Travels with a birder 1: extreme birding on the Spanish steppes
“There’s nothing worse than the smell of vulture vomit,” Oscar tells us enigmatically.
Our location is the steppes of central Spain, and with the help of Oscar, a friend and local naturalist, we have seen Spanish Imperial eagle, great bustard and bee-eater — all before breakfast.
Our next stop is a derelict farmstead. The time-worn buildings are a relic of a way of life long gone, a source of family memories and ancestral ghosts. The new occupants, a colony of 100 rare lesser kestrels, are equally dependent on the land. “The fields are farmed organically to encourage a rich source of insects for the birds, but we do have a problem with a fox that has moved in,” bemoans Oscar. The ‘problem’ of course is that foxes eat baby kestrels.
Agricultural change is having an impact on this lesser kestrel stronghold. Their favoured habitat of arable fields, with a strong insect population through limited use of pesticides, is slowly being replaced with pistachio and almond trees — now able to grow in the region thanks to climate change and an associated absence of frosts.
Several ‘must see’ bird species later and we say good-bye to Oscar, for now. Our destination is the ornithologist’s paradise south-west of Madrid, Extremadura. We camp in Monfrague National Park, along with an unruly bunch of glamourous azure-winged magpies who prefer the inside of our tent to the holm oaks shading us. Black storks, black vultures and European rollers are on the priority list, together with Arrocampo wetland nature reserve; a biproduct of a nuclear power station’s thirst for water.
Our visit to Extremadura is not just about birds. There is the world heritage trio of Mérida, Cáceres and Guadalupe, and the thriving medieval town of Trujillo. This evening we sit by the town’s Pizarro statue and watch families of swifts tearing round the Plaza Mayor, swooping and screaming eternally.
Oscar calls. We should meet him tomorrow tonight — we are not told why.
The rendezvous is a bar. Several iced coffees later, we are introduced to one of Oscar’s fellow birders. We all pile into Oscar’s van and set off on our mystery tour. After an unscheduled and slightly disconcerting re-routing to avoid a wildfire, we turn off the highway and onto dust cloud tracks through parched Mediterranean forest until we arrive at a gate inscribed ‘Coto privado de caza’. “We have to walk from here,” Oscar tells us, unloading a large suitcase-size rucksack.
We head across the scrub until, with some surprise, we come to a vertical drop. Like lemmings, we follow Oscar over the edge of the gorge; the size of which puts Cheddar in its place. We squeeze between boulders, careful not to lose our grip, wondering at what point we can suggest reversing the procedure and climbing back up. Oscar beckons, signalling for silence. On two messy jumbles of twigs just below us, precariously close to a precipitous drop, are two young griffon vultures the size of Christmas turkeys, and now we know why we are here. Oscar has come to ring them to help with the population monitoring of this species. The first to be ringed lies motionless, having just regurgitated some supper. We watch from afar as the bird is weighed, measured, checked over and two rings deftly placed on one leg. The second bird plays dead as it too is checked and ringed. We withdraw silently — in awe of the birds and the ringer. Overhead the parents are circling, having just returned from a feeding bout.
Oscar is right though, there is nothing worse than the smell of vulture vomit.