Spain - Day 2

Oh dear, what a catastrophe!

At teatime on day 2 perhaps still jetlagged after getting up at 3.15 am on Monday to make the flight from Stansted, I managed to permanently delete all the photos I had taken during the day including good views of some notable first time sightings.  So all I can do is tell the story of what I saw without the evidence.

The day started well before dawn when we drove a few miles to an observation post at the Southern corner of the lake.  It was still pitch dark but after half an hour, vague shapes could be made out and I used the moon setting on my camera to see lines and lines of cranes in the distance...

The story with the cranes is that they gather on the Laguna di Gallocanta before migrating northwards across the Pyrenees. Each day at this time of year some will make the flight, some will remain and others will move in.  

So as the light improved, they started to move off in increasing numbers, flying straight over our heads in an overwhelming display except for one lone individual that came back.  Someone joked that it must have forgotten something.

We were told that there were around 15,000 cranes in the area on the day but the hotel organised a competition for us to guess how many there would be on the last day of our stay, just before the start of the "crane weekend" when most are expected to make the move north.  The number counted on that Friday was over 27,500, many more than any of us guessed!

Also seen on or the lake were some distant flamingos, shelduck, shoveler and teal as well as calandra lark, merlin and marsh harrier nearby.

Later in the day we travelled around a bit seeing crested lark, several linnets rock sparrow and roe dear. indeed it was going along in the van that led to a spectacular sighting when one of the guides saw two great bustard crossing behind us in his mirror as he drove along!  They disappeared straight away but we caught up with them again by circling around and managed good views. 

Something similar happened not much later when a bird of prey flew out of a tree in front of the advancing van.  Some thought buzzard and some thought marsh harrier but it flew off speedily to a corner of a distant field, where it could eventually be identified as a booted eagle

You can see why I was fed up about deleting the images.

I did manage one photographic capture that evening. In a garden near the hotel there was a bush full of twittering birds, which could only be seen fleetingly as they left and entered the foliage so I tried without much success to video them:

Tree with invisible birds

The Merlin app suggested spanish sparrows but I think not. Bog standard house sparrow is I think the correct answer.  I later learned that spanish sparrow is a more rural species.