Kentish Plover | Cliff'sView Blog

Ria Formosa, Algarve

Golden beaches, blue skies, warm weather and good food and wine – sounds like an ideal holiday location.

Add in fantastic bird life and you have a hell of a location! The Ria Formosa lagoon is a designated Natural Park in Portugal’s Algarve, that stretches from Faro to past Tavira in the East. It is a mixture of lagoons, salt pans and islands that attracts hundreds of thousands of birds, especially during migration.

In early Spring, we had the pleasure of a great week in Tavira and the neighbourhood. Tavira itself is lovely and there is a wide variation of sights, habitations and things to do nearby.

Reasonably common are Cormorants of the European race, Sinsensis, which have brilliant white head gear, in breeding plumage.

White Storks take most of the vantage posts, waiting on their sites for their returning mates to join them from Africa or building nests together, accompanied by loud, far carrying ‘clacking’ as they greet each other with their beaks.

The birds can be seen and heard in most of the towns and on old factory chimneys elsewhere.
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In the salt Pans themselves a wide range of waders and larger birds can be found. These include Curlew Sandpipers, Greater Flamingos, Kentish Plover and the speciality species, the Spoonbill.

This unusual bird with a long, strong beak equipped with a spoon-like tip, is hard to miss.

Common in the pans are Whimbrel, Redshanks, Greenshanks, Little Egrets and Black-winged Stilts.

Also to be found are Golden Plover, extravagant Hoopoes and skulking Water Rails.

More remote areas such as on the islands, can throw up Stone Curlews.

Surrounded by oppulent golf clubs, lakes and ponds host many birds that are often easily seen reasonably close. This includes the beautiful Bluethroat, large birds such as Flamingos, Spoonbills and Glossy Ibis as well as ducks such as Gadwall and Red-crested Pochard.
Crested Larks are quite common.

Of course there are also plenty of Gulls – particularly Yellow-legged and Lesser Black-backed as well as terns, particularly Sandwich Terns.

Shrub birds such as Serin, Zitting Cisticola and Waxbills can be seen near the towns while further inland you can see a good range of raptors. We saw Kestrels, Lesser Kestrels, Marsh Harriers and Bonnelli’s Eagles.