Day 5: A cream-coloured evening

22nd of July:

Another day on Lanzarote! After some good breakfast we left the apartment with all of us. We wanted to do some hiking in the neighbourhood of Guatiza. We searched for the Barranco de Teneguime. We thought we'd found the right track and started the walk. Later it turned out it was a track walking just parralel to the Barranco, so we were walking on the hills on the egde of the Barranco. We saw some Ravens and apart from the Berthelot's Pipits that are always everywhere there was not much seen. After the short hike we drove to Los Cocotheros, a small village along the coast, east of Guatiza. We checked the saltpans there but there were no waders or such thing present. The birds simply just weren't around. Around noon we decided to go Jardin de Cactus. This is a wonderful garden full of catcuses and other plants, very impressive. Since there was water, there were also some nice birds around. We found at least 4 Melodious Warblers here, a nice surprise, as this is, as far as I know, not a common migrant here, and four together is a good score then! There were also flocks of Spanish Sparrows and the flyover of two Bee-eaters was a good one!

Jardin de Cactus

 Spanish Sparrow (Passer hispanicus), male

Melodius Warbler (Hippolais polygotta)

In the afternoon some snorkling and swimming was done in the sea near Costa Teguise, resulting in the observations of some really nice fishes, such as Lizard Fishes. In the evening my dad and I went to El Jable again. We went to the same areas as before. Soon we had 10+ Stone Curlews:

Stone Curlews (Burhinus oedicnemus insularum)

Other observations were at least 7 Hoopoes:

Hoopoes (Upupa epops)

A nice Kestrel of the ssp dacotiae:

Common Kestrel (Falco tinniculus dacotiae)

We knocked on the door on this Southern Grey Shrike was at home:

Southern Grey Shrike (Lanius meriodinalis koenigi), the 2cy bird

And here a recording of the bird singing/calling:

 Southern Grey Shrike ssp koenigi, El Jable, Lanzarote by Fmeijer 

But best of all, was the group of 12 Cream-coloured Coursers we came across. My dad first heard them calling in a patch nearby. Then a few took off but the rest stayed and showed really well. I screwed up a bit with my camera settings, just when was close to the car.. you can guess, my dad has perfect images of that moment!

Cream-coloured Courser (Cursor cursorius)

El Jable, with the Famara cliffs on the background.