After a quiet night we disembark in Bilbao, Spain to glorious weather at 8am making sure we were first in the queue to leave and after a frustrating wait took a taxi up Santurtzi Hill spending three hours looking for birds and butterflies slowly making our way down the hill and back to port.
Santurtzi Hill by Dave Hall
The temperature was already in the high 20s when we arrived and this brought out hundreds of butterflies and were able to identify 16 species including Marbled White, Adonis and Long-tailed Blue and Clouded Yellows and missed Swallow-tail, Wood White Small Heath, Ringlet and Short-tailed Blue found by another bunch of butterfly enthusiasts from the ship.
Birds were very active and we had Turtle Dove, Hoopoe, Red-rumped Swallow 2, Raven, 2, Red-back Shrike 2, Serin 2, Fan-tailed Warbler 4 and Melodious Warblers 3 including one very obliging bird which Pete enjoyed photographing as it fed on the ground in front of him. Other sightings included Hummingbird Hawk-moth 5, Lesser Treble-bar, a Bee-fly species yet to be identified and European Wall Lizard.
Melodious Warbler by Pete Hall
Back on board me and Dave enjoyed tea and cucumber sandwiches in the posh bar before we went up top to join the others scanning the hills overlooking the harbor and found four distant Griffon Vultures soaring together and when we sailed out of the harbor hundreds of Yellow-legged Gulls were loafing on the harbor walls much to the pleasure of John while Common Sandpiper 6 resting on the edge of dockside and a Sandwich Tern flew past.
The return trip started of sunny and calm but by the evening the wind had picked up and a very noticeable swell started to effect those who hadn’t nailed there dinner down and we had a restless night being tossed about. The southern part of bay was not active until we reached deep water and then we managed 30 Fin Whale, 12 Bottled-nosed Dolphin, 8 Striped Dolphin, two very distant Harbor Porpoise and two Killer Whales’s though distant. Sea birds included Med and Sooty Shearwater, Great Skua and an unidentified wader species. Everyone kept there dinner down even though the ship was pitching something rotten.
Richard
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