Natural Selection

If you didn’t know I am currently on an island off southern Tunisia. It’s an island with an airport, and there’s a causeway with a road on it to the mainland. But even so the lure of a cheap getaway to a genuine Mediterranean island was too good to resist.

I’ve booked on a couple of trips. One is to historical sites around the island. The other is to the Sahara including where Star Wars was filmed, which I can add to Cleveleys beach as places I’ve seen in that category.

I had a mosey round the hotel grounds this morning after breakfast, not least because the tour rep said I shouldn’t do anything until I’d met him to be briefed. The views of Great Grey Shrikes were, as is often the case in the south of the range, stunning.

The picture below was actually taken with my mobile phone, to give you an idea of just how showy the birds were today.

There were also some Spotless Starlings knocking about. Bird names can be confusing at times, but a Spotless Starling is indeed a bird that looks like ‘our’ Starling but without the spots.

I had a couple of trips to some water south of the hotel which is labelled on ‘maps’ on my phone as the ‘Blue Lagoon’. I’ve no idea if that’s an official name, but I can’t find another one. I will write up most of it tomorrow, hopefully with further highlights, but today I will mention one thing.

Going through the loafing Yellow-legged and Lesser Black-backed Gulls I was pleasantly surprised to see a Darvic ringed LBBG at the first time of asking. The superzoom on the camera delivered pictures that enabled me to confirm the code as V.R1F. This individual was ringed in Denmark (full details awaited). It’s well known that Lesser Black-backs often head south for the winter, but it was great to play a part in further understanding of their movements.