I lead a tour group from the the US Audubon Naturalist Society in April to southern Spain. We had a great time apart from the awful windy weather. The famous Levante wind just would not stop for almost the whole eight days. We did however have a great time, saw lots of birds and other […]
Tag: Bee-eater

Creative twist
This post is about colour. I am in between wildlife trips so I thought it would be interesting to play around with the colour in some of my wildlife images. Rather than change the colour of the subject, I wanted to see what effect it would create if I removed the background colour. Presumably, it […]

A gallery of Chobe’s feathers
In this post I have chosen to let the images talk for themselves rather than tell stories. This post is a gallery and hope fully the images are enough. This gallery shows you the wonderful variety of birdlife you can see along the Chobe river. As I have mentioned in earlier posts on this trip, […]

Bee Eaters at East Leake Nottinghamshire
A day off work gave me the opportunity to travel up the M1 where a party of Bee-eaters have set up home and look like trying to produce some little Bee-eaters with a little luck. The RSPB has set up safe viewing with the help of a local farmer and the quarry owners. We paid […]

Foreign visitors to the Algarve
Yesterday we took our day off and replaced the steppes of Alentejo with the saltmarshes, beaches and lagoons of the Algarve. It was a long and brilliant day, packed with quality stuff. We left very early to arrive at our first site, Salinas do Forte do Rato in Tavira in good time. It was pretty […]

Twice as many?
In 1492 when Christopher Columbus arrived in America, the people already living here were well aware of their land’s ornithological treasures. On October 12, 1492, Columbus wrote in his diary that the only wild animals he saw at all were parrots, but he had seen much more by October 21, when he wrote, The melody […]

Looking for Arabian Waxbill in Wadi Waj – Taif
Phil and I went to Wadi Waj, a site near the center of Taif. This site is a wastewater runoff stream that permanently flows and has good growth of reeds and sedges nearby. It is a place where Waxbill has been seen and where we saw two last summer. We went on the hope of […]

Arabian Green Bee-eater
The Arabian Green Bee-eater is usually treated as conspecific with M. viridissimus and M. orientalis, but differs from both in its very short stub-ended central tail feathers; bright blue forehead, supercilium and throat, and bluer lower belly; broader, smudgier black breast-bar; marginally larger size and clearly longer tail (minus the tail extensions) than the other […]