22nd Dec Picos de Europe

As the weather is still good we take a road along the northern edge of the Picos de Eur­opa, following the narrow limestone gorge of the Rio Cares. As dusk falls we find a parking place ‑ the first we have seen alongside the river. At about ten o'clock I go outside the van and find the gorge bathed in the light of the full moon. It gives the limestone an ethereal luminescence and with the sound of goat bells in the fields above there is a touch of Shangri‑la about the place. We go for a moonlight walk along the road.

Dec 22

First thing this morning there is cloud on the top of the cliffs, but the bottom of the valley is clear. Down by the river and we watch dippers and grey wagtails for a while. As the cloud evapor­ates in the sun, griffons and buzzards soar overhead. On the high rocks another griffon sits on a pile of vegetation, hold­ing his wings out for the warmth of the sun and showing off the dark centred coverts. Perhaps he had eaten well yesterday for he is still there when we leave at about midday. A heron flies downstream, sees us and has to work quite hard to gain height to get out of the valley without coming any closer to a human than absolutely nece­ssary.

After a cup of coffee we walk back along the road. A sparrowhawk flies low over the river below and has a go at something on the rocks but the victim escapes. A sparrowhawk needs to be able to mount surprise attacks on its victims, coming at them from the cover of woodland edges, glades, copses, hedges etc. Here it has to make do with the cover of boulders along the stream.

There is a road marked Oceña 4.5 km. On a map the distance would have been more like one kilometre but the road switches back and forth to climb the almost shear rock face.

Despite the alarming changes mentioned previously, farming in these mountains is still very much small scale stuff. The workhorse is often a mule, the farmer may have a half-dozen or so cows, and forage is cut by hand in pocket-hand­kerchief sized fields. Some fields have small stone barns and at one of these we see a farmer who had ridden past us on his mule, seen to his cows and cleaned out the barn, and now rides back down the road with a milk churn fixed to the saddle. It is not a very profitable livelihood and the farm houses, though strongly built, tend to look in need of external care.

Another farmer arrives at his field in a truck ‑ a big vehicle for the winding mountain roads. He walks back to where we are watching through the telescope and asks if we were looking at vultures. He speaks no English but with the help of the field guide pictures (it doesn’t have Spanish bird names) we are able to converse about birds. We ask about golden and bonelli's eagles, and he says there were golden eagles in the Picos and also white eagles (bonelli's or booted or short-toed - they all have white, but none of the spanish names for eagle translates as white eagle). Rock buntings and rock sparrows are around but not rock thrush; blackbirds he knows but not ring ouzel; dippers and wagtail live down by the river; robin and wren he points out; and firecrest which he tells us sleep in crev­ices in rocks. He hasn't seen wall-creeper in the area but surprisingly also says no to alpine chough which we see a few hours later. Still it is nice to see that some farmers at least are aware of the crea­tures around them.

Some way further up this road we come upon a flatter landscape ‑ a patchwork of small terraced fields, woodland, stony broken ground and rocky outcrops. There are a number of small-bird calls, most of which we recognise, however, amongst them was a very weak nuthatch type call but different enough to make us stop and look around. Eventually Jim locates a strange bunting perched on a bare tree near a barn. It looks very much like a yellowhammer except that it has black and grey stripes on its head, and, when it turns towards us, orangy underparts. This is a male rock bunting, the only one we see in the area.

Higher still we watch two male bullfinches feeding on brambles ‑ flying up and hovering to pick off fruit that could not be reached from a nearby stem. A firecrest works its way down a tree, hovering under a leaf stalk for whatever it could find then landing briefly on a twig before going down to the next leaf.
On the highest broken ground are about a dozen alpine choughs, acting like red‑billed chough except that they are using their shorter stouter bills to poke about in quite long vegetation. Earlier we had seen some flying along the top of a ridge mobbing a kestrel.

Going back down the road we hear green wood­peckers calling loudly. There are two voices, one quite strong and the other with a sharper tinnier sound that we have heard before and we wonder if it really is a wood-pecker. This time we locate the birds and, even in the failing light, could see that the head markings are slightly different to usual, in particular there is not so much black around the eye. This is the Iberian race, which is generally greyer on the head than the main European race, and which has this tinnier sound to its call. One of the woodpeckers is on a tree trunk a short way below us. The black moustachial stripe indicates that this is a female, and she has the higher pitched voice. Most of the time she appears to be looking around and listening in­tently, however this may have been a head swaying movement which is used in threat and courtship displays, and which, in spring, is used to strengthen the pair bond at times of change‑over at the nest. Normally pair formation takes place in March and April, but green wood-peckers roosting in neighbouring trees may begin pairing up in November. Prospective partners give loud and frequent advert­ising calls from their roosting tees, especially in the morning and evening, and the calls carry for about one and a half kilo­metres.

Tawny owls were also calling in the dusk, somewhere up in the trees or rock crevices.