{"id":919,"date":"2015-07-04T19:37:36","date_gmt":"2015-07-04T17:37:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/birding-and-wildlife-trips\/birding-in-spain-gets-cross-with-aussie-birders\/"},"modified":"2015-07-04T19:37:36","modified_gmt":"2015-07-04T17:37:36","slug":"birding-in-spain-gets-cross-with-aussie-birders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/birding-and-wildlife-trips\/birding-in-spain-gets-cross-with-aussie-birders\/","title":{"rendered":"Birding In Spain gets Cross with Aussie birders"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Australia to Spain, and beyond<\/p>\n

Featuring the Ken Cross Back to Europe Trip Log<\/p>\n

This May past Ken Cross<\/strong> came from the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia<\/strong>, and brought his merry crew of Australian birders and companions with him to enjoy a superb classic spring birding tour of Spain.<\/p>\n

After many months of e-mails and planning Ken and Steve\u00a0finally met up in Madrid\u00a0<\/span>in mid-May, and from here was launched our tour of the best of Spain and its birds. Over the next 12 we toured and birded Extremadura, the Picos de Europa, the Pyrenees, the Ebro Valley plains and the Ebro Delta<\/strong>, finishing the tour in Barcelona. We also managed to organize a pelagic cruise one morning to look for shearwaters and petrels…How did we get on?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

You can read all about it here at\u00a0Ken\u2019s blog<\/a>:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/kceuropebirds.blogspot.com.au\/2015\/05\/day-15-groups-final-full-day-in-spain.html<\/p>\n

The first challenge that faced us was to work out a packing scheme; however if there\u2019s one thing we have come to excel in in the birding circuit it\u2019s just that. As we think the photo shows:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\"Packing<\/p>\n

A few days later another challenge arose: how to beat the hotel views, food and service that we had in the Picos de Europa. I don\u2019t think we beat it in the subseq\u00fcent hotels, but we came reasonably close.<\/p>\n

\"One<\/p>\n

\u00a0\"One<\/p>\n

2 amazing and stimulating views from our hotel in the Picos de Europa<\/em><\/p>\n

Our impressions were that Ken (Mr Cross) and his crew (Russ, Maria, Vince, Steve, Jan, Karen, Norm, June, Ray) had a good time all round, but in particular they really loved the mountains, and this is judging from the battery of \u201coohs\u201d and \u201caahs\u201d delivered by all when the Pyrenees and Cantabrian mountains came into view.<\/p>\n

The final tour tally was 213 species of birds, with of course some very interesting and unusual sightings, and with fun and Aussie humour all the way.<\/p>\n

Dupont\u2019s Lark <\/strong>and Lammergeier<\/strong> were chosen as the group\u2019s bird of the tour. Although we should remain impartial with questions of taste we are very glad that the Corn Bunting did not enter the competition!<\/p>\n

The big surprise to me was that when I arrived home from a later trip I found 2 field guides to Australia waiting for me: one for the mammals, and another for the birds. A big thank you to our Aussie friends for that, and for their great company!<\/p>\n

Now though I have to start saving up to go to Australia.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\"Australian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Australia to Spain, and beyond Featuring the Ken Cross Back to Europe Trip Log This May past Ken Cross came from the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia, and brought his merry crew of Australian birders and companions with him to enjoy a superb classic spring birding tour of Spain. After many months of e-mails and […]<\/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":[6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birding-and-wildlife-trips","category-birds-in-spain"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7I752-eP","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919","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=919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdinginspain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}