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Portugal Trip - Day 11 - Portugal

The amphibian and cicada chorus continued well after bedtime last night and was quite the lullaby. Great stuff.

Adding to the late night feel-good was yet another clear and light-pollution-free star-filled sky, and - as a bonus - we were graced with a splendid new moon as well.

Come morning, even the overnight trail cam had muscled in on the action with the capture a passing badger. All in, a very cool camp!

Today's drive has been equally satisfying. We've basically followed the Spanish / Portuguese border north, spending AM in Spain and PM in Portugal. The roads have been just sublime. We've literally encountered hardly any traffic all day. 

Approaching lunchtime, we were treated to a splendid sighting of a short-toed snake eagle. The bird was perched on a shrub quite close to the road and we were able stop, get the bins on it and resolve its finest details, right down to it's orangey-yellow eyes.

Lunch was spent quite literally on the border at a bridge over the river Erges near the Portuguese settlement of Segura, and what a fantastic and peaceful place or was. The vistas and ambiance were splendid and amongst the vast bird life action encountered there we spotted two more new species in the form of Spanish sparrow and blue rock thrush. This is a good place to know.

Post border crossing we continued to bumble north stopping only for perishable provisions before nosing the truck into the Serra da Malcata Natural Reserve and diving down a promising-looking track.

The reserve is reputed to support lynx and wolves so we forged quite deep into the network of tracks before finding a spot we deemed would be good to overnight.

All was well for an hour or so before cometh some angry hunters. Basically, in a mixture of Portuguese, Spanish and English we were informed that we (purportedly) weren't allowed to stay where we were, and if we persisted we may well be shot.

We decided this might be one of those occasions on which it was best to pick our battles, and so moved out of the network of forest tracks back towards the entrance we'd used and that's where we're currently to be found.

To be fair, it's no worse a place than the place we had to quit: both have so far been pretty light on wildlife of any description. Perhaps not helping is the weather. Things turned quite dramatically mid-afternoon with a noisy thunderstorm and since that point it's been pretty cold, damp and miserable. Naturally, that didn't stop Emma-the-Bedraggled from running.

This post was composed at 22:00 on Wednesday 2nd April from our intended overnighting spot:
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Portugal Trip - Day 10 - Spain

The morning dawned cloudy and comparatively cool, which lent itself well to a run around the complex of forest tracks we'd slept amongst. Before we set off, Emma-the-Mammal-Tracker reported lots of signs of overnight boar activity and sure enough, just as she was finishing her run, she spotted a large (probably) male boar passing purposefully over one of the tracks she'd just run down. Cool but scary.

We'd taken different routes by that stage and I couldn't compete: the best I could muster from my route was an entirely unscary (to people) great-spotted woodpecker.

The day's drive has been another un-trafficked road bumble-fest (apart from traversing Badajoz, which was awful) that gave up some splendid vistas both natural and cultural. The best natural sighting was of a chilled red fox sitting nonchalantly in a field, whilst the best cultural sighting was of the castled settlement of Albuquerque.

We are, self-evidently, back in Spain. There were two reasons for this choice. The first was that (notwithstanding Badajoz) dipping back in provided the most direct (bumbly) route to our next Portuguese national park target. The second was the price of fuel: ~€1.70/l in Portugal, whilst in Spain we filled up at €1.47/l. A no brainer!

Tonight's intended overnighting spot is another quiet track affair amongst a mix of habitats. We have some open, boulder-strewn country, a good-sized pond and some harvested cork-oak woodland to gaze out over. You may even have uncorked a wine bottle that relied upon the bark of the tree in the pic at some point. 

It's been very birdy and we've also had another good fox sighting. As night's crept in we've also enjoyed / endured an excellent cacophony of cicadas and amphibians calling. Add in the whoops and melodious tones of bee-eaters, hoopoes and cuckoos and it all sounds very tropical.

This post was composed at 22:00 on Tuesday 1st April from our intended overnighting spot:
N 39.29169°, W 06.97805°
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=loc:39.29169%2C-06.97805 
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Portugal Trip - Day 10 - Random Images

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