ABDU

We’re birding again. We’ve now spent quite some extra time doing nothing at home. Both Mårten and Erik had some personal stuff to do, but now we’re in the air again. We have managed to tick off some tricky birds at home though.

• The Siberian Accentor lingering in Lindesberg was important.
• The Arctic Redpoll is not a particularly uncommon bird in Sweden during winter, but it’s far from trivial to find. Could have been missed with some bad luck
• And yesterday, we had twitch tour to Skåne (Scania) to pick up the wintering American Black Duck that’s been there for several winters now.
• Tundra Bean Goose yesterday is also a good bird.

And tomorrow we’re leaving for Morocco. We have been wavering back and forth on the tactics in Morocco. We want to go to Mauretania, initially we though we should do that on a separate trip. Then we found out it’s possible to actually acquire Visas in Rabat, making it possible to drive across the border from Western Sahara to Mauretania. We’ve decided to skip Mauretania on this trip, and do that later on our return trip to Morocco. It’s possible to fly there and acquire a visa at the airport.  It would be too much boring driving to do all of Morroco/West Sahara and then also Mauretania in 3 weeks.

As a WP lister though, it feels as if Mauretania is very important, flipping through the Birds of Africa south of Sahara book shows quite a number of African species that ought to be possible on the WP southern most border. One can always drool over the possibility to find a new species for the region. Dream on.

On a different topic, yesterday we got to see a flock of Grey Partridges.

When we ‘re spending time together, in the car or just hanging out, we often speculate over different species. Where/when will see this or that. Grey Partridge is such a species, It’s not especially common anywhere included in our itenerary, it would have been possible to miss. On the other hand, the bird is not sufficiently rare to deserve a directed effort. Spending a few days in Skåne is by no means a sure way of seeing the Grey Partridge. Anyways, yesterday a Common Buzzard scared a small flock that took to it’s wings. Nice. It wouldn’t surprise me that when this year is over, we’re lacking something that is pretty common, like maybe Spotted Nutcracker or Three-toed Woodpecker and there is no time left to repair the damage.