Glass Half Full

Trying to stay positive is the key. When all around is doom and gloom my glass is half full. Spring is not far away. The sun will shine, rain will stop and birds shall sing. Despite the virus, birds will arrive from Africa, my pliers well oiled and camera batteries fully charged in readiness for oodles of photos.

Good news from Greece where we are due to travel on 5 May and where the Greek authorities are even now preparing a welcome for tourists from late April.  Even here in moribund Great Britain our government appear to realise that their yo-yo restrictions and lockdowns are disproportionate to any remaining threat, and that they must allow society to open up very soon.

Meanwhile, an archive from warm and sunny Lanzarote 18th January to 1st February 2015. 

It was fairly blowy on the day Sue and I set off south to the working salt pans, Salinas de Janubio and the little lunch-stop village of El Golfo. It is often breezy, more likely windy in the Canary Islands which lie in the Atlantic Ocean some 100 kms off the coast of Africa. During the times of the Spanish Empire the Canaries were the main stopover for Spanish galleons on their way to the Americas because of the prevailing winds from the northeast. There is compensation for the breezes in the islands’ subtropical climate with long warm summers and moderately warm winters. 

The Canary Islands

Not far from our base of Puerto Calero and just off the LZ2 we stopped off to look for Lesser Short-toed Lark and perhaps more Houbara Bustards in a location they are reputed to use. No luck with the bustards however we did see Lesser Short-toed Lark, Berthelot’s Pipit and Kestrel, as well as finding a good crop of huge watermelons and strawberries growing in a seemingly inhospitable but well irrigated place. 

The Lesser Short-toed Lark is a bird of dry open country which is fairly common in Lanzarote and breeds in Spain, North Africa and eastwards across the semi-deserts of central Asia to Mongolia and China. It prefers even drier and barer soils than its close relative the (Greater) Short-toed Lark. As far as I know the Short-toed Lark is but a scarce passage visitor to the Canaries, and a species I am familiar with in the Mediterranean. 

Update 2020. A recent paper has proposed that Lesser Short-toed Lark is better treated as two distinct species, with the position subsequently adopted by the IOC World Bird List. The species that occurs here in the Canaries is now known as Mediterranean Short-toed Lark. Distribution - southern Europe, Canary Islands, North Africa and Iberia through the Levant to western Iraq.

Mediterranean, (Lesser) Short-toed Lark

Watermelon, Lanzarote

From a high approach road the salt pans down at sea level often appear tranquil enough. There can be a different story at ground level where the wind whips the water into a frenzy of white as a display of how the salt pans create their valuable product by deposition of salt. The Greenshanks are wading through the salty froth of the water seen in the first photo below, 800 yards away.

Salinas de Janubio

Greenshank

Greenshank

Berthelot's Pipit

Black-winged Stilt

Black-winged Stilt

Turnstone

What with the wind and lack of cover to approach birds, this is a difficult place in which to birdwatch and take photographs. Unfortunately I didn’t manage any pictures of the also-present Whimbrel, Kentish Plover, Grey Plover, Redshank, Little Stint, Curlew Sandpiper, Common Sandpiper or Black-necked Grebe but it was good to see so many species in this one place.

A short drive away from Janubio is the famed Green Lagoon, something of a tourist hot-spot and a destination for crowded buses. It is easy to see why and to join in the endless photography which takes place. 

The Green Lagoon, Lanzarote

The beach itself is of pebbles and the cliffs behind the lagoon equally dramatic, having been wind eroded into fantastic shapes over the course of the centuries. The scenery is further enhanced by the large finger of rock which sits just off the beach and causes the sea to crash around it. The landscape here is so wild filmmakers used it as the backdrop for Raquel Welch wearing her animal skin bikini in the classic movie One Million Years B.C. 

El Golfo, Lanzarote

The weathered cliffs extend all the way along the walkway which goes in the opposite direction to the village of El Golfo, revealing different bands of rock smoothed and shaped by the forces of nature. 

Just along from the Green Lagoon is the village of El Golfo which has possibly the highest concentration of fish restaurants on the island. The morning’s catch is gutted and cleaned on the beach to a watchful audience of many dozens of Yellow-legged Gulls and the inevitable Common Sandpiper scurrying through the rocky pools. 

El Golfo, Lanzarote

Yellow-legged Gull and chef. 

Common Sandpiper

We stopped off in the pretty town of Yaiza before heading back to the Hotel Costa Calero and a pre-dinner glass of Cava. 

Yaiza, Lanzarote

 

Hotel Costa Calero

Another successful day of exploration in Lanzarote. Previous posts about our holiday to Lanzarote can be found at "A birding-day Lanzarote style" and at Birding Lanzarote.

More birds soon from Another Bird Blog.

Linking today to Anni in Texas,  Rain's Garden  and Eileen's Saturday Blog.