Wallcreeper

 Surely one of Europe’s most exotic birds and very difficult to find, the wallcreeper often brightens Charente’s winters by descending from its high mountain breeding grounds and feeding on the sheer walls of our chateaux and churches. La Rochefoucauld is one of its traditional haunts but as the chateau has been closed for several months because of Covid restrictions it has been possible to search for it only on the exterior walls. It was not until today, however, that I finally managed to locate an individual although a few other observers had managed to see it earlier in the year.

Early Spring 2021

 

After yet another protracted absence from the blog, here are a few pics of some of the more interesting birds which I have come across so fat this year.

Lapwings are not rare of course but this year there have been exceptional  numbers on the flooded fields  of theTardoire valley.The flocks peaked at around a thousand often in the company of a similar number of golden lovers.

Cattle egrets have been very plentiful also, sometimes in flocks of over one hundred. Great white egrets have not been hard to find either but usually in small groups of up to three.

Dartford warblers obligingly showed up in the gorse near Soyaux and the perigrine falcon was in a quarry in the north of the department. Th floode fields also held lesser black backed gulls and black headed gulls but the great crested grebe was on the Mas Chaban lake.

The tiny zitting cisticola was seen near Agris as was the tree sparrow.

We await now the arrival of the main spring migrants as the cranes have already passed in their tens of thousands.