Private tour day. We woke up at 6:30 and got ready, packing some ham sandwiches for lunch. We were picked up by one of the tour guides, Antonio, and he commented on how we looked young. Thanks dude, thanks. It's okay though, we do look young.
Our actual tour guide for the private Donana tour was named Maria. She started by speaking to us in English, but we explained to her that we would rather speak in Spanish for practice. That turned out great! We chatted about why Vanessa and I were there, what we were doing in our gap year, and learning foreign languages. We had lunch with her afterwards too.
There are several different habitats in Donana. The first was pinares, where pines dominated, and wide sand roads went through it, leading to Sevilla and Cadiz. El Rocio, the horse and dry lake town, is a pilgrimage spot, we learned. The church there holds La Virgen del Rocio, and in the summer, hundreds of people walk through the Donana roads to get to the church and do a procession at dawn.
We saw rabbits, heard Sardinian Warblers, and watched the forest turn gold with sunlight, morning dew glittering in the spider webs and pine needles. Then there was the cork tree area leading to a huge field of tall, silvery bushes. also wet with dew. Cork trees are big in this part of Spain and Portugal, though synthetic cork has done a lot of damage on this industry. The cork trees have to be at least 40 years old before the outer layer of bark can be harvested in the perfect shape of a cork. After the initial harvest, corks can be collected from the trees every 15 years. The other habitats were maritime forest and rice fields.
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| The outer layer of a cork tree |
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| Cranes flying over rice fields |
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| A deer! |
The tour was kind of stop-and-go to look at birds, and here are the best lifers (birds we had never seen before):
- Little Owl: there was a cork tree we stopped at briefly to see if there was a Little Owl there. It was not, but later, Vanessa spotted one sitting on a sunny rock much later
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| http://www.owlpages.com/owls/species.php?s=2270 |
- Cranes: hundreds of squawking cranes were on the ground in the rice fields, a V-shaped flock flying down to join them. They were almost prehistoric, all gangly and strange, but amazing
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| http://visit-western-spain.com/the-crane-grus-grus-in-extremadura/ |
- Hen Harrier: the British couple we had see the day before had seen several. We finally saw one flying over the rice fields
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| http://www.rarebirdalert.co.uk/v2/Content/RSPB_Hen_Harriers_breed_at_RSPB_Geltsdale.aspx?s_id=184396157 |
When Maria learned of our experience bird banding, she mentioned that every Friday, there was a grebe banding in Huelva, a large city about 45 minutes away. She asked the main guy Luis if we could join them the following day, and he said yes! Maria's friend Laura would be able to pick us up from the hotel in the morning, and we would get a ride back to El Rocio when it ended. Sounded good to us.
After the tour and the yummy lunch we ate with Maria, Vanessa and I chilled on a park bench overlooking the dry lake. Then we walked to the sewage area, which the British Chris and Linda had said would be a good birding spot, but we didn't see much. As we walked back a half-hour later to catch the bus back to Matalascanas, whaddayaknow, we saw Chris and Linda! We discussed what we each saw on the tour earlier, and then Chris said they were going for a walk on some of the sandy roads, and if we wanted to join them. Why not? We didn't have anything to do at the hotel, and birding with these interesting people would be fun. And fun it was. We talked about literature, birds, and where we and they had traveled before. We saw some lifers too. After two hours of walking, we needed to catch the bus. So, we said goodbye to Linda and Chris, and headed back to the hotel.
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