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15th July
Good afternoon. Thank God (metaphorically speaking of
course, I don't want to offend any atheists or Satanists
- even though you're both going to Hell), the day has at
last arrived when this Spanish crap has come to an end.
So here you go: Spain, Extremadura, job done, only took
two months. "Enjoy."
***
29th March
The last day in Spain
Digi-binned (I don't know what that
means) Black Stork
It wasn't really our last day in Spain, but it was our
last day of birding before we went back to Madrid for a
few days, so you'll be overjoyed to know that this is
indeed the last entry in the most protracted trip report
in history - and my God (metaphorically) what a mediocre trip report it's been!
Let's think back and recount all of the many highs...
... ahem, we thought we'd finish up birding at Monfrague seeing as
the two other visits had been so good, and there was
also some unsettled Eagle business...
Booted Eagle (a pale one)
... no not that Eagle. So far we'd seen four species of
Eagle (Spanish Imperial, Golden, Short-toed and Booted)
but Bonelli's was playing hard to get. The Puente de Cardenal is supposedly a really good site for them, so
we went, and we waited... Alpine Swifts had
arrived in good numbers since our last visit, as had
Red-rumped Swallows, in fact I made this extremely
incisive observation in my birdspotting jotter:
rr swallow - common. recent influx
But nicht Bonelli's Eagle. Not to worry, it wasn't a
lifer and we'll see them again, just enjoy what's
around, because next week it'll be back to wandering
over the moors in the piss-pouring rain watching Red
Grouse and Meadow Pipits - if I'm lucky. And then two
raptors soared slowly over the ridge and out over the
middle of the reservoir...
...well ejaculate all over my decaying
great-grandmother's corpse! Two Bonelli's Eagles!
Truly marvellous and most fortuitous.
Bonelli's Eagle - note everything
you're supposed to note
Marvellous indeed! Time for some food, after all we must
have been out birding at least 30 minutes by now
(EXTREME!), so we feasted on kidney pie and oxtail,
washed down with punch and warm milk. The weather was
incredible, and there was nothing better to do than sit
in a shallow valley just before the Fuente de los
Tres Cano viewpoint and watch Vultures of all three
variety constantly pass over...
Egyptian Vulture
... and listen to Dartford and Sardinian
Warblers scratching away, mashing it up and mixing
it large - I am down with the kids, I mean kidz (three
cheers for iPods, knife crime and unprotected sex on
park benches!). But one bit of sylvia scratching
was unlike the other two, it was far too musical, even a
bit Blackbirdy... hmmm... then there were two birds
singing... but where the fuck were they? One seemed
slightly closer than the other, so we attacked either
side of a small group of trees in a classic pincer
movement taken straight from Rommel's diaries. And what
did we eventually manage to find? Orphean Warbler
- a nice big bastard of a male! Or, should I say,
Western Orphean Warbler. Should I say Western Orphean
Warbler? I've seen Eastern Orphean Warbler before, but
these Westerns were a first. Do I get a tick? I could
have a look in Shirihai's Sylvia Warblers, only
the last time I did that I opened it up, saw £60 written
on the inside jacket, and then threw the fucking thing
out the window in despair - sixty fucking quid? SIXTY
FUCKING QUID??? Jesus H.Christ! I could have bought a
six bedroom detached house for that. So two (Western)
Orphean Warblers, spectacular! The next viewpoint had a
couple of Spanish birders who spoke near perfect English
and put us onto a Black Vulture nest - excellent work!
And so I repaid them by showing them the Eagle Owls (in
not so perfect Spanish) at Portilla de Tietar,
where tonight an adult was getting grief from a pair of
very, very, very, very, very stupid Ravens:
The two Spanish birders were absolutely over the Moon
with seeing an adult, so much so that they began to tell
me exactly where to find bucket loads of awesome local
birds (some I didn't even know were in the area) include
Wallcreepers! Fucking Wallcreepers - and
typically we were pissing off back to Madrid the next
day! Why didn't we meet them the week before? Jesus
Titty-Fucking Christ!
Some neat graffiti - note the
internationally recognisable smoking spliff and
cock+balls motifs
Rock Bunting
Not to complain though (fucking WALLCREEPERS!!!), Eagle
Owls were a brilliant end to a brilliant week of Spanish
birdspotting. The final morning at the Finca Santa Marta
was memorable for all the right reasons - our bill
turned out to be a fair bit cheaper than we were
expecting. Hoorah! So there you go. That was Extremadura,
hope you enjoyed it, but don't really care if you
didn't. There's only one bird to finish with, and that's
WALLCREEPER, but unfortunately not in this trip
report. "Trip report?" Don't make me laugh.
Anyway, here's a Stork:
And here's what happens when you think drinking beer
before wine will make you feel fine:
And this illustrates what happens when you're born
retarded and think you're that bloke from Nazareth:
The rest of this rubbish from Spain can be found over
here >>>>>> HERE
7th July
Scream for me Twickenham!
After five minutes of singing about a dead albatross,
there's a section in Maiden's preposterously epic song
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner where Steve
Harris plays a slow three note bass line along to a
pre-recorded sound of a creaking ship, when a voice
begins to quote a passage from the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
which inspired Maiden's longest song. On Saturday
they played the whole song at Twickenham, it was the
song I most wanted to see Maiden play above any other.
In the section I described above, just as the voice
began to speak of "four times fifty men (and I hear
nor sigh nor groan)", a blue mist began to rise from
the stage as Bruce Dickinson wandered around in a long
black cape, and then something struck me: I realised
more than ever, without any sense of bias and speaking
completely objectively, that Iron Maiden are the
greatest band ever, and every other band and their lame
fans are shit-eating bastards.
But the fact remains that being a Maiden fan will
neither win you friends nor influence people; a top
with Eddie on will not make you more attractive
to the opposite sex; nobody will give a shit if you tell
them that Adrian Smith's solo in Aces High is the
single greatest gift to Western civilisation. Even when
they were allegedly fashionable in the 1980s Maiden were
already a decade out of date: they rose to superstardom
in a music scene dominated by British bands like
Ultravox, Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran, whilst the US
market was selling out of albums by Michael Jackson and Madonna as fast as they were making them.
So why are they so big? This year alone they've played
to 1.5 million people in a tour that began in Mumbai and
will finish in Moscow after a circle of the globe that
takes in 31 countries. I see it like this, can you show
me one other band that can deal with Winston Churchill, the book of Revelations,
nuclear holocaust, the Crimean War, ancient Egyptian
mythology, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, murder of native
American Indians and clairvoyance within two hours, and
then for its lead singer to fly the band, its crew and all
the staging to the next gig in their very own Boeing
757? And that's why they're so big, because when you're assaulted
by a world in the grip of a credit crisis, negative
equity, bird flu, global warming, bio-fuel, religious
fundamentalist oil catastrophe, it's reassuring to know
that there are still people willing to spend tens of
thousands of pounds on an enormous Egyptian mummy with
movable limbs for the sole purpose of entertaining a stadium
filled with people raising their hands and saluting the
Devil. Laughable? Yes. Completely
ridiculous fantasy? Yep. On Saturday you're watching Iron Maiden sing
about aerial battles in WW2 and wondering what the
fucking hell Bruce Dickinson is doing waving a Union
Jack, on Monday you're back cleaning tramps' shit out of
public toilets and having Birdseye fishfingers and
McCain's curly fries for
tea - and that's if you're lucky.
Even with a combined age of
312, Maiden are relentless: after this tour they're back
in the studio to record their 15th album, another
world tour will follow shortly after its release.
Support on Saturday was provided by some useless
dickheads who are the current cock-sucking favourites in
Kerrang magazine, but the basic problem with any
band other than Iron Maiden is precisely that - they're
simply not Iron Maiden and therefore fucking shit.
Except perhaps AC/DC. And maybe
some others. Anyway, fuck off.
4th July
Shitting hell, tomorrow I'm off to London to see Iron
Maiden, and from looking at the set list that they've
been playing on this tour, it seems like a dead cert
that they'll be doing Rime of the Ancient Mariner
in all its 13 minutes of glory. I will probably never
again get the chance to see Maiden play Rime of the
Ancient Mariner, so this is big, this is epic. This
is like Moses and tablets of stone. Maiden. Fucking.
Rule.
Spain again. We're almost there, just stick with me. The
end is nigh...
***
28th March
The Penultimate Birding Day
Trujillo
The reason we'd failed
miserably with Sandgrouse was probably down to the
rather tardy starts to the birdspotting days. In fact, I
don't think we once made it out on the road before 10am.
Hardcore. So today was going to be an early start and
those bastard Sandgrouse were going to be nailed. And
then we started drinking this weird lemon brandy the
night before and... out on the road about 10am...
Those plains out by Santa
Marta de Magsasca are really good, like really good.
Today there were 35 Great Bustards, including a
foam bathing maniac:
This is
supposed to...
... make
gentlemen Great Bustards...
...look
hot to any nearby females.
11 Montagu's Harriers in one
field today, and an impressive flock of 100+ Cattle
Egrets, also the usual ridiculous numbers of
raptors, Calandra Larks, Great Spotted Cuckoos,
etc etc etc... A genuinely amazing place. And then
frustration. A Pin-tailed Sandgrouse was calling
not too far from us, only it was completely and utterly
invisible. It must have flown behind a small ridge, and
that was that. We later heard from local birder John
Muddeman that some friends of his were at that very spot
first thing in the morning and had reasonable numbers of
Pin-tailed Sandgrouse, so there you go, that's what
happens if you don't get your lazy arses out of bed and
out looking for birds. Bone idle pair of bastards that
we are.
Well there you have it, a salutary
lesson in how not to watch birds. Had to go back to
Trujillo for one final look at the Lesser Kestrels,
there were over twenty showing fantastically well over
the square, and then back to Finca Santa Marta to have a
wander around the vast olive groves. Azure-winged
Magpies were heading to roost in impressive numbers,
my first Cuckoo of 2008 cuckood away like a...
err... cuckoo clock (?), Short-toed Treecreepers
and Scops Owls were both out and about calling
close to dusk and there was a Black-winged Stilt
on a crappy little dirty puddle sharing space with two
Red-eared Terrapins:
There was also a Dachshund called
Brandi:
It liked to chew pine cones:
3rd July
The Moors
Mountain Hares are great. End of. (which "means end of
the story", as in there is nothing much else to say
about it). So are badgers. And both are even better when
they're just a short walk away from home. I am Cornholio.
Saw a Sparrowhawk catch a House Martin and then saw
another/the same Sparrowhawk catch a Red Grouse. The
Curlews were not amused. Neither were the two fly-over
Redpolls.
2nd July
Old Moor RSPB
"Me? Go on a twitch? You must be joking. I'd never do
anything as decadent as that. Oh what's that? You'll
pick me up? And petrol is free? Well, how can I refuse
that!" And then an hour later I was sat outside the
pub with a lukewarm pint of Kronenberg, waiting for Mr
P.Woollen to arrive in his sturdy chariot with
passengers Messrs Curtin and Payne, before being whisked
off to Barnsley for the Little Swift. Thankfully
I saw the 2001 bird, and I sure was thankful for that,
because the Old Moor bird had vanished about an hour
before we got there. Still, Spoonbill, Green Sandpiper
and Little Ringed Plover were all ticks for my fanatical
yearlisting maniacal tendencies, so well worth it. Also
managed to year tick a certain
pie fanatic.
And just to quash a rumour that I heard tonight, no I
haven't quit either birding or twitching. I just can't
quite find the enthusiasm to update this blog as much as
I used to. I'm still out a few days every week,
traipsing over hills looking at Red Grouse(s) and Meadow
Pipit(s). I've been thinking of taking up archery. Or do
I mean fencing? Can't remember now.
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