Week One: Birding highlights

A quick review of my first week of birding in Malta

I am taking advantage of the rain sweeping across St.Paul's Bay to look back briefly over the birds I managed to see during my first week in Malta, with the idea of more detailed site and species based blog posts to come in the near future.

With it being winter and Malta being a small island with an overabundance of active hunters, bird diversity is limited at the moment. The ever present Spanish Sparrow is the most common, their winter communal roosts creating unbelievable din. The less common Tree Sparrow can also be found in more rural areas.

Tree Sparrow (Passer montanus). Majjistral Nature Park. January 2016.

The Sardinian Warbler is a common resident, even found in urban gardens, while the tiny Zitting Cisticola is easily noticed due to its distinctive display flight and call. The Blue Rock Thrush breeds on the cliffs around the island, it's song surprisingly beautiful.

Winter passerine visitors include large numbers of Starling, Chiffchaff, Black Redstart, European Robin and Meadow Pipit, while the odd Blackbird, White Wagtail and Western Stonechat are here in smaller numbers.

I visited both the two wetland nature reserves in Malta over the weekend. Simar produced Teal, Moorhen, Coot, Little Grebe and Common Snipe while Ghadira was quieter with more Teal and a Common Sandpiper.

Common Snipe (Gallinago gallinago). Simar Nature Reserve. January 2016

Multiple short sea-watches revealed Yellow-legged Gull, Black-headed Gull and Sandwich Tern with a single Northern Gannet and a couple of Mediterranean Gulls.

The most interesting sighting to date was an adult Baltic Gull seen from Rdum Tal-Madonna on Thursday evening. Considered a subspecies of Lesser Black-backed Gull by some and a full species by others, Larus (fuscus) fuscus breeds around the Baltic Sea and migrates to Sub-saharan Africa. Having seen these elegant, long winged gulls in Israel last Autumn, it was fantastic to see this declining taxa in Malta.

The only new species for me this week was the Yelkouan Shearwater, a species I will become more familiar with as my work for Birdlife Malta on the LIFE Arcipelagu Garnija project continues.

And finally, a Chameleon.

Mediterranean Chameleon (Chamaeleo chamaeleon). Ghadira Nature Reserve. January 2016