2016 has been a great year for Birding The Strait. Here we review some of our best moments of birding and the milestones in our work as bird guides in Tarifa, Andalusia and Morocco. We would like to express our most sincere gratitude to all the many great people we have had the chance to meet in these twelve months!
We started our birding year in the best possible way: a morning visit to La Janda where 2018 Cranes offered a great show. We made a special effort to document the unprecedented winter presence of several presumed hybrid Spotted Eagles. The resulting information was published by the British website Birdguides.
In early February we participated in the World Wetlands Day with “Laguna de La Janda Friends Association” giving a lecture on the interest of La Janda for the local development of ecotourism. The achievement of a legal figure of protection in conformity with the natural values of La Janda, along with the restoration of lost natural areas, is one of the most ambitious purposes for Birding The Strait and we fully support this association, of which we are active members.
A few days later we crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to Africa for the first time in 2016. We where invited by Dakhla Attitude Hotel to a Fam-Trip in one of the hottest birding spots within the Western Palearctic: the Bay of Dakhla and the Aousserd region in the Atlantic Sahara. We had nine unforgettable days of scouting, birding and wildlife photography filled with highlights, which we summarized in this trip report.
During the spring, we ran five birding tours to Morocco, three of them in combination with Andalusia, totalling over 30 days of birding in the neighbouring country. We visited the foremost birding sites in the Atlantic Coast, the Riff Mountains, the high Atlas, and the Sahara Desert. Among the many highlights we will never forget the courtship display of a male Great Bustard in one of the, sadly, very last leks for this species in Africa, a shelf-found Pharaoh Eagle Owl and a pod of 10 Orcas in Cap Rhir, to name only a few!
In April we were awarded with a Certificate of Excellence by TripAdvisor thanks to the great reviews we got from our clients in 2015. This same month, we celebrated the release of eBird España, the regional eBird portal in Spain. This is a project on which Birding The Strait has been deeply committed from the very beginning. Indeed, as part of our responsible business policy, we systematically upload to eBird all the ornithological information generated during our day trips and tours in Spain, Morocco and beyond. Moreover, we are reviewers of eBird in Andalusia. We believe this is an excellent way to keep an agile database of our records and at the same time contribute to research and conservation projects resulting from eBird’s big data. In June, Steve Kelling from Team eBird/Cornell Lab of Ornithology paid a visit to Tarifa, and we also participated in the first meeting of eBird España in Pamplona, Navarra.
Another conservation initiative we are particularly satisfied to have contributed to, is the successful crowdfunding for Montagu´s Harriers in La Janda coordinated by Tumbabuey Ornithological Group. In Birding The Strait, we want to thank our clients, whose trust in our guiding services enabled us to donate in this campaign.
During summer we ran several private boat trips off Tarifa for small groups to photograph pods of Orcas that concentrate in the Strait to predate on migratory Bluefin Tuna. This provided memorable moments like the observation of 20 different individuals in a single excursion.
In august we took part in the British Bird Fair for the fourth consecutive year. This time we attended the stand of Andalusia with 14KM association in behalf of the Tourism Board of Tarifa to promote our region as a world-class birding destination.
The favorable weather in September made unleashed one of the best raptor migration seasons we remember in Tarifa. We had a fantastic seven-day raptor migration tour in the Strait of Gibraltar as local guides for a Swedish group led by Gigi Sahlstrand / Avifauna and the world authority on raptors identification: Dick Forsman.
In October Dutch Birding published the paper (in English) “Identification of Rüppell´s vulture and White-backed Vulture and vagrancy in the WP”. This is an extensive work Javi co-authored with our colleague Guillermo Rodríguez, including 14 pages and over 55 colour plates, many of which have been obtained by Birding The Strait during our birding day trips in the Gibraltar area.
In late autumn and winter we ran private birding tours combing the Strait of Gibraltar and Doñana National Park, where we where lucky enough to get a very close encounter with an adult Iberian Lynx, and a one-on-one wildlife photography course in Tarifa. Finding the second Steppe Eagle for Spain during one of our birding day trips in La Janda, made what we should consider our bird of the year.
In December, we mostly rested, enjoyed some holiday travel and intensively birded our local patches in Cádiz where we added not one but two striking Hume´s Leaf Warblers to our lists. This was also the time to finalize the arrangements for a very promising 2017. This included signing three new collaboration agreements of which we are very excited about, but this is something we will explain in detail in our 2017 review…
According to our eBird statistics, in 2016 Birding The Strait has recorded 302.706 birds of 374 species (and 4 hybrids) from Northern Spain to Southern Morocco. Beating this figure will be a real challenge in 2017, and we want to do it with you!