Working hard...

I'm only a couple of weeks away from retirement. One of the last things I had to do was to go over to our Lisbon office and do a handover of my projects. Fortunately though I managed to work a bit of free time into the trip. My colleague and friend Jon Haigh had arranged for a trip out birdwatching for the pair of us. Jon is a total "dude" birder so our local guide proved invaluable.
We started off from Lisbon in his car and headed out to the Tagus estuary. The weather was not what we expected though. Despite Spring coming on it was cold, overcast and windy. Not ideal weather to introduce Jon to birding, but you could say it was typical of a days birding!
We started off on an estuary at rising tide.

Most of the birds were some way off and not in photography range, but we got Jons Portugal list off to a good start. Whimbrel, grey plover, dunlin, turnstones, marsh harriers, black kites and a pair of overflying bee-eaters were all nice to start off with.
We then moved back into the car and quickly got spotless starling and the recently split Iberian magpie. After that we headed for some a private reserve which we had access to. This had a pool with two star targets - little bittern and purple swamphen. We scanned the reeds but nothing seemed to be there. Jon then wandered across to us and said "I've just seen an interesting bird with a red beak". We thought it might have been a waxbill, but quickly worked out it was not a tiny bird and was seen crawling up reeds. He'd only gone and seen the little bittern and had not alerted us to it. Jon's first lesson in birding - don't keep it to yourself. To be fair he did look crestfallen when he saw the scale of his crime but we tried to be gentle with him. It refused to show again, so we headed off round the reserve getting nightingale, hoopoe, waxbill and a few other commoner species. Before we left we had a last go at the pool. Jon managed to redeem himself, refinding the little bittern in virtually the same spot!!

They are really small birds, not much larger than a coot and can disappear really easily, as this one did again. They are present in the UK most years and bred on the Somerset levels but would be a really good bird to see. Much commoner here but still tricky.
Next stop was some salt pans further along the coast. The main target here was Kentish plover which nest here.

They are similar to the commoner ringed plover but more delicate, washed out and with a nice brown cap. They used to nest in the UK but have now been lost to us as a breeding species. They are also a bogey bird for me, having dipped on them numerous times. We also had breeding plumaged curlew sandpipers here plus a Sardinian warbler scratching away nearby.
Finally, and I suppose most surprising was the large flock of flamingos, not just here but over the estuary.

You may note there are no pink birds here. These are all juveniles, the pinker adults having migrated to breeding ground in Africa leaving the juveniles to spend their summer in Iberia.
All in all a very pleasant way to spend a morning, albeit in bloody cold weather. I'm hoping Jon had got the bug now. He certainly now knows the lie of the land and is the 110th best birder in Portugal now according to the BUBO list. Only upwards from here.