{"id":112,"date":"2008-05-15T16:30:27","date_gmt":"2008-05-15T14:30:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/general\/spring-red-footed-falcon-fall\/"},"modified":"2008-05-15T16:30:27","modified_gmt":"2008-05-15T14:30:27","slug":"spring-red-footed-falcon-fall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/general\/spring-red-footed-falcon-fall\/","title":{"rendered":"Spring Red-footed Falcon fall"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s been quite an unprecedented fall of Red-footed Falcons<\/strong> in the drylands of Lleida<\/strong> over the last week or so. Reports of these little charmers in groups of from 3 to a dozen birds have come in from the drylands of Balaguer<\/strong>, Bellmunt<\/strong> and Alguaire-Almenar, and if nothing has been said about the drylands of Alf\u00e9s<\/strong> it’s probably because the local birders are too busy counting them at other sites!<\/p>\n

I was leading the Naturetrek Catalonia tour<\/strong> in the area when we unwittingly but gratefully bumped into our first Red-footed Falcon on Monday 12th May. One of the 13 participants pointed out the bird in question, “What’s that bird in the tree over there, Steve?”.<\/p>\n

I confess that I didn’t get round to answering him (in the mode of humouring him, thinking to myself “I’d better look at his bird and tell him it’s a Kestrel before he gets narked with me”) for at least 10 minutes. Well, in my defence, it wasn’t easy coping with the barrage of birds that we encountered that morning: a dozen or so male Little Bustards<\/strong> calling, flying and chasing each other, a pair of Hobbys<\/strong> practising their aerobatic skills on a wandering Swallow, countless Calandra Larks<\/strong> trilling and jingling, a sentinel Southern Grey Shrike, even a couple of flyover Black-winged Stilts!<\/p>\n

What a surprise I got when I eventually did focus his “kestrel” in my scope! “Crikey! A Red-footed Falcon<\/strong>! Wait a minute! Two in the same tree!”<\/p>\n

We went on to see 6 Red-footed Falcons that morning (plus Kestrel, Lesser Kestrel<\/strong> and Hobby) and no fewer than 9 the following day in the drylands of Bellmunt. Adult and subadult males and females, enjoyed by all.<\/p>\n

Such encounters are great when you’re out birding<\/strong>, and for me they’re even better when\u00a0 you’re leading a tour and everyone gets to share in the experience.<\/p>\n

Another good thing has also happened this week: it’s rained!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s been quite an unprecedented fall of Red-footed Falcons in the drylands of Lleida over the last week or so. Reports of these little charmers in groups of from 3 to a dozen birds have come in from the drylands of Balaguer, Bellmunt and Alguaire-Almenar, and if nothing has been said about the drylands of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7I752-1O","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}