PORTUGAL: TAGUS RIVER ESTUARY AND SR. LISBOA RESTAURANT

 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.

Here's another photo taken through Bernardo's scope. Look at the detail on the claws and the bug in this beautiful bird's beak. It tis an Iberian yellow wagtail--yeah, not something I would be able to come up with a name for without help.

Bernardo even took some video with my phone using his scope.

We had both beautiful scenery and perfect weather for birdwatching.

One of my favorites, the gray heron. When it unfolds its neck and takes flight, it is an imposing bird.

Here is a common shelduck, maybe not so common because we only saw one.

Wait wait WAIT! A flamingo photobomber?  

And not just one, but a whole FLAMBOYANCE of flamingoes!

This was our favorite birding surprise of the trip. We had never seen so many flamingoes this close in the wild, not in Kenya or Tanzania or anywhere else in the Africa. Bob had gotten a great view of a lone flamingo in the Galapagos Islands, but we saw hundreds on this bird watching excursion. Who knew there were flamingoes in Portugal? We didn't!

Bernardo told us the ones we saw were mostly teenagers and hadn't developed their darker pink color yet. The older, stronger flamingoes had flown off to another point in their migration route.

I love these awkward, gangly birds.

After the flamingoes, these kentish plovers seemed pretty ordinary. Heck, EVERY species of bird seemed ordinary.

Bernardo knew all the best  places to look for birds in the Tagus River Estuary Reserve.

An abandoned crab shell:

. . . an abandoned (thank goodness) snake skin:

. . . and an abandoned shell:

Bernard spotted a tree full of birds:

One little egret . . . 

. . . surrounded by three or four black-crowned night herons.

This yellow-crowned bishop was easy to spot, even without the scope, because of its luxurious golden yellow feathers and dramatic black markings.

Besides birds, Bernardo drove through a grove of a kind of tree we hadn't seen before, cork oak. We learned that Portugal is the top producer of cork in the world, providing 52% of all the world's cork and as many as 40 million cork bottle stoppers a year. Cork oak trees, which provide that cork, cover about 8% of the total area of Portugal and make up about 28% of its forests.  Cork farming takes a lot of planning and patience. It takes about fifteen years for a cork oak to mature, and then raw cork is harvested from the trunks and large lower branches of these trees, peeled away in thick. spongy layers every nine years.

This was the densest cork oak forest we saw. Usually it seemed there were just random trees here and there, but that's probably because we were driving to places where we would see birds, not trees.

The twisting branches and small leaves remind me a lot of the live oaks we have in Southern California.

When it is harvested, the tree is marked with the last digit of the year so that farmers know when to come back. The tree below left, then, was last stripped of its cork in 2016 and will be due for harvest again in 2025. The tree below right is marked with a "2" for 2022 and will be harvested again in 2031. Note the difference in color between the two trees. It is easy to see which one has been recently harvested. 

Looking up the trunk, we could see two rings that indicate this tree has had the cork harvested twice. 

Above the harvest line, we could see the dense, spongy cork bark.

Eagle-eyed Bernardo noticed something else high up in another cork tree:

A booted eagle sitting on a nest was keeping an eye on us.

We learned on our trips to Africa how helpful guidebooks can be, if only to help us know what to look for. Bernardo showed us these drawings of a hoopoe (in red box), a bird I had certainly never heard of before, although Bob had.

And then there one was in real life, just walking around in a little grassy area kind of like a center median where Bernardo often sees them.

It looks exactly like its portrait. 

 

Stork nests are everywhere throughout Portugal. It is typical for them to build their nests on power poles. 

Here is another nest we saw later in the day. Later in our trip we saw a tower with seventeen distinct nests on it, a true Stork Condominium. 

The storks like to nest near the rice fields where there are plenty of small fish and other animals living in or near the water. They are huge and unmistakable in flight.

Another great spotting and photo by Bernardo, a European serin, which is the smallest species of finch in Europe. 

On one of the side roads, we drove past a fire that had just started in a dry field.

We were there before the fire engines, but by the time we had driven past and had this view from a farther away, we could hear sirens and see flashing lights.

All the excitement didn't rub off on these two,

I couldn't help but think of the children's book The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf (although it is set in Spain, not Portugal).

This looks a lot like the American Southwest. 

It was really fun to see a side of Portugal that most tourists don't bother to see.

After Bernardo dropped us off at our hotel, we checked Yelp to see if there was a good place to catch an early dinner nearby. We found a restaurant with almost a 5-star rating and just two €€ signs, meaning it wasn't exorbitantly expensive. It was also about a half-mile away, a distance we felt we could walk, even after a long day, so off we went. Unfortunately, it was uphill.

It has a pretty unassuming exterior. We would have missed it if we hadn't had the actual street number.

We hit the jackpot with Sr. Lisboa Restaurant. First, we were very lucky to get a seat as they are a small restaurant and were fully booked for the evening, but we had come early enough that they felt they could work us in. After we were seated, we heard them turn away several other people who followed us. 

The food was spectacular. We started with a plate of bread with three kinds of butter and dipping oil. 

That was followed by octopus tentacle in chimchurri sauce:

. . . then a green salad . . . 

 . . . followed by a cod filet on top of mashed potatoes that formed a volcano, complete with buttery lava.

Our third main course, crispy pig, and it was also delicious. 

I think we agree this was our best meal in Lisbon.

Our hotel was in a shopping area, and since it was our last evening in Lisbon, I did a little shopping on the way back to our hotel and purchased this unique papier-mâché nativity.

I really enjoyed Lisbon and would love to go back for a few more days.