Mon 7 Sep 2015
We drove to Tarifa for this morning’s pre-breakfast excursion. On the beach we found sanderling, dunlin and turnstone. We wandered along the causeway towards Tarifa island looking out to sea and managed to get good views of a couple of shearwater species – Cory’s and Balearic. Lesser kestrel and a hoopoe were over the island, but we did not walk that far as the wind was quite chilly. Back at the beach we added yellow-legged gull, sandwich tern, ringed plover, and bar-tailed godwit. Before returning for breakfast we had another quick look in town for the bulbuls, again without any luck.
After breakfast we drove west heading for the Bonanza Salt Pans. We called in again for a brief visit to the Montenmedio Golf Club. Still no luck with the eagle owl, but we ticked alpine swift and jackdaw.
A few small lagunas at Sanlucar de Barameda were well worth a visit as they held lots of interesting birds. Most notably marbled and white-headed ducks, both rarities (counts of 18 and 14 respectively). Others were squacco heron, little egret, purple swamphen, glossy ibis, common and red-crested pochard, gadwall, shoveller, little grebe, coot and moorhen. One
other interesting spot was a common waxbill, an introduced African species that now breeds successfully in southern Spain.
The Bonanza salt pans is a great birding spot holding large flocks of flamingos, avocets and black-tailed godwit and hundreds of other birds. Too many to list them all, but new ones for our list included curlew, avocet, ruff, greenshank, curlew sandpiper, little tern, black-necked grebe and curlew sandpiper. While we stood by the car eating our lunch we also saw a red kite and an osprey.
We had to move on and stopped briefly at the nearby Laguna Tarelo. This was very quiet, but we did spot a couple of nigh herons, along with marbled and white-headed ducks. A drive through Algaida Pine woods was fruitless. A quick excursion out of the car before we were driven back by annoying insects produced just spotted flycatcher and Sardinian warbler.
Our final port-of-call for today was the coastal town of Chipiona. As we sat eating 
ice-creams there were very few birds about. Yellow-legged and lesser black-backed gulls on the beach and a lone gannet out at sea. House sparrow, swallow and house martin were the only other species around. We stationed ourselves next to a warehouse where our target species were known to roost. We had a long boring wait with nothing much to see, but then in the distance a small bird approached. As it neared we were able to identify it as our target species – Little Swift. After a quick fly around it darted into its nest under the eaves of the building never to be seen again! It was a further 20 minutes before another showed up, but then they started to arrive in numbers and treat us to an aerial display. We counted a maximum of 13 of them in the air together. A superb end to the day.
Dinner was pizza at a sea front restaurant in Tarifa. Watching the Morocco ferry port we decided to that we would go on a pelagic trip from here on Thursday.
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