{"id":40,"date":"2008-01-12T15:57:00","date_gmt":"2008-01-12T13:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/birding-and-wildlife-trips\/2-species-of-sandgrouse-in-the-drylands-of-alfes\/"},"modified":"2008-02-10T00:14:20","modified_gmt":"2008-02-09T22:14:20","slug":"2-species-of-sandgrouse-in-the-drylands-of-alfes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/birding-and-wildlife-trips\/2-species-of-sandgrouse-in-the-drylands-of-alfes\/","title":{"rendered":"2 Species of Sandgrouse in the drylands of Alf\u00e9s"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Now I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s the first time on record, but it&#8217;s certainly the first time that I have ever seen both <strong>Pin-tailed Sandgrouse<\/strong> and <strong>Black-bellied Sandgrouse<\/strong> in the same day in the <strong>drylands of Alf\u00e9s<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not unusual to see <strong>Pin-tailed Sandgrouse<\/strong> here, in fact this is the only place in <strong>Catalunya<\/strong> where the species breeds (some 50 pairs at most?), but seeing a <strong>Black-bellied Sandgrouse<\/strong> is quite another matter. For one thing there are probably no more than 10 or 15 pairs of this avian gem left <strong>breeding in Catalonia<\/strong>, and they don&#8217;t breed at Alf\u00e9s. Secondly, actually seeing them even if they are in the area requires luck, timing and a little celestial indulgence.<\/p>\n<p>Alf\u00e9s is only 6 or 7 minutes from my front door so I made a short incursion, mostly to locate the <strong>Pin-tailed Sandgrouse&#8217;s<\/strong> favoured haunts this season in preparation for a <strong>birding trip<\/strong> in late March. Two British birders have booked 2 nights in la Garbinada, a splendid <strong>rural hotel<\/strong> in the nearby village of la Granyena, and one of the prize birds around is precisely the Pin-tailed Sandgrouse. I don&#8217;t suppose the <strong>Black-bellied Sandgrouse<\/strong> will stay around until then, as when I last saw it it was flying directly away from me at a nifty speed!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Now I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s the first time on record, but it&#8217;s certainly the first time that I have ever seen both Pin-tailed Sandgrouse and Black-bellied Sandgrouse in the same day in the drylands of Alf\u00e9s. It&#8217;s not unusual to see Pin-tailed Sandgrouse here, in fact this is the only place in Catalunya where [&hellip;]<\/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":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birding-and-wildlife-trips"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7I752-E","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","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=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}