BIRDING MALLORCA

 May in Mallorca

In early May, we spent a week in the beautiful countryside just to the north of Pollenca, and I managed to dovetail some birding with family trips around the island. An unexpected and unfortunate facilitator in this regard was the stomach bug that laid everybody low but which allowed me dashes of a different nature on a few occasions. Part of the fun is in the planning and I must mention the Mallorca thread on Birdforum, run by Mike Montier, which is as generous with its time and patience with holidaying birders as it is with its knowledge and expertise.

As a relatively inexperienced birder abroad, the opportunity to see species which are rare or scarce in the UK, either close at hand or in greater numbers, was exceptional. On the first morning, I was up and out early and had the Boquer Valley -  a dramatic, high-sided cleft running into the sea above Puerto Pollenca -  all to myself. 

Sardinian warblers chattered from the bushes and a rock thrush silhouetted on the huge boulders at the start of the trail but, try as I might, I could not pin down a balearic warbler despite calls from the undergrowth. 

High up on the valley peaks, a booted eagle drifted away south and was joined briefly by a second and an Eleonora's falcon. Returning to the car park, a distinctive rolling trill rippled across the sky and a flock of thirty or more bee-eaters, set alight by the morning sun, dazzled overhead and flew out to sea.

Better yet, a further five were perched above the car park quite close to the path. Bee-eaters have flirted with the UK, and recently nested in Norfolk several years running, but they never fail to conjure up everything that is bright and exotic about the Mediterranean: one of those memories you tuck away to bring out on a cold tramp along the shingle on a drab winter's day.

A wryneck piped up from a nearby tree and then zipped into dense cover - my only sighting on the trip of another favourite bird.

In the afternoons, the temperature did rise towards 30 on occasion but was rarely oppressive, and a stroll from our villa along the lanes always produced something eye-catching. It did feel as though the small plots of land, studded with olive trees and an insect-laden understorey of wild flowers, were what a less-intensively farmed UK landscape might have been like many years ago.

Mornings began with hoopoes calling softly over the gardens and all along the road, spotted flycatchers - now dwindling in Norfolk - launched feeding forays from the overhead wires, some of them the less streaked balearica subspecies.

Nightingales chocked and whistled from the denser greenery, again issuing a melodic reminder of what has been lost nearer to home. 

Not so with the smart, chestnut-capped woodchat shrike -  at home in these beetle-rich pastures, and only a rare tourist to the UK - as a pair of the indigenous badius race (I think, despite a tiny fleck of white on the wing of one) scoured the crumbly soil of the olive grove.

Above the green-gold grasses, cornflowers, wild carrot and chicory was a floating layer of painted lady and clouded yellow butterflies, the tangle of olive trees and then the dark, ragged line of the Tramontana mountains rising steeply to the north. Above everything, the thick stripe of blue sky. To my delight, the afternoon warmth brought raptors out from the mountains and for 30 minutes, I watched black and griffon vultures circle languidly high overhead. Slowly, they dragged their huge wings east and were lost to view.

The nature reserve of S'Albufera on the east coast of the island is internationally renowned as a thriving wetland sanctuary for birds, and my visit there, on a very warm afternoon, seemed to be a succession of wildlife spectacles delivered as a reward for clocking up the steps away from the busy hides. 

At the back of the queue when bird names were being handed out, the red-knobbed coot is a rarity in Europe but gained traction on Mallorca following a reintroduction scheme in 2004. A single bird showed well on the canal at the end of the Sa Roca hides and waddled away into the reeds.

The undoubted birding highlight however, exceeding even the incongruous sight of an eleonora's falcon speeding above the traffic in Port d'Alcudia, was the little bittern flying into the reeds at Columbars bridge and then edging through them, all claws and beak, peering out into the open with almost myopic concentration. It is one of the most compelling encounters with wildlife I have experienced.

Fan-tailed warblers, or zitting cisticolas as we must call them, rose and sang restlessly from the reeds but though I heard one sounding off like a steaming kettle, the moustached warbler preferred to remain overshadowed by the shuffling choir of nearby nightingales and serins in the sallows.

Less fussy by far were the wading birds which strutted in the muddy acres of the reserve. Flamingoes elegantly dominated the flatlands on either side of the path to the Cibollar hides

and the black-winged stilts, normally the lankiest bird at the pool, picked and preened their way through the shallows with relatively dimunitive grace.

Around their feet, scurried little-ringed and brown-capped kentish plovers - much more evident here than the southern county that gave them their name -  some with young which seemed determined to stray, much to their parents' distress.

On the path in front of me, a yellow wagtail of the race iberiae daintily wove in and out of the grass before seeking water and the flies simmering at its edges.

The heronry was rather obscured by the vegetation at the edge of the main canal but brief flight views only of purple and squacco herons, and a rather shy night heron bunched up roosting in the trees, were balanced by the primadonnas of a noisy and active glossy ibis and cattle egret colony.

Other destinations might have challenged Mallorca's primacy as a Mediterranean birding venue in recent decades but I was astounded by the beauty and diversity of its birdlife. Having missed as many target species as I saw, another trip to this lovely island, in which the only bugs are invertebrate, is definitely required.