Showing posts with label Skiathos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Skiathos. Show all posts

Saturday, May 28, 2022

No Page Threes

The last ten days proved very frustrating. Since returning from Greece in the early hours of 18 May, I’ve not been able to get out ringing or do any meaningful birding. 

Skiathos, Greece - May Days 

My return to a typically British summer of wind and rain meant that gardening and other chores took priority. There’s one thing to say in favour of the good old British climate - it certainly makes things grow, as testified by our green waste bin now bursting to overspill with clippings of grass, trees and hedgerow. 

At last, I’m free so on Saturday I met up with Andy at Oakenclough at 0600 and a promised sunny morning with less than 10mph wind and the customary cold northerlies. 

As I drove on site a buck Roe Deer leapt over the wire fence ahead and disappeared into woodland. I searched in the boot for hat and warm jacket in readiness for the display of 6°, unlike the 27° of recent Skiathos. 

There were Willow Warblers and Garden Warblers in song, a foretaste of that to follow as we caught with good variety, unspectacular numbers but thankfully not a single one of the customary titmice. In fact throughout the morning, a single Coal Tit was the only representative of the tribe. 

14 birds caught – 5 Willow Warber, 2 Chiffchaff and one each of Blackcap, Garden Warbler, Bullfinch, Goldcrest, Pied Wagtail, Robin and Dunnock. 

The adult male Bullfinch was a stunner.  

Bullfinch

Both the Blackcap and the Garden Warbler proved to be adult female with full brood patch, the Pied Wagtail a second year male. 

Pied Wagtail

Garden Warbler

Blackcap

The young Dunnock an example of how soon young birds are able to leave the nest and become at least partly self-sufficient when upon release it flew strongly into the trees from whence it came. 

Dunnock

We caught adult Willow Warblers only with no examples of recently fledged ones. The cold weather of May has slowed the species’ breeding season with the emergence of young a week or more away. 

Chiffchaff
 
Willow Warbler

Birding was quiet because migration is more or less over apart from late stragglers that often surprise. Several families of Greylag, 6 Oystercatcher, 2 Lapwing, 4 Pied Wagtail, 2 Mistle Thrush, 4 Swallows, 4 Garden Warblers, 12+ Willow Warblers. 

Greylags

Linking this weekend to Eileen's Blogspot and Anni in Texas.


Wednesday, October 21, 2020

The Old Ones (AreThe Best)

There’s little chance of birding or ringing until next week as an Atlantic storm heads this way towards us for the weekend. Friday looked a possibility but Sue and I have to go for our flu jabs at precisely 1012 on Friday morning. 

Instead and for this post I’m raiding the archives for pictures from Skiathos, Greece, this year and past years. Birds, landscapes, people. Enjoy and come back soon. Don’t forget to “click the pic” for best effect. 

The Bourtzi- Skiathos

Street Entertainer - The Bourtzi
 
The Bourtzi from the harbour

Near Xanemos

Spotted Flycatcher

Yellow Wagtail

Kanapitsa
 
Kechria, Skiathos
 
Notice Board - Skiathos Town
 
Eleonora's Falcon
 
Kastro - Eleonora's site

Great Egret at Strofilia
 
Little Egret at Strofilia

Skiathos Town
 
Xanemos

Hoopoe
 
Skiathos

European Shag

Skiathos Town
  
Lonely Seat - Skiathos
 
Red-backed Shrike

Whinchat
 
Souvlaki

Skiathos Town

Back soon. Don't go away.

Linking this post to Eileen's Blogspot and Anni's birding

Friday, September 25, 2020

Yammas

This is bliss. Two weeks without the incessant doom and gloom of TV, radio or newspapers. Two weeks of unbridled sunshine on a beautiful Greek island.  

With a spare hour while Sue readied herself for a night on the town I set to and composed a Blogger post for eager followers of Another Bird Blog. There are a few bird pictures, hopefully more in coming days. 

The fine weather, apart from Day One, has meant few birds in quantity but made up for in a degree of quality. Day one saw parties of 30/40 Bee Eaters contact calling overhead as they headed south and over the Aegean Sea, next stop who knows? The usual suspects are around the garden of The Ostria - willow/chiffs, Yellow Wagtails, Whinchats, Red-rumped Swallows, Spotted Flycatchers, and Red-backed Shrikes. 

Red-backed Shrike
 
Whinchat
 
On the Internet I found the answer to the puzzle I set myself with the finding of a strange looking plant above Xanemos beach. 

Squirting Cucumber
 
Ecballium is a genus of flowering plants in the family Cucurbitaceae containing a single species, Ecballium elaterium, also called the squirting cucumber or exploding cucumber (but not to be confused with Cyclanthera brachystachya). It gets its unusual name from the fact that, when ripe, it squirts a stream of mucilaginous liquid containing its seeds, which can be seen with the naked eye. 

The thing looked harmless enough but as soon as I touched the lookalike cucumber out came a water pistol spray of liquid. 

Here at Xanemos were Rock Doves pursued briefly by a Peregrine. Two Blue Rock Thrushes stuck to vegetation where the raptor would not see them. Along the lane to Xanemos more flycatchers and Whinchats but sadly the nearby tomato farm was not operative and so held zero birds in the normally watered environment. 

One of the causalities of this sad year by way of not enough tourists to eat the produce and no work for producers, pickers or sellers. Maybe the grape harvest will survive as wine? 

Grapes - Skiathos
 
A few more pictures taken towards Skiathos Town where the lake held Little Egrets and a flash of Kingfisher. 
 
Red-backed Shrike

Airport ahead
 
Skiathos

Skiathos

Amaretto Taverna

Evenings we return to a few regular haunts as well as one or two new ones when we found both Platanias and Pegasus tavernas had decided there would be little gain from opening in 2020. 

Maistrali Taverna

Sea Bream - before

Sea Bream - after

Baklava

Stay tuned. I'm still taking pictures of Skiathos.

 

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Birdy Song

Today we heard from TUI. Our holiday to Skiathos in May is officially cancelled. 

The good people of Skiathos and Greece as a whole suffer yet again after the Thomas Cook fiasco of 2019.  With luck we will be able re-book our holiday for May 2021 and so inject some cash into the island economy. 

Here’s a video of Skiathos scenes with a favourite song entitled “Wings” and sung by Birdy.


I dedicate this post to all our friends in Skiathos, especially The Family Mathinou at Agia Paraskevi, Costas and Efie at Spiti Oneiro, Dream House. Also - Nikos, Mum, Speri, Tina and Eleni at Maistrali, Christos at Kohyli, and Nikos & Julian at Platanias. Not forgetting all the other brilliant people, too many to mention, who make every Skiathos holiday so wonderful. 

In Skiathos 

Ta léme sýntoma. See you soon folks.

Thursday, March 26, 2020

Goldfinch Gone

Three days of sunshine and all the Goldfinches suddenly vanished from my garden. There's been 15-20 most of the winter so bang goes my plan to do a little garden ringing while in lockdown.

Goldfinch

So here's a post first published at the end of 2013 to celebrate the year's pictures in a month by month sequence. It’s mostly the birds which stirred the senses with odd shots of the places where memories are made. 

January is time to escape from the grey, cold skies of a UK winter and grab some welcome sunshine, if only for a few weeks. We were stunned by the long, wide, sandy expanse of the beaches of Fuerteventura, some several miles long and just begging to be walked. When tired of the walking I sat on some quiet rocks near the shore and took pictures of a Whimbrel, a shy wader species I had longed to photograph. 

Fuerteventura

Whimbrel

February continued where I left off in the early part of the year in ringing birds out on the frozen mossland. Brambling winters don’t happen too often, 2012 and 2013 being the first for several years and a winter when I caught 66 of the striking finches. One bore a Norwegian ring, another one later captured in Norway. 

Brambling

March, and as the ice lingered on there were still Bramblings to be seen along with a good number of common Reed Buntings. Bird ringing is not about catching rare or scarce birds. Catching and ringing birds is about monitoring the populations of common birds, an important and vital job in these worrying days of wholesale declines.

Many a trainee ringer has fallen by the wayside when realising that rare birds appear in mist nets on equally rare days and that the humdrum of catching common birds is mostly unexciting hard graft. Imagine my surprise on 15th March to find a Little Bunting in the net, an agreeable but unimportant addition to the winter catch of 72 Reed Buntings. That Little Bunting was still around into April when I guess it felt the urge to migrate.

Little Bunting

April is Wheatear Time. The migrant chats appear along the coast on their way to the uplands of the UK or Scandinavia. A few are destined for Iceland or even distant Greenland. The birds are hungry following their journey from further south and can rarely resist a mealworm, so I send them on their way north bearing a ring which tells others that they arrived there via the UK. 

Wheatear

May usually involves Menorca. The island draws us back with its rugged and gentle landscape, quiet roads, friendly locals and spring sunshine. Birds are hard to find but rewarding when you do, unimpeded by crowds of target birders running here, there and everywhere. The Hoopoes use the same nest site and feeding locations every year. Creatures of habit also use the same café for a spot of lunch. 

Hoopoe

Menorcan lunch

June and it’s time to find and ring some wader chicks. The task is to find them in the literal sense but also find them before they disappear as a species from our diminishing wetlands and intensified farms. Redshanks aren’t the easiest to come across, in fact they are damned difficult to locate, sprint like Usain Bolt and have protective parents that shame many a human. The first I ringed for a good few years. 

Redshank chick

July is a time when birds and birders go quiet. There nothing much to do except feed the kids and stay around the house, least of all travel very far to discover new things when migration time is far away. Skylarks aren’t the easiest of nests to find but I daren’t go near this one as the size of those grubs says the chicks are big and possibly out of the nest. Skylark chicks often leave the nest long before they can fly, an evolutionary adaptation which increases their chance of survival. 

Skylark

August often sits on the fence between summer and autumn not knowing which way to jump. The cold, late spring of 2013 made late broods last into August and wader chicks about to fly. My personal favourite picture of 2013 just happens to be my favourite species the Lapwing. With luck the spikiy young Lapwing below will live 15/20 years. Let’s hope there are places for it to live 20 years from now. 

Lapwing

September produced an unexpected holiday in Greece when our daughter Joanne married on the island of Skiathos. Two weeks of unbroken sunshine with a few birds thrown in. A battered old Suzuki Jimny served as a passable hide to photograph the normally unapproachable Woodchat Shrike and a superb vehicle to reach Kastro where we enjoyed numerous Eleanor’s Falcons. So many reasons to return in 2014 to the tranquil haven of Hotel Ostria owned by the delightful Mathinou family.

Skiathos, Greece

Makis and aubergines at Hotel Ostria

Woodchat Shrike

October was quiet with subdued migration on our west facing coast. Red-breasted Mergansers eluded me for years, shy birds unwilling to have a portrait taken until after a couple of days of rough weather I came across a young bird at Pilling. I got my picture on a grey, cloudy day but wonder what happened to the bird and if there will be another chance to photograph a merganser so close. 

Red-breasted Merganser

November turned up a few Snow Buntings, scarce in recent years. So infrequent have they become in recent years that any discovered immediately become target birds for those less inclined to actually find any birds for themselves. I had a Snow Bunting to myself for a while at Pilling and spent time lying spread-eagled on the tideline to take a few portraits as the bird fed unconcerned at my presence. 

Snow Bunting

December 2013 is ending as it began in a raging storm and more to come. In between the birding was hard slog with not much to show for time spent in the field. I searched my archives for December to find the best picture of a month’s efforts, a mediocre shot of an above average bird. Things can only get better in 2014. 

Curlew

As a footnote to the above. we won't get to Skiathos in May 2020 and maybe not in September.  The people of Skiathos suffered a financial blow in 2019 at the time of the Thomas Cook debacle - car hires, holiday lets, hotels, cafes, shops and restaurants, many of them small family businesses. Now those lovely people will be hit again as the island is already in lock-down. 

Linking today to Eileen's Saturday.

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