Not listless - starting over in 2024
THOSE of you who, like me, are ‘listers’, and not only keep life-lists and country or regional ones, but also like to have yearly totals of species observed, will understand.
The rest of you may well be bemused by my need to get out of bed on January 1 to kick off the year’s bird list.
Okay, so it wasn’t the crack of dawn, but judging from the pleasing lack of traffic, still quite early when I ticked off species number one (house sparrow of course) then followed it up with yellow-legged gull, collared dove and Eurasian starlings before I got to the motorway on my way to the Clot de Galvany.
There I soon had coot, shoveler and gadwall from the Zeiss hide, and was lucky enough to see a winter-plumaged red-knobbed coot together with pochard and dabchick on the Charco de Contacto.
The main lagoon yielded a group of glossy ibis and many feeding crag martins, then a female
marsh harrier came to seek her lunch in the reed-bed.
A drive along the coast wasn’t very productive, apart from the odd Sandwich tern, so I made my way to the Salinas de Santa Pola, where a great many flamingoes were in residence, as were many cormorants, a solitary grey plover and the usual group of spoonbills.
On, then, to Pinet, where perhaps 20 black-tailed godwits fed, along with a few blackwinged stilts and many avocets, whilst in the distance could be seen a huge gathering of golden plover, roosting on a stony island – maybe 300 at least.
A lonely dunlin fed on a mud strip near the car park.
When I ventured out across the fields, there was little to be seen, but a big flock of skylarks made my journey worthwhile.
My friend Jacobo had alerted me as to the presence of a Caspian tern, so on my way back towards Santa Pola, I paused and was lucky enough to get a good view of this spectacular bird, even though it was sound asleep!
It was surrounded by slender-billed gulls – also ‘sleeping it off’ as befits New Year’s Day. Just as I was leaving, a winter-plumage whiskered tern flew over the road.
It had not been the best of mornings – nor the worst!