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woodchat shrike

I’ll happily confess that I’m not really one for pet birds: they’re noisy, they’re smelly, and some of them, I hear, have the disconcerting habit of outliving their human owners.

Loggerhead shrike, Arizona

Even if cagebirds didn’t give me the slight willies, I gravely doubt that my first choice for a domestic companion of the feathered sort would be … a shrike.

Red-backed Shrike Tuscany

I love shrikes, and have since I saw my first loggerheads in eastern Nebraska more than 40 years ago. Whatever the rest of the day afield has held, it is often the shrikes — common ones or rare, big ones or little — that press themselves most deeply into memory: a northern shrike chasing tree sparrows through the thickets, a great gray hounding innocent jays and magpies, red-backeds lighting up a brushy pasture, a southern gray singing from a Spanish fenceline.

great gray shrike

In the house, though? Never. Of all things.

But as so often, and always so surprisingly, I find that my tastes are not universally shared.

Lesser Gray Shrike

In 1795, Johann Matthäus Bechstein, uncle of the poet and philologist and father of German ornithology, dedicated a lengthy chapter of his Stubenthiere to these “bold predatory birds” and their place in the fashionable bourgeois living room.

Southern gray shrike

Like the European jay, the great gray shrike imitates many sounds. It does not quite succeed in replicating the songs of other birds, but its own flute-like note is that much more beautiful, quite similar to that of the gray parrot; it puffs out its throat like a frog…. Perhaps one might be able to teach it to speak, as it has some notes that are very like the human voice.

There is one thing to be very sure of, though, as Bechstein reminds us in his account of the lesser gray shrike.

Northern Shrike

Letting any shrike fly around in a room with other birds in it is not appropriate, because it is likely to want to kill its comrades — if not out of hunger, then out of jealousy or bad temper, or just to prove that it can.

Bloodlust notwithstanding, the male lesser gray is among the most desirable of cagebirds, “with a wondrous capacity to learn … the entire songs of other bird, among them the nightingale, the skylark … and the quail.” The woodchat, on the other hand, though its handsome plumage commends it, always mixes “its own screeching and squawking” into its imitations.

Then as now the commonest laniid in central and western Europe, the red-backed shrike was the birdkeeper’s favorite, readily captured, handsomely plumed, and easily fed. The song of the beautiful male

is a combination of the songs of the goldfinch, various warblers, nightingale, thrush nightingale, robin, wren, skylark, and woodlark, mixed with only a few of the shrike’s own coarse strophes.

Red-backed Shrike

Best of all, though,

if you place the shrike in a room infested with flies, he will quickly clear them out. He catches them most easily in flight; if you then stick a few pins into a twig, he impales the flies with an odd movement.

I’m still not convinced.

Southern gray shrike

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Birds and Art In Catalonia: See You in 2016!

Sagrada Familia

How to choose?

How do you decide between a soaring lammergeier and the soaring vaults of the Sagrada Família? Between golden orioles bursting out of the roadside brush and the gilded glory of the Palau de la Musica? Between bee-eaters barking and burping low overhead and the equally colorful, if less uncouth, cherubim and seraphim in some of the most important paintings of the western Middle Ages?

Lammergeier

Here’s the secret: you don’t have to. At least not in Catalonia, where nature and culture have worked together for two millennia to create a landscape of endless delights—delights avian, artistic, and culinary.

This year’s tour started with a birdy bang with our first afternoon’s visit to the Llobregat Delta. We quickly decided that every world-class city could benefit from marshes, reed beds, and seashore like those that ornament Barcelona.

zitting cisticola

Sizzling corn buntings, scratching serins, and zitting cisticolas welcomed us as we left the parking lot at Cal Tet, and our short walk through warm sunshine—especially welcome to those of us who had endured a cold, wet winter—was accompanied by red-crested pochards, Audouin’s gulls, purple swamphens, and the interminable good-natured shouting of Cetti’s warblers. The only thing more richly supplied in Catalonia than good birding is good meals, and we started off right with an excellent dinner at one of the many fine restaurants in our neighborhood.

We launched the next morning with a quick breakfast in our hotel, then left at 7:30 to drive north along the Mediterranean to Aiguamolls, one of the finest wetland sites in Catalonia and Spain. White storks are almost comically abundant in the area, their great stick nests adorning what seems like every rooftop and treetop; we were rarely out of hearing of the exuberant bill clattering.

White stork

A common nightingale, not always the easiest of European songsters to see well, chanted and clucked and gurgled and trilled in plain view in the parking lot, and Cetti’s warblers were equally, and equally uncharacteristically, visible as we headed towards the first of the comfortable blinds that dot the marshes and ponds of the refuge.

That blind was doubly welcome when, for the only time in our week together, the weather turned less than congenial: the dull drip that had occasionally interrupted our walk threatened to turn to drizzle, and we sought shelter overlooking one of the best ponds at Aiguamolls. Garganeys, little egrets, little and great crested grebes, marsh harriers, and the first of what would be many whiskered terns made the wait for cheerier skies pass quickly, and indeed, we might have missed the splendid European spoonbill that magically materialized on the water in front of us—the only one of the entire tour—had we not been forced to patience by the rain.

Eurasian spoonbill

The weather improved, and we finished our walk before venturing into the charming little resort town of Sant Pere Pescador for lunch. Not only was the food well up to our already exalted expectation, but we got to enjoy a little local color as the townspeople came in to fill their bottles from the great casks of wine lining one wall of the dining room: the incredibly low per-liter prices for what were quite respectable vintages (we tested a few, in the interest of cultural understanding) made us wish we’d brought our own supply of well-rinsed coke bottles.

Heartened by the blue skies and the bluer waters of the Mediterranean, we moved on to the famous ruins of Empuries, where first the Greeks and then the Romans established estimable cities beginning some twenty-eight centuries ago.

Empurie?s

It was in the upper, Roman city that the signal advantage of this tour first sunk in: “birds and art,” some of us murmured, “birds and art,” as standing on the site of the two-thousand-year-old forum we watched firecrests, crested and long-tailed tits, and wood and western Bonelli’s warblers pass through the trees at eye level. We were a happy group as we returned to Barcelona, happier still over an excellent dinner in our hotel’s own restaurant.

After our early start the morning before, the next found us lingering a bit longer over breakfast before we set out for the forty-five-minute drive to Montserrat, the otherworldly mountain that rises abruptly from the coastal plain just northwest of Barcelona. Our destination was the monastery with its world-famous church, still an important pilgrimage station on the way to Compostela; on this beautiful blue-skied morning, though, we paused first at the Camí de les Batalles, a rosemary-scented trailhead above the little town of Bruc.

Montserrat landscape

Serins, chaffinches, and the most obliging pair of cirl buntings in all of recorded time kept us entertained in the little parking lot while we pondered one of those improbable coincidences history is so full of: had the Catalonians not tricked the French into retreating from the flank of Montserrat in 1808, Joseph would never have abdicated the throne of Spain, and his nephew and son-in-law would never have conducted the investigations that made him, Charles Bonaparte, one of America’s most important early ornithologists.

Higher on the mountain, the moonscape of Montserrat’s oddly rounded peaks—reached by one of the world’s steeper cog railroads—was quieter than its maquis-clad slopes.

Montserrat

As the eerie fog cleared, a few soaring birds appeared, among them the only sparrowhawk of our week together, and we were eventually able to get fine looks at a couple of the typically shy western subalpine warblers singing in the sparse brush.

An elegant lunch in one of the monastery’s restaurants was followed by a visit to the church, where we admired the remnants of the Gothic cloister and tried hard to imagine away the Baroque besmirchments of much of the basilica’s interior. The line to pay respects to the Romanesque Madonna was short, so we joined the other pilgrims to marvel at the mosaics, sculptures, and wall and ceiling paintings adorning the long approach to the statue, its gold orb worn to a sheen by the kisses and caresses of the faithful over the centuries. We moved on to the monastic museum, one of those collections whose curators for some reason have felt the need to place on exhibit every last piece of art they own; the best strategy is to head straight for the highlights, among them a second-rank El Greco, a fine Caravaggio (if you like that sort of thing), and some truly eye-opening early Picassos.

Montserrat Romanesque fragments capitals

Next morning found us going from early Picasso to early, period, as we left the hotel at 5:00 for the dry plains of Lleida. The early start was made less painful by a well-timed stop for coffee and pastries along the way—just the type of glimpse into genuine Catalonian trucker culture the average tourist never sees—and our eyes were open and our expectations high as we ventured out into the fields at sunrise. Hoopoes, red-legged partridges, common nightingales, and a gorgeous woodchat shrike (there is no other kind) started things off, and as we moved south across the steppe, colorful bee-eaters, noisy calandra larks, huge and cryptic European thick-knees, and, best of all, more than two dozen little bustards accompanied us.

Little bustard

As expected at the height of spring, the spirit was well and truly upon the male bustards, who were bouncing into the air above the females as they uttered their funny flatulent buzzes; in their distraction, several landed quite close to us, giving us wonderful views of these handsome and sadly imperiled grassland birds.

Lunch was in the tiny village of Belianes, where an enterprising restaurateur has transformed an ancient olive press into a charmingly intimate space serving excellent meals. It was hard to get up from the table, but more birds awaited, this time at the lake of Ivars. The approach, through intensively cultivated fields and a decidedly grimy farm town, is discouraging, but the lake never fails to exceed expectation. This time, Mediterranean gulls joined the abundant black-headeds, great crested grebes floated placid on the water at close range, and best of all, a male penduline tit descended from the willows to feed from the cattails just a few feet in front of us, a life bird for some and a highlight of the tour for all of us. We celebrated the successes of a long and rich day with a traditional dinner in Barcelona’s Santa Caterina market.

Ciutadella Park, Barcelona

One of the great advantages of our Barcelona hotel is the proximity of the Ciutadella Park, a neatly laid-out and birdy site just steps from our front door. The morning after our long day at Lleida, we birded the park as a group, some of us starting at sunrise, others joining in as the morning went on. Spotless starlings and a finally cooperative short-toed treecreeper were among our best sightings, with a selection of introduced parrots and parakeets adding color and noise to the scene.

Color would be the theme of the rest of the day, too. After breakfast and a break, we set out into the city, exploring the medieval neighborhoods and their sights in the time-honored way: wandering until lost.

Santa Maria del Mar

We compared the somber but moving Catalan Gothic of the improbably tall Santa Maria del Mar with the more obviously Frenchified architecture of the cathedral, and marveled at the mass of the city’s surviving Roman fortifications.

Barcelona Cathedral

We had coffee and snacks at the Café 4 Gats, where Barcelona’s artistic avant-garde met at the turn of the twentieth century, then moved on to a guided tour of one of Catalonia’s real jewels, the Palau de la Musica, a masterpiece of light and whimsy.

Palau Musica Catalana

After a light lunch of Catalan specialties, we moved on to one of the most famous buildings in Europe, the Basilica of the Sagrada Família. No matter how often you enter this church—still a-building 120 years after it was begun—the sheer imagination of Gaudí’s conception and the way that light, organic form, and devout conviction come together in one enormously varied and miraculously unitary work of art remains breathtaking.

Sagrada Familia

The great project is scheduled for completion just ten years from now—surely occasion for a tour reunion.

The next day’s sights and sites were just as monumental. After a hurried breakfast in our hotel, we drove north to the mountains on a warm, bright morning. We arrived at the Cadí-Moixeró visitor center just as it was opening for the day—and just as a wryneck began the day’s serious business of singing in a nearby orchard. It took a while, but the strange woodpecker eventually flew in to reveal itself in all its weird, bark-colored glory. It was a good start and a good sign. The school retreat up the mountain, just below the pass, produced wheatears, mistle thrushes, and several looks at the often elusive citril finch, a specialty of the Pyrenees’ conifer-dappled meadows.

Cadi Moixera

Red-billed choughs played around the cliffs above us, and as the skies grew warmer, Eurasian griffons, huge, bulky, tawny vultures, appeared in numbers. And then, from behind, there approached the bird of the day: a lammergeier, so close that the “beard” of this bearded vulture was visible. The great wedge-tailed bone-breaker soared nearby for several minutes, then disappeared as we congratulated each other on our amazing good luck. It wasn’t over, though.

Lammergeier

A few moments later, the vulture reappeared, this time in the valley below us, just yards away, giving views such as none of us had enjoyed before. It was less a sighting than a visitation, and one that will remain in our memories for a very long time indeed.

After lunch in Bagà, we took time to bird the lower-elevation forests of the Pyrenean foothills and to visit the unprepossessing Romanesque church of Sant Joan de l’Avellanet, first documented in the early tenth century.

Sant Joan Avellanets

We were fortunate enough to find the church open, and stepped inside to see the short, single nave, the narrow slit of a window, and the graceful round apse, so different in style and ambition from the Gothic treasures of Barcelona.

Somehow, the last day of the tour had sneaked up on us, and we returned the next morning to the wetlands of Cal Tet. This time, we kept to the path outside the marshes to walk to the beach, where large numbers of Balearic shearwaters fished offshore and little ringed plovers, tawny pipits, and a handsome Eurasian oystercatcher haunted the sand. A hoopoe, the last of many we encountered in our week together, flew about the abandoned buildings, and cisticolas zitted what was now their familiar homely song overhead.

Little ringed plover

Our visit to Sant Joan had been intended in part to prepare us for the medieval halls of the National Museum of Catalan Art, which holds the most important collection of Romanesque wall and panel painting in the world.

Museu nacional arte catalan

Modest stone churches like Sant Joan were once covered inside with colorful masterpieces, masterpieces now on display in Barcelona, where they are exhibited in galleries built to evoke their original ecclesiastical settings. The lively colors, exaggerated forms, and earnest fantasy of these works are unparalleled in the history of western art—and matched in the natural world only by the beauty of Catalonia’s birds.

Museu nacional art catalan

So how to choose? It’s simple. Don’t. Do as we do, and take in all the richness of a landscape full of nature and culture, wildness and history, art and birds.

For a list of Bird and Art tours, visit the website of Victor Emanuel Nature Tours. We’ll be returning to Catalonia April 14-22, 2016.

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And Paddle Like the Dickens….

Common pochard

The common pochards at Cal Tet last week were having a hard time staying beneath the surface long enough to feed.

Common pochard

This female paddled hard to maintain her submersion, creating twin maelstroms with each stroke of her feet.

 

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