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I have recently returned from a week's holiday with my wife Inga spent in South-West Spain based at Punta Umbria in Huelva Province (3-10 June) . We travelled with Saga Holidays from Nottingham/East Midlands to Faro Airport, Portugal and although SW Spain had experienced indifferent weather prior to our arrival, we enjoyed a week's fine weather with temperatures generally in the mid to upper twenties.
The gardens of our Hotel joined on to the Los Enebrales Nature Park, a varied area of vegetation - Stone Pine, Juniper and scrub made up a dunes system habitat. Occasional walks in this area along the specially constructed pathways regularly produced a number of interesting species including Crested Tit, Crested Lark, Sardinian Warbler, Serin, Spotless Starling and small groups of Azure-winged Magpies. Our Hotel balcony overlooked the dune/pine tree area with the beach and sea c50 yards beyond. During the week we recorded a number of birds from the balcony including :
Red-rumped Swallow
Pallid Swift (occasionally amongst the Common Swifts)
Sardinian Warbler
Serin
Spotless Starling (nesting on the roof)
Yellow-legged Gull (dozens daily)
Caspian Tern
Little Tern
Common Tern
and Gannet (fishing off-shore).
Saga Holidays at the Hotel Barcelo Punta Umbria have a close working relationship with a professional bird-trip company, Platalea, based in nearby Huelva. I joined two of their four programmed trips in an 8-seater minibus plus birding guide with telescope (mornings 0930-1.30
with collection from/delivery back at hotel0, each trip being to a different habitat. My trips were to :
A. Lagoons and Freshwater Marshes. Birds seen included:
Greater Flamingo - 100+ (incl some nesting this year - but only distant views due to water channels intervening)
Spoonbill (over 500 pairs nest in the area)
White Stork (dozens nesting on specially provided platforms on the electricity pylons - occasionally 4 nests to a pylon)
Cattle Egret
Little Egret
Grey Heron
Purple Heron
Squacco Heron
Purple Gallinule
Red -crested Pochard
Black-winged Stilt
Kentish Plover
Whiskered Tern (plus nesting colony)
Little Tern (c400 pairs in the area)
Booted Eagle
Bee Eater
Fan-tailed Warbler (Zitting Cisticola).
B. Countryside Tour -mainly along country tracks through Wheatfields and Sunflowerfields.
Additional birds seen included:
Collared Pratincole
Azure-winged Magpie
Raven
Woodchat Shrike
Osprey
Montagu's Harrier
Hen Harrier
Lesser Kestrel (nesting colony on Trigueros Water Tower)
Calandra Lark
Lesser Short-toed Lark
Crested Lark
Skylark
Serin
Common Waxbill.
Finally, Saga Holidays had specially arranged with the company "Donana National Park Tours" for a 3-hour professionally guided tour in a 4-wheel drive safari bus (with large opening windows) to visit, along sandy tracks, the major ecosystems of the Park. The company's vehicles are some of the very few authorised to travel within the confines of the Park and this meant that although we saw a number of riders on horseback, we didn't see any other motorised vehicles during our trip. Donana, about 1 hour by coach from Punta Umbria, is one of the most famous birdwatching localities in Europe and will already be known to a number of Lincs birders. It is immense and covers some 500 square miles (1300 square kilometers) of near-virgin habitat,most of it flat marshlands or "marismas" plus sand dunes, scrubland and open woodlands. Donana,however, is essentially a wetland site and is considered by many the number one such reserve in Europe.
In addition to crossing the usually "off-limits" area of the Park, we also visited the main public Visitor Centres at El Acebuche and Palacio del Acebron. The highlight of the Donana tour was undoubtedly the Visitor Centre Jose Antonio Valverde in the "off limits" area. The Centre overlooks an area of mainly reeds, stunted trees and tall tamarisk bushes in which were nesting hundreds of birds (many within 40-50 yards of the centre building itself):
Glossy Ibis
Night Heron
Squacco Heron
Little Egret
Cattle Egret
with 3 or 4 of the above species nesting in the same bush or stunted tree. It had a tremendous visual impact with the continuous feeding and coming and going activity. At one stage, I counted a squadron of 15 Glossy Ibis overhead returning in formation to their nests. Further there were at least 6 singing Great Reed Warblers around the Centre competing amongst themselves and mainly perched high up on the reed stems.A truly awesome birding experience.
Other birds seen during the safari bus trip included:
Greater Flamingo
Little Bittern
Cattle Egret
Purple Heron
Short-toed Eagle
Booted Eagle
Black Kite (with up to 10 in the air at once)
Purple Gallinule
Little Tern
Whiskered Tern
Little Owl
Woodchat Shrike
Azure-winged Magpie
Red-rumped Swallow.
Another memorable part of the Donana trip was the visit to the village of El Rocio for an extended lunch break after the safari bus tour. It has been named the international village of the horse. All the houses have stables and hitching rails and all the streets are sand tracks (of varying depths of sand!). It is a living relic of the days when Donana was almost wholly inaccessible except on horseback. Motorised vehicles now use the sandy tracks of the village mingling with the occasional rider on horseback. I glimpsed a couple of horsemen who looked like the "Good" Clint Eastwood but fortunately none resembled the "Bad" or the "Ugly". My wife and I had previously visited El Rocio about 10 years ago and I remembered lunching in a particular restaurant. I soon relocated it in a surprisingly peaceful setting a few hundred yards to the west of the village on a gentle slope overlooking a very large, shallow lagoon called "La Madre de las Marismas" (The Mother of the Marshes). The Restaurant ("Aires de Donana") must be one of the best birdwatching restaurants in Europe for, lunching on the shaded terrace outside - with binoculars at the ready - one had in front an ever-changing scene dominated by flocks of Greater Flamingos, with feeding Spoonbills, White Storks, Little Egrets, Black-winged Stilts, Squacco Herons, Black-tailed Godwits, Grey Herons, various Ducks, and also with Swifts and Hirundines circling above plus the ever-present Red and numerous Black Kites. A veritable birder's paradise! Another memory to treasure - and the food and wine were good there, too.
Regards,
Freddy
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