We awake to another day of warm sun ‑ an English couple we met yesterday told us it is not usually this hot at Christmas. On the hill above the Cape and there was broken ground with low growing gorse and heather between lumps of metamorphic rock. The place was alive with birds of the same species as yesterday, including a couple of rock buntings giving the weak nuthatch-like call we had heard before seeing the first one a week ago.
A cart track leads down the hill and through pasture land. Our attention is taken by some small lizards running over nearby rocks, apparently preferring the vertical surfaces to the horizontal ones. Consultation with the reptiles and amphibians book suggested that we were seeing two forms of the common wall lizard, but it also warned that north‑west Iberia is one of the most confusing places for small lizards because, although there are only four species, they are all very variable and can often look alike.
Further along the track Jim finds a bird which, through the binoculars, looks like a whitethroat with a cocked tail. Then we see through the telescope that it has a red eye ring ‑ a female Sardinian warbler some hundred kilometres from where the book says it should be. Its range is thought to be linked with the distribution of olive groves, and as olive growing has spread, so have the birds. It skulks along the bottom of a wall and then goes under a hedge, not allowing us to observe much more.
We normally try to avoid towns and villages, but the track takes us through a community that is not nearly as tightly packed as those we have seen in the mountains. There are small fields between houses, and along the stream are communal laundry troughs. We haven't seen donkeys or mules since leaving the mountains but here people have small herds of livestock ‑ which might include cattle, horses, goats, and sheep with young lambs ‑ grazing the roadside or open country. This being school holiday time, often children are left tending these flocks.
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