Encounter with a beautiful but wounded hoopoe.

Deze post in het Nederlands: klik hier.

When trying to save a hoopoe seems more important than mushroom hunting.

Introduction

Looking for some tasty St. George´s mushrooms (Calocybe gambosa or Tricholoma Georgii), a mushroom that is common in our region, we suddenly saw a black and white bird sitting in the grass. Maybe it was a magpie? No, it was a hoopoe. Without noticing we had approached the hoopoe up to at least 5 meters and it still hadn´t flown away, would it be dead? No, although the creature didn´t move a muscle, it still blinked occasionally with its eyes. This was an opportunity and quickly I walked back to the car to grab the camera. At a closer inspection its right wing showed to be in an unnatural position and when after a cautious approach the bird still didn´t get away, it was confirmed that there was something wrong with it. After picking it up very carefully we could see that the wing was damaged. What to do now? Luckily in our region we have a wildlife care-center where one of the attendants is a friend of ours. The mushrooms were immediately forgotten and we set off to the care-center which is situated in the middle of the woods. Once we got there it turned out that nobody was present, so we phoned our friend which wasn´t at home neither. Nevertheless he said we could leave the poor animal in the back of his land rover which was parked by his house. We installed the hoopoe as comfortable as possible and left it waiting for the attendant to come home. The next day we called him, but it turned out that despite the devoted care the animal had deceased.


Some Facts

As can be seen in the photos the hoopoe is a quiet exotic looking bird with black and white wings and tail and a pinkish-brown body. Another conspicuous characteristic is the pinkish crest, of which the upper part is also black and white. In the United Kingdom the hoopoe is a very rare bird, with only a very occasional breed. In spring some hoopoes may appear in the south of England when they are migrating. However, in Spain the hoopoe is rather a common bird which is resident in the south of the Iberian Peninsula. Also in our region it can be spotted frequently, although only as a summer guest (see map), especially in the more arid meseta that lies directly south of the Cantabrian Mountains. The hoopoe likes to stroll around in meadows and along paths, searching with its long beak to surprise various unlucky arthropods and sometimes lizards. Good places for spotting them are the forest edges of planted pine groves. These are planted on former agricultural lands and are therefore of a reduced size and surrounded by open fields, very much to the liking of the hoopoe. Moreover, the hoopoe is fond of the pine processionary caterpillar, a caterpillar which is quite harmful to the pines. This has caused the hoopoe to be commonly considered as a very welcome guest.

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White Storks nesting on castle ruins

 The White Stork (Ciconia ciconia)

  

Marius van Heiningen 

  

Introduction.

I think everybody knows the White Stork, a large white bird with black wings, which builds enormous nests on buildings, electricity masts and trees. And “large” isn´t exaggerated if you look at its dimensions: a standing height of 100 - 125 cm and a maximum wingspan of 215 cm. When I still lived in the Netherlands I remember that the White Stork was one of the most popular birds and that very great efforts were made to encourage them to make their nests in Holland, even appearing regularly on the TV news. When I came to Spain I was stunned by the overwhelming amount of White Storks in the direct neighborhood of my new home, which most certainly surpasses the total population of my native country.  It was very easy to spot colonies of 15 or more nests close together or seeing over 50 Storks foraging in a meadow alongside the road. For data about behaviour, breeding, description, conservation, etc., I refer to a comprehensive report in the Wikipedia.

Distribution.

The White Stork is a migrating bird which stays the winter in Sub-Saharan Africa and breeds mainly in Europe and the Middle East, with a subspecies wintering in India and breeding in Turkestan (map 1). In Europe the storks have two strongholds, the first in Poland and Eastern Europe (about 150.000 pairs) and the second in the Iberian Peninsula (about 40.000 pairs) with very few pairs in western and northern Europe (map 2). In Spain most storks breed in a 250 km wide strip parallel to the border with Portugal (map 3). In the southern Cantabrian Mountains they are common and in the northern part even rare, but in the foothills directly to the south they are extremely common. This great concentration is possibly due to the much sunnier climate, compared with the northern Cantabrian Mountains, and the common practice of irrigation in the form of flooding the meadows, which forces all small animals to crawl above ground. It is really easy to observe a flooded meadow with large groups of storks. In Spain most nest are built in trees, churches and electricity masts, although sometimes they use other structures like the ruins of a castle, as is the case in the next photo report. In our region the first storks arrive at the end of January and normally leave in September or October, but most probably due to the relative soft winters of the last years, lately some birds stay the whole year.

Map 1 shows the breeding and wintering distribution of the White Stork. Map taken from the Wikipedia.

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A family of Egyptian vultures.

The Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus).

Introduction.

One day in august last year I decided to observe a family of Egyptian vultures, which had their nest situated in one of the fissures of a great limestone cliff, just about a kilometre away from my village. I climbed a parallel limestone ridge to reach a height slightly above the rock shelters on the opposite side of the valley, where I settled comfortably with binoculars and camera ready. For some exciting three hours I kept observing the flights of a pair of Egyptian vultures with their only young and occasionally some griffon vultures. I tried to shoot some photos, but my semi-reflex camera is better in shooting short distances macro-photos than long distance photos of relatively small objects.

Distribution.

On internet there is already a lot of general information available about the Egyptian vulture, so in this post it won´t be repeated, but instead I like to emphasize on the geographic distribution. A search on bird-websites leads to variable data about the number of adult individuals in Europe and Spain, but all reach the same conclusion of an important generalized decline. In the 2008 SEO/birdlife censoring for Spain the results gives 1452 certain pairs and 104 possible pairs, while the whole EU population is estimated at between 1700 and 1800 pairs (Environmental website of the European Commission). So it doesn´t seem unreasonable to consider Spain as the European stronghold of the Egyptian vulture (see map 1).  In recent years the Iberian population has declined more than 25%, mainly because of poisoning caused by the consumption of illegal baits used for predator control. Also the loss of food supplies caused by the sealing of municipal waste dumps, a great decline of the Spanish rabbit population and the current controlling of the disposal of animal carcasses (2002 regulations, trying to avoid the bovine spongiform encephalopathy  (BSE) or better known as mad cow disease). Other important causes are electrocution when colliding with power lines, lead poisoning (from gunshots), collisions with wind turbines, disturbance and habitat loss. Decline in Africa, the Egyptian vulture is a migratory bird, is likely to be caused by loss of food availability (extinction of the African wildlife) and of direct hunting in some places. Therefore the Neophron percnopterus has become in the unfortunate situation of being considered an endangered (EN)-species, which means that there is a high risk of extinction in the wild.

The distribution map of the Virtual Atlas of the “Avifauna Terrestre de España” (Terrestrial Bird-fauna of Spain, map 2) gives a high concentration of pairs in the central and eastern Cantabrian Mountains, together with a general high concentration for the inland of north-east Spain. A 50x50 km frequency grid gives information about the percentage of 10x10 km grids occupied with the species concerned. For instance, when a 50x50 km grid has a frequency value of 60-80%, it means that between 30 and 40 grids of 10x10 km have at least one pairs of Egyptian vultures. From the six 50x50 km grids which together cover the Cantabrian Mountains, the grids number 6 (88%), 4 (80%) and 3 (72%) are placed second, third and fifth in the national rank of grids with the highest frequency (map 2), which highlights the Cantabrian Mountains as an excellent place to spot these beautiful birds.

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