BirdingInSpain

Theoretically birding and relativity

Or… “Location, location, location!” 

Now it could be true that a large part of birding and the excitement that seeing a certain bird can provoke among birders can be quite closely measured using the DOB rule.

Namely that excitement is inversely proportional to :

Distance Of Bird (DOB) from observer x species occurrence index

OK, I just made it up. So what am I trying to say?

Let’s look at an example:

Above we have the modest Eurasian Coot (Fulica atra) – from now on just “Coot”, as it is usually termed in British English.

If you (i) live in Europe and (ii) see a Coot on your local river and (iii) it is close enough to be well seen through the binoculars you are carrying, and (iv) it is within its normal range and is relatively common on that stretch of river your response might materialize in such a facial expression:

Now if the Coot in question is so far away as to be a barely identifiable blob in your telescope your reaction, if any, might look like this:

If the Coot is on that same river but somehow you have managed to get so close to it that you can take a good photo with your unassuming camera and lens, your response might be like this:

Now for a change of habitat. If a Coot appears on your city terrace and is looking into your bedroom/living room window you might wear this expression:

If you unexpectedly encounter a Coot swimming in your bath then your reaction would possibly be reflected in this look:

If the poor Coot is plucked and roasted and sitting on your dinner plate, and you are an inhabitant of the Ebro Delta, you might wear this expression:

If its plucked and roasted and sitting on your dinner plate and you are an inhabitant of Barcelona, you might be wearing this expression:

If you are out walking the dog at your local marshes somewhere in California and a Coot crosses your path, you might pay witness to the event like this:

Well, that’s my relatively theoretical  theory. What’s yours?

Merry Christmas!

Florinda, Steve and Lionel the Little Bustard would like to wish all our friends, partners, clients, colleagues and collaborators a

Merry Christmas and a Happy and Prosperous New Year 2014!

Our thanks to Mike Watson for permitting the use of his photo of this jumping Little Bustard!

Hide Photography

Our spring on the plains bird photography programme is fully booked :0 from the 12th April to 24th May 2014. However, we still have places available from the 24th May and into June.

Furthermore, Lammergeiers, Goshawks, Bonelli’s Eagles, Red Kites, Griffon Vultures and Black Vultures are all great subjects to photograph in the January-April and September – November period. And they can and have been photographed from our hides, just recently in fact.

Our photo trip prices are likely to go up a little in 2014, not much, but sometimes every little counts.

However, we are holding this year’s prices for any enquiries received before the end of the year and which lead to a booking in 2014.

So if you have been thinking about it, now’s the time to get in touch.

Steve West and Florinda Vidal, Lleida, December 2013

Fly direct to Barcelona from 6 London airports

Fly to Barcelona from…

Heathrow

Gatwick

Stansted

Luton

City

Southend

Direct flights to Barcelona. And then just an hour and a half to Lleida by car, or just over an hour by train. And all the possibilities that opens up…

Birding

Hide Photography

Nature

A holiday.

Barcelona birdwatching tour

Are you a birder thinking of birding in Spain while visiting Barcelona? You might have considered organizing a Barcelona birdwatching tour, so you can go birdwatching around Barcelona for a day or two.

And then your desire for birdwatching might have taken you further. You will have surely heard about birding the steppes of Spain, and then could be tempted to add the steppes and plains of Lleida, Huesca or Zaragoza to your personalized birdwatching tour.

And then if the birdwatching tour has taken you to the steppes it would be a shame to miss out birdwatching in the Pyrenees, wouldn’t it? After all, the Pyrenees are not far from the steppes and offer some great birdwatching opportunities. So now on your birdwatching tour of Catalonia and northeast Spain you could include one of the beautiful national parks of the Pyrenees – Aigüestortes National Park in Catalonia, or Ordesa National Park in Aragón. These birding sites are ideal places for enjoying the most spectacular mountain scenery, but many there are many other places for birdwatching where you can bird for special alpine and forest birds.

OK. So now we have a birdwatching tour starting in Barcelona and visiting the steppes and the Pyrenees. And what about birdwatching in the Ebro Delta? No birdwatching tour in this part of Spain would be complete without birding in the Ebro Delta for a surprising array of wetland birds.

This sounds like a brilliant birdwatching tour, but there are some problems. Firstly, what would be the ideal route for such a tour? What particular itineraries should be planned into this birdwatching tour to encounter the greatest variety of birds, and to guarantee some of the rarer or more localized birds? Well, that’s where we at Birding In Spain can help. 

Secondly, how are we going to allocate ourselves enough time to do this birdwatching tour enough justice? Ah – now that’s something you have to work out for yourself.

Birding Mallorca

Thanks to Geoff and June for their appreciative comments of the Birding In Spain itineraries for birding on Mallorca, as well as the useful update about access to the Salines de Salobrar in the south of the island.

First a sincere thank you for the information on your web site. We’ve just had a short birding trip to Majorca (Mallorca) and your information and itineraries were perfect.

Now some updated information. The salt company at the Salines de Salobrar have put up no access signs. There is also a locked gate on the path your itinerary tells visitors to use. By the gate there is a new information board about the birds, which we found strange. We then met another couple of birders who told us the company now want you to go to the salt plant and pay €10 to enter the site and walk around to see the birds. I have to admit we hoped across a bank and stayed at the edge of area to see what was there.

Finally, we spent quite a while looking for Thekla larks without any luck. On our last morning we took a walk from our rural hotel in Moscari to get a photo of the hotel across the fields and there, no more than 200m from the hotel, we saw a pair feeding.

We found Majorca a great place to bird watch at this time of the year.

Again thanks for your website.

Elsewhere on Mallorca you can find Purple Gallinules 

Geoff & June Seabrook

Hide Photography in Catalonia

This is the cover of the attractive new brochure on bird photography in Catalonia just edited by Birding In Spain and La Sabina.

It’s packed with some great bird photos – all of them taken from our hides – and tons of relevant information about bird photo trips and hide use, location, species etc.

A big thanks to all who contributed to make it possible, above all photographers who contributed a lot of the photos, such as Yves Adams, and especially to Eva Solanes. Eva was responsible for the graphic design and we think she did an excellent job. Congratulations Eva!

Anyone interested in seeing more of this brochure can request a copy by sending us an e-mail.

Happy birding, and great photography!

Extreme weather II

April 2013 ended with 6 consecutive days of rain, at times very heavy, at what was the height of our plains in spring photography season. This was very annoying to some of our guest photographers, having to face up to the challenge of getting photos of plains birds from our hides without getting soaked or coated in mud. Sometimes the challenge was just getting to the hides!

Little Owls had to make do with what they could find

This was irksome, but worst still for us was the bird side of things: Small colonies of Bee-eaters were excavating nests one day and just “gone” the next, perhaps to reappear when the rain stopped, or perhaps not; Little Owls and Lesser Kestrels seemed to be relying on millipedes to tide them through hard times in the complete absence of grasshoppers; male Little Bustards occasionally threw their heads back in a half-hearted display but downright refused to do anything that could be construed as a “jump”.

Little Bustards were not convinced about the advantages of jumping. Photo by Jordi Bas.

Then came the summer, and things returned to normal, or a close resemblance of it. Rollers started inspecting the nestboxes we had put up for them; Hobbies were using regular perches in the vicinity of their nest; and one day I located a Green Woodpecker’s nest with several tiny chicks in the hollow trunk of an old almond tree.

Rollers were ousted from nestboxes by the violent storms. Photo by Jordi Bas.

In June a hailstorm hit the plains area. Only 3 villages were mentioned in the local news, but those 3 places mark the area of the drylands where these birds were nesting. That week I went back to the Green Woodpecker’s nest and checked: there’d be no chicks raised from that particular brood, as the nest was flooded. Maybe the adults could try again, but what about Little Bustards and Montagu’s Harriers nesting unprotected in the open fields? How would they have fared?

One of the nesting Hobbies was killed by the hail.

But worst was yet to come. About two weeks later another hailstorm hit almost exactly the same area. And this time round it was really virulent. The day after scenario couldn’t be more disheartening: one of the nesting Hobby pair was lying dead at the foot of the nesting tree; the lid of one of the Roller nestboxes had been blown off and the contents completely cleaned out; Montagu’s Harriers were nowhere to be seen.

A Green Woodpecker’s nest was “flooded out”. Photo by Wim de Groot.

Somebody should be quoted here. Perhaps Mark Twain  “Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get”, or perhaps Frank Lane “If you want to see the sunshine, you have to weather the storm”.

Birding In Spain binocular review

We are proud to announce that recently Birding In Spain has struck up an interesting area of collaboration with Vanguard, manufacturers of sporting optics, camera bags and accessories, tripods, etc.

But first of all a confession: We were not at all familiar with Vanguard products, with their binoculars or telescopes, their daypacks and assorted bags, not even with their award-winning tripods. And although we’re not always in tune with the latest in anything, not even birding gear and optics, we’ve been into birding in many ways for a long time now, we’ve come into contact with a lot of birders from most parts of the world, and we’re familiar with the big name brands in optics and other birding gear. Or so we thought.

In other words, we couldn’t help feeling somewhat skeptical about the material that was on its way to us from Vanguard, and began to wonder if we really wanted to get professionally involved with a brand that was so unfamiliar to us. Recommending products that we weren’t convinced of would be compromising our professional standards, and that was not something we wanted to do. At the same time, how could we not give the products a fair opportunity, after Vanguard had sent them to us in such good faith?

Fortunately, we can say the dilemma has been solved, and in the best way possible. Firstly, Vanguard have acted with efficiency and eloquence in the way they have their products to us and, secondly, our inspection of the products themselves has dispelled the major withholdings or doubts we may have had. We like what we’ve seen, and very much! 

Another confession: As professional guides we use top of the range binoculars of brands that are familiar to all birders in Europe and probably around the world, and we see no reason to change. So I personally will not be leading birding tours with my new Vanguard binoculars as my main pair of binoculars. However, that is not the point.

We also organize birdwatching courses and field excursions, get client’s companions who come along without binoculars, work with field collaborators, and it’s also very useful to have a “back-up” pair in case something happens to the main pair of binoculars, and without having to suffer a great compromise in effectiveness and image quality. So the new binoculars should see plenty of action! And they’re a lot more affordable than our main pair of binoculars, something that is very important to bear in mind when comparing their performance with models that could easily be 4 times or more their price.

So what about the review? Well, after trying out the Endeavour ED 10 x 42 in the field we looked through the Internet to try and find a glossary of terms to explain things more correctly, to come to terms with the terminology ourselves (e.g. lens coatings, eye relief, etc) and came across the review below which was already written, and in the most professional manner. There’s no way we could get close to writing such a well-constructed review, and what’s more we agree with virtually everything that’s said here, so there’s no compromising our standards or opinions just because Vanguard sent us some review material.

Here it is: Best Binoculars Reviews

There’s one major point we would add, and it’s not a positive one. The author of the review is very impressed by the low light performance of these binoculars, but our location and time of year has led us to do our initial trials under very different conditions: very bright light typical of midsummer in our continental Mediterranean climate, where right now the temperature outside must be around 35ºC. With such trials we have noticed colour-fringing (chromatic aberration) – yellow or purple fringes to contrasting lines and edges especially when viewing objects (antennas, common swifts, tree branches) against a bright sky. How much of an issue can this be? We’re not sure just yet so we’ll have to test the binoculars under less intense lighting conditions to see how the trials compare.

Oh, and another thing we’re not quite sure whether to test or not: Can we wash them under the tap?

Angry birds peck back!

Recently we got another unpleasant surprise when about to visit the Llobregat Delta nature reserve on the edge of Barcelona (previous ones have included reserve closed, being locked in, no water, disturbance by wild boars, etc). We were told that there were now entrance fees established for visiting the Llobregat delta reserve – but that they were only applicable to “professionals”. The argument is that a professional bird guide can obtain an “economic benefit” from the use of the reserve. So, as professional guides ourselves, what do we think?

Sorry, but the whole idea gets a big thumbs down. First of all it’s a very feeble platform that of “those who obtain an economic benefit will have to pay”. For example, what about non-professional guides leading a birdwatching group? Or a visit by the local mayors or town or city councils? Or a photographer who takes a photo of a bird from one of the hides and then sells it to a magazine? And one who doesn’t sell any of his photos? Who is going to decide who, if any, of these will have to pay? The concept just doesn’t stand up to discussion or scrutiny.

And it’s not just because we will have to pay. It’s an arbitrary measure. It’s discriminatory, it’s ineffective, it’s overblown and under-reaching, and it’s not going to be of any benefit to anyone or anything. And sadly it doesn’t mean there will be an improvement in the management of the reserve, or an increase in the services offered to the visitor.

The new management plan for the National Park of Monfragüe also contemplates payment by visitors. But after this general proclamation the considerable divergence between these two “pay per visit” proposals gets wider and wider. The Monfragüe initiative is directed at payment for services, such as car parks, guided tours and access to previously restricted areas. And the income thus generated is to be directed back at management and upkeep of the park. In other words more for more, and not less for more as proposed with the Llobregat Delta initiative.

We believe that the “user” of nature should pay to an extent, but for services, not for just being there in nature. But first of all “exploiters and polluters” should be the ones to pay the most, e.g. a factory that pollutes a river, a company that takes off water from a river for irrigation, bottled water or cooling, logging companies, hotel chains with hotels in areas of natural beauty, and a long etc. The initial focus should be on making the bigger guys pay, because they are the prime “users”, and all too often “abusers” of nature. What is needed is an INTELLIGENT policy of use and exploitation of natural resources, including nature for amenity, but by no means conferring exclusive or prime importance to this aspect when there are so many others that should be addressed first. In the case of the Llobregat Delta why can’t Aena or Abertis pay?

So these people are all with you eh? Let me see…. that’ll be 120 euros. Is there anybody hiding in the reedbeds? 

Furthermore consider this: we have already paid quite a lot for these reserves. Where else did the funds come from that were spent on management tasks, construction of visitor centers and hides, publications, signs etc? From taxpayers and consumers, of course. So we pay as taxpayers and now bird guides are supposed to pay as professionals (though with no signs of any accompanying tax relief), while the polluter, or climate change denier, or environmental detractor, or just general exploiter need not pay. This does not work as a fair-minded concept, which is why we call it discrimination.

While this precept lasts we will not enter the Llobregat Delta reserves because we refuse to pay. We also warmly invite the reserve direction, management and staff to contemplate the advantages and mechanisms of bidding other, wealthier entities to pay for the maintenance of this and other reserves.