Sun 6 Sep 2015
For our pre-breakfast walk we simply crossed the road to Los Lances beach. It was till too dark to see anything in the stone pine woodland behind the beach so we headed straight out onto the sand. Not a great deal about – just yellow-legged gull and sandwich tern. Wandering around the grounds of a hotel we spotted crested lark, feral pigeon, collared dove, house sparrows and linnet. We glimpsed a small brightly coloured parrot which we tried to follow around the hotel grounds. We eventually caught up with a small group of these, which turned out to be Love Birds (escaped cage birds). We had another look in the pine trees before returning for breakfast, managing to locate spotted flycatcher and short-toed treecreeper.
After breakfast we headed towards Jimena de la Frontera. We made an unplanned stop at a local privately owned nature reserve, Huerta Grande, where we had a guided tour by the proprietor. We spent 20 minutes in a hide overlooking a small pond and surrounded by feeders. We logged lots of serins and blue tit, great tit, common whitethroat, chaffinch, house sparrow, blackcap, garden warbler and collared dove.
As we chatted to the owner prior to departing a good raptor passage began to develop overhead. Booted eagles, short-toed eagles, griffon vulture and dozens of honey buzzard. We decided to go back to the Cazalla Observatory near Tarifa, but there were probably more bird watchers there than migrating birds!
Giving up on the raptor watch point we resumed our journey towards Jimena, stopping to eat lunch by the Rio Hozgargante. This sadly turned out to be rather disappointing as the river had almost completely dried up. Walking along the river bed we eventually came to a little water where we found Sardinian warbler, blue tit, nightingale, robin, blackbird, goldfinch and blackcap. A couple of griffon vulture passed over. We found evidence here of bird trapping. We spoke to an English lady who lived locally who told us that the authorities did very little to stop this illegal practice.
Next we drove the length of the Marchenilla Track. This proved a bit more interesting with sightings of woodchat shrike, little owl, wheatear, bee-eaters, stonechats, Montagu’s harrier, buzzard and red-rumped swallow. At the end of the track we stopped for a coffee break before retracing our route. On the second pass we added a black-eared wheatear.
We now aimed for Castillo de Castellar de la Frontera where we hoped to find white-rumped swifts. En-route we stopped by a bridge near Presa de Guadarranque to look for Monarch butterflies. We saw some, but they were far below us under the bridge. We stopped again at a high point overlooking the Embalse (reservoir) del Guadarranque to look for the two-tailed pasha butterfly. We got great close-up views of this magnificent species as one of them defended his territory against an interloper.
The Castillo was heaving with locals and tourists on this fine Sunday afternoon and it was difficult to find a place to park. The castle is perched high atop a hill
giving extensive views of the surrounding countryside. We hung around for an hour or so but never spotted any white-rumped swifts, but there were quite a few raptors passing, and it was unusual to be looking down on many of them from our high vantage point. The only new species added was crag martins.
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