The Picos de Europa are a fantastic range of mountains in northern Spain. The scenery is great and the wildlife very good too. But of course I am glad to be back at work!
Travel does broaden the mind for the naturalist, I think. Going somewhere different exposes you to different habitats and species and you get a different insight into the wildlife that is common back at home.
I can't help but be impressed by how common house sparrows are in Spain - and indeed how common they are in Paris railway stations - and remember that they used to be so much commoner in the UK. Why is it that in the Gare D'Austerlitz there are lots of sparrows hopping around picking up the crumbs of your croissants and they are so unusual in central London? We are working on this problem and hope to have answers sometime fairly soon.
Amazing meadows with huge numbers of butterflies. It was great fun picking out a whole range of species that are familiar at home and then sorting out some of the 'new' species as well.
The red-backed shrikes in the Picos were great - lots of families of fledged young birds learning to catch the large insects such as grasshoppers on which they depend. It's a lot easier to see why these birds have disappeared from the English countryside over the past 50 years - those large insects can't cope with farming that pushes wildlife to the margins. But I do wonder why some pairs didn't hold on in the less industrially farmed corners of England.
Red squirrels in the woods - lovely to see.
And sitting outside in the afternoons one only had to look up to see birds of prey - from our house we saw buzzards, sparrowhawks, goshawk, booted eagle, short-toed eagle and a few griffon vultures. And yet the fields and woods were rich in small birds too.
And the Lings? The starlings in Spain are a different species from the one in our gardens at home - the spotless starling. In the distance they look exactly the same, but up close the spotless starling lacks the speckles of our bird. They lack the stars, so they are Lings.