Again in June, I wrote concerning the birds of the Macaronesian islands – Azores, Madeira, the Canaries and Cape Verde. At the moment I’m going to zoom into the desert islands within the east of the Canaries archipelago – Fuerteventura and Lanzarote. These islands lie near the western fringe of the continental Sahara Desert. Fuerteventura, the bigger of the 2 islands, is roughly 100 km lengthy and lies at 28oN, 14oW, simply 100 km from the mainland coast of southern Morocco. Lanzarote is a few 50 km lengthy and lies to the north of Fuerteventura, separated by a 13 km-wide channel. For me, residing in Gibraltar, that’s only a kilometre lower than the width of the Strait of Gibraltar. Lanzarote lies slightly farther from the coast, at 125 km from the mainland.
The islands are volcanic in origin, a reality that doesn’t escape you the second you arrive. The islands are dotted with extinct volcanoes which dominate the panorama. The panorama itself is desert – there are few bushes and there’s little standing water. Enormous tracts are stony desert, dominated by darkish lava. In different areas there’s sandy desert, the place yellow and reddish sands predominate. There may be little cowl for birds, principally arid-adapted thorny shrubs, however that doesn’t imply that the birds are essentially straightforward to seek out. A collection of dry years, with exceptionally little rainfall even for these islands, appears to have impoverished the panorama which appears to be like drained. In my private expertise, a variety of these birds are tougher to seek out now than they have been a decade in the past.
The star of the present, for me not less than, is the Fuerteventura Stonechat (Saxicola dacotiae). It’s unique to the island of Fuerteventura, the place you discover it in areas with shrubs, very often near farms which have slightly extra greenery and presumably give entry to water. Within the Eighties, the inhabitants was estimated to be between 650 and 850 breeding pairs however a later survey, in 2005 and 2006, advised there could also be as much as 14,500 people. That’s the total world inhabitants of this chicken. It’s fairly potential that chat numbers, alongside different birds of the desert and semi-desert, fluctuate based on accessible water. Our personal actions are additionally having an affect by elevated water extraction for people and livestock. In depth development for the vacationer trade and really conspicuous and main highway works are including to the “tiredness” of the panorama. Many birders go to these islands and describe them as great for his or her birds however you actually need to look exhausting for these birds and I’m frightened that lots of the species could also be declining in numbers. That’s, not less than, my impression.
Not all is gloom and doom. There’s a resident inhabitants of Egyptian Vulture (Neophron percnopterus majorensis), which is given sub-species standing. This chicken has now gone from the western Canary Islands and had been in decline within the jap islands, with 35 pairs estimated in 2008. I’m reliably knowledgeable that this case has been reversed and that there are actually extra Egyptian Vultures right here than beforehand recorded, with round 100 pairs and 500 people. Safety of nesting websites and the common provision of meals at feeding stations has clearly executed the trick.
