June 25, 2022
During the Covid pandemic, Bob somehow got into birding. I'm still not sure how it happened. He has always loved wildlife photography, and so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that he narrowed his focus to what he could see a lot of nearby. His interest in birds expanded as we took several trips to Texas during the last few years and on our trip to Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands in March.
But who knew that PORTUGAL would be a birding paradise? Certainly not I.
Bob hired a private birding guide, Bernardo Barreto, to take us out looking for birds for a full day. He was an excellent guide, and in one day we saw 53 different species of birds. (For more about Bernardo, see his website here.) But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Bernardo picked us up at 7:30 AM. On our way out of town we saw this great mural. I have no idea what it means, but I like the anachronistic combination of the clothing and the can.
We traveled across the Vasco da Gama Bridge, opened in 1998. At 10.56 miles long, it is the longest bridge in the Europe Union. As a point of comparison, the Coronado Bridge in San Diego is 2.1 miles long, and the San Francisco Bay Bridge is 1.7 miles long. (On the other hand, the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in Louisiana is almost 24 miles long.)
The Tagus River ends its 626-mile journey in Lisbon and provides the city with its main port. Its estuary is the largest one in Western Europe. It is a critical spot for bird migration, hosting over 50,000 birds during the winter. A 35,000-acre nature reserve was established in 1976 to preserve the wetlands.
Bernardo had an impressive scope mounted on a tripod. The scope had something like 600x magnification. That, combined with his amazing eye for finding birds, made for a very successful day.
Another really amazing thing about Bernardo is that he can take pictures with a cell phone through the scope. I tried doing it, and I had 0% success. Almost all the bird pictures I have here were taken by Bernardo with my phone through his scope. Most of the time I have cropped the photo and rotated it, but they are still pictures he took.
The first bird we saw was a black-winged stilt.
