4 Jan 1989 - Pinhal de Leiria

The coastal region of central Portugal forms a transition area between the Mediterranean flora to the south, and the north Atlantic flora to the north. In the Pinhal (pine forest) de Leiria we find more and more unfamiliar plants, and feel frustrated by the lack of a suitable field guide to identify them. This is entirely my fault, I wasn't expecting to see flowers in winter, so I did not look very hard for a field guide! The forest dates from the thirteenth century and yields turp­entine as well as timber. It stretches some 20 km along the coast and is up to five kilometres wide. It is rather differ­ent from pine plantations in Britain ‑ the trees are more widely spaced, and there is often a well devel­oped shrub layer of gorse and heather.

Seedlings in the clear‑felled areas do not appear to be in rows, perhaps pine seeds have been broadcast over the area rather than regeneration being left to nature. In between the seedlings are heathers, gorse, broom, hotten­tot fig, etc. In one area of pines about a metre high, the lower branches have been loped off and the gorse chopped down before it overwhelms every­thing.

In between the stands of pines are strips of cultivation, rye, potato and maize are the main crops here, and in some places are stands of enormous eucalypt trees, faster growing than the pines, but ecologically unsympathetic in this part of the world.

The birds of the low open scrub are dart­ford and sardinian warblers, wrens, robins, and stone­chats. The forest as a whole seems well populated with a variety of thrushes, tits and finches, and jays.

We follow a coastal road, stopping where poss­ible to look for birds. Sea-watching yields only gannets and gulls, or just patches of brown frothy water crashing against the cliffs below. Often the gannets seem to be in family groups of two adults and one juvenile. However, newly fledged gannets are usually solitary birds on the sea for a couple of weeks until they are strong enough to fly easily from the water surface. Then they latch onto any passing adults or join fishing flocks.

At one stop, a half dozen small birds fly into a bush in front of the van and stay just long enough to be identified as waxbills, a spe­cies introduced from Africa as cage birds. Escaped birds have set up colonies in the wild and are apparently doing quite well in southern Spain and Portugal. They are small finches with bright red bills, dark caps, red around the eye, pale throat and reddish bellies, rump and tail.

To reach the Tagus estuary we cross an area called Estremadura, a rolling landscape of red hills, vineyards, farms with bigger fields than we had seen for some time, and roads with better surfaces. In the Aveiro area houses were decor­ated with colourful ceramic tiles on the outside, here they are white-washed with red roofs. Away from the coastal pines, there are more plantations of eucalypts and the area has an aura of Mediterra­nean heat.