March 9, 2025
Day 20: La Puebla del Rio
It's a naive sort of observation, but I am often amazed at how rivers always seem to know where they are going. They head for the sea, and they never get confused about how to get there. Sometimes I will try to consult a river on this, looking at the direction of the current, but that can be misleading because wind can push things on the surface the "wrong" way. Still the point is that the earth, that nature holds some immutable truths. You can tell yourself that you are going the right way, or your GPS can make some kind of claims, but there is no "fake news" when you are talking directly to the river.
The sun works the same way (funnily enough). Your clock (or as was the case this morning) your wife can tell you to hurry up, because it's breakfast time. But there is a fact check built in to the world - if it's pitch black outside, it's not breakfast time.
What is all this ranting about, then? This morning (morning?) our clocks ("smart"phones) declared 7:00 a.m. wake up time. We leapt from our bed, brushed our teeth, put on our shoes and socks, and opened the door. wtf? Pitch black!
We sort of figured it out. The phones have all those confusing time zone, use network time, respect daylight saving time, type settings. Since we generally don't understand all that, we just set the time to the correct local time, somehow. What happened today was that while the phones continued to maintain "local" time, meaning that they were not influenced by the fact that at our home turf it is 9 (8?) hours earlier, they somehow got wind of the fact that there (not here!, and not in western vs eastern Spain) the clocks had been moved one hour. So they almost got it right, but woke us up one hour too early. That is better than 8 hours too late, maybe.
The lesson is that computers are helpful, and after the fact you can (usually) figure out the convoluted reasons why they screw up, when they do. But, for example, when the GPS in your car tells you to turn right, now!, and you end up in the river, knowing later why it made that error (e.g. map file not updated to account for new road construction) does not help, as you sail along. One thing at least will be sure, you and your car will float accurately to the sea, the correct sea!
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Speaking of the sea, or at least large amounts of water, as I write this (waiting for breakfast) it is pouring rain. I know this not only because the smartphone tells me so, but because I hear it on the roof of the great greenhouse structure here at the hacienda. We were really looking forward to today, in hopes of photographing lots of "illegal" birds at the quarry. But not if the cameras are going to drown. When it gets light (which it will do in its own good "time") we'll have a real look outside and decide what to do.
The rain was coming down hard and we stared both out the window and at the forecast, looking for a sign that this day we had planned for so long would not be ruined. All the signs said that we had no hope. So we put on our rubber pants, and went for it!
Muddy water was flowing across the potholed dirt road that leads to the hacienda, and once again we pushed rather than risk a crash.
We did spot a raptor in the distance quite quickly, and risked pulling out a camera for a snapshot. It turned out to be a Common Buzzard.
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We also began to see flights of black birds wheeling about. These turned out to be Glossy Ibis:
We had two destinations in sight for the day. The first was the thing we had identified from home was Cañada de los Pájaros. It's a water filled former quarry -gravel pit that is set up as a refuge for wintering and endangered birds. To us it would be a chance to photograph birds at closer range, assuming we could get a camera out. The second destination we had only learned about yesterday, from 'Cardo. Called Dehesa de Abaho, it's also a lake, with a visitor centre we knew to be closed, and what was described as the largest breeding colony of storks in Europe.
We passed the Cañada first, and indeed the rain seemed to have let up. But it was before 10, so the gates were not yet open. We carried on to the Dehesa. By the time we got there, the rain was blasting again. We met two mountain bikers out of Coria del Rio, that seemed to be enjoying the mud and wild weather. But not us!
We carried in to the visitor centre, parked the bikes, and snuck through the locked gate. There were storks all about - on low trees, on rooftops. It's the closest we have been to storks in their nests, because the trees were so low and so near.
I really wanted to get a stork in flight closeup, but again the blasting rain made it impossible to have the camera out. We walked most of a trail to the lake, but got driven back by the rain. I did sneak a camera out to record the visitor centre. It had about twenty storks standing on its roof, but I didn't get to show that.
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We began to battle our way back to La Cañada, and here I really began to chill. I was wearing my short gloves and my fingers were frozen and painful. I pulled my hands inside my rain jacket sleeves, but to keep control of the handlebar I had to stretch the coat across my back, allowing that part to chill. If there had been shelter anywhere, we could have pulled some warmer stuff from our pack, but no chance.
We made it to La Cañada and were puzzling over the directions signage when a car pulled up. It turned out to be Augustin and his 9 year old son Jose. Augustin runs the onsite restaurant, and he gave us directions about how to find a certain gate leading to the lady who created and runs the place. And, wait for it, the sun came out - even if only for a bit!
We found the gate and the lady, and paid a very reasonable 20 euros, to enter bird heaven! We ran around exclaiming "Look, Look", and snapped a couple of hundred photos. Some of the birds were exotic species, from Africa and China, and were housed in aviaries. I still went snap, snap, though Dodie pointed out we could neither submit these to eBird nor even really include them on our private Life List. But most of the birds were free and had decided on their own to live at this pond. So we will gladly count those! To do that, it will take some hours doing IDs on them, and then we will insert some of the more interesting ones here in the blog.
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As we walked around the lake, we encountered Augustin and Jose, who had come out under an umbrella. Augustin explained that Jose was quite advanced in learning English, and wanted to guide us around and also speak English. So for a while we acquired a nine year old grand kid.
Jose was extremely personable and cute, and yes, was speaking English quite well.
The weather turned showery again, so we made our way back to the bikes, and over to the restaurant, run by Jose's dad. This now evolved to the same fortuitous situation that we had had at the Moroccan place in Gibraltar. At first, anyway, it was just us in the restaurant. We discussed with dad what would be good for lunch, and settled on chicken paella. We also got a lesson on juice flavours: piña, melocoton, naranja, etc. We chose ours, Jose chose his, and we all settled in at our table to wait for lunch. Except Jose lured me in to a game of ping pong, at a nearby table that had been converted for the purpose.
Out the window by our table, more and more birds floated by. It was just like home, where I often shoot birds that come to our deck, through the dining room windows. And like at home in this situation, no rain!
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Later Jose came to say goodbye. I told him of the towns we were heading to next, and he knew them, at least as far as Granada. Not bad.
We cycled back to our hacienda, with Dodie worrying as we went about the horrible grinding noises the muddy grit was producing with our rim brakes.
It was raining, but we still could do a few snaps:
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After we arrived, I activated a hose I had noticed and blasted the bikes free of grit. Then in addition to lubing the chains, I swapped out all the brake pads. Unfortunately it seems that Dodie's rear brake is again in need of bleeding. We don't really think we'll find someone in Spain equipped to do that. We'll need to keep that brake as well adjusted as possible until we find help for it.
Valerie, the hacienda owner, had put together a nice breakfast for us this morning, including fried eggs for me. She pointed out that in Spain, unlike in France and Germany, fried eggs are common. But she also mentioned pancakes. For tomorrow I am planning to ask if she will do both!
We went through all the bird photos and selected 66 as being pretty good. In terms of species, many of these are duplicates, but there are still about 38 unique species in there. Of these, some are clearly from Africa or elsewhere, but many are local to this part of Spain. My plan is to tell eBird exactly where I am, and give it my 38 or so species. If a species is accepted, we will claim it as a Spanish bird we saw.
Ok, eBird felt that 18 of our 38 were legit local species. In this, they rejected 3 types of swans - which we thought was poopy! Of the 18 legit local species, 12 were new to us for 2025, bringing our 2025 total to 130. And, we added 5 to our LifeList. Pretty good for such a rainy day!
Here are some random choices from what we saw today:
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Today's ride: 27 km (17 miles)
Total: 527 km (327 miles)
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