My final blog from my Naturetrek trip to Fuerteventura are all from the same day. Three species of birds all performed extremely well for the camera and gave me my favourite shots from the trip.
When Matt and I led this trip 2 years ago, we found a brilliant picnic area in the hills. The highlight that day, was the same as this year with a stunning Great Grey Shrike. The one this year wasn't as tame as the one from 2 years ago, when we were photographing it with our macro lenses. However, the one this year actually produced better, more natural results as it sat, searching for prey from a reasonably low perch. By me moving slightly, it was also possible to have a background of light mountain, rather than a dark tree. This certainly also helped give good results. I ended up taking lots of photos of the bird in this position, although it did fortunately change its pose several times, so not all the photos looked the same!!
The Great Grey Shrike that occurs in Fuerteventura is of the subspecies koenigi. During the week we had many sightings, more sightings than we had from either of the past 2 years, so the bird certainly appears to be doing very well there. We even had 3 of them around the hotel gardens throughout the week.
The images below are from the picnic area. It was very difficult knowing which ones to post, so I have posted several!! What a bird and what a performer though!
Great Grey Shrike ssp. koenigi.
After the picnic lunch we moved a couple of miles to a Mirador with amazing views of the surrounding hillsides. As we were parking, a beautiful male Spanish Sparrow was sitting on the fence just outside the car. I quickly took a couple of shots of it, not realising that I would shortly be getting even better views of it on more natural foliage and a rock. In the meantime though, several Ravens were also sitting on the fence, allowing close approaches. In fact, one person was seen feeding it by hand!! I'm not sure I would risk getting a nip from a Raven!
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