the harbor and its springs enjoying the quiet of a waxwing-free winter's afternoon. Common goldeneye and common mergansers edged their way onto the trip list. The temperature began to drop from a balmy 12 degrees F so we changed strategies.

We went to the pet store.

I figured it might sell bird seed and therefore the owner might know another local bird watcher and that local bird watcher would know where else we could go looking for the waxies.

Bingo! Within 30 minutes I was talking to a nice woman who was, indeed, a local bird enthusiast. She'd had the waxwings in her yard that morning. We got directions and headed out to her rural home, racing the daylight, which was doing its best to disappear into Lake Michigan.

Then we got lost. Found a general store. Got directions. Found the woman's house and yard, now 100-percent devoid of Bohemian waxwings.

The Waxwing/Bunting Lady's house. She was both nice and helpful.

"They come every morning to eat the fruit on that tree right in front of my living-room window!"

I muttered to myself, feeling slightly wounded.

"Ya can't hardly shoo 'em away once they start eatin'!"

Wound now gushing blood.

"Yeah, I didn't even know what they were 'til I talked to my daughter on the phone and we figgered it out!"

Wound: meet salt. Salt: wound.

Geoff pulled me away, toward Back Breaker. We needed to go elsewhere so I could have my missed-life-bird conniption fit in peace.

And here is where our luck changed ever so slightly. We ran into a big flock of snow buntings. you can read the tale of this in my recent post over at the 10,000 Birds blog.

Snow buntings. In a tree, of all things.

After enjoying the buntings and their weird, tree-perching behavior, we rolled back past the Waxwing Lady's house, just in case we were on an actual roll.

She came out again to chat with us. We told her about the snow buntings.

"Oh yeah, those things come to our feeders round the back of the house every day, all winter!"

I felt my knees begin to buckle.

Back to town we went, but it was to late to see any more birds. Instead we added planked white fish to our gastronomic life lists, got some affordable hotel rooms and crashed out, with visions of Waxwing/Bunting Lady's birds dancing in our heads.

My room had plaid wall paper which made me think I might be sleeping inside a giant Christmas present.

Ahh. Sleep. Let me drift until tomorrow, when I will take on the Zenlike aura needed to ADD THIS #$&(%(+@ BIRD to my life list. But, really, I'm not like that.

I'll continue the saga in my next post.

Briefly Waxing Rhapsodic About Bohemians

They were even more beautifully Bohemian than I thought they'd be. We found a small flock of seven Bohemian waxwings in a retirement community cul-de-sac in Traverse City, Michigan. This was yesterday, February 15, 2011, just after noon. That's life bird number 600-something...

The telling of the complete saga will have to wait for another day because I am now having to re-enter reality and there's simply no time for storytelling. But when I DO tell the tale, you should know that it will include: extremes of cold, a stretching of the time-space continuum, a pet store, frantic phone calls placed to unknown persons who MIGHT have seen a flock, many helpful messages from Michigan birders, a stern scolding for my list-serv faux pas, bad food, good beer, the first robin of spring, bear tracks, snow buntings, Geoff's questionable choice of chapeau, late nights, early mornings, doldrum afternoons, and planked whitefish.


But like I said, there's not enough time to get into all of that now.
Thanks for following along, my friends.
I'll see you out there with the birds.