Birding Notes From Old Iberia - Stork Migration Under Way

[Alfred Maley]

On Sunday, while Linda was photographing Monarch butterfly caterpillars, she heard the call of a Common Buzzard high in the sky over the farm. This is the time of the year when buzzards pairs become very vocal and indulge in aerial acrobatics prior to the egg laying in late February. She looked for the calling bird and noticed, up high, a group of 35 White Storks silently gliding north. These would be adults that migrate to Africa from colder and snowier parts of Europe. It’s likely that these first arrivals are headed for central and northern Spain, eager to reclaim their nesting sites, often in short supply.

The local (resident) storks on the farm are paired up and boisterously getting ready to make baby storks. Egg laying occurs  around the first week of February. Migrating storks will continue to pass over well into March, when they can look down and see already hatched young storks.

The commonest small bird around the farm is the Chiff-chaff - there are literally thousands of these drab-but-energetic creatures searching every bush, shrub and tree for insects. Sometime in late March or April we will wake up and they will suddenly be gone, back to the forests of Scandinavia and Russia.

Inspection of the Little Owl nest boxes revealed one indignant Little Owl and evidence that both boxes had been used in 2017.

On Monday we drove over to La Janda to see the wintering Common Cranes and found nearly 500 of them, along with a splendid pair of Imperial Eagles, a Great Spotted Cuckoo and a very obliging Peregrine that was sitting by the roadside on a power pole. Spanish Peregrines are noticeably smaller than “our” peregrines, but still always fun to see.

Al Maley
Hampstead NH/Los Barrios Spain
www.montedelatorre.com