Mallorca : 21st October 2015 : Punta de Capdepera, Depuradora de S’Illiot and S’Albufereta

Mallorca : 21st October 2015 : Punta de Capdepera, Depuradora de S’Illiot and S’Albufereta.

Today was mainly a drive around with birding as a bit of an add on. Since we had been to the southernmost point of the island yesterday, today we decided to go to the easternmost point. We drove to Capdepera making the mistake of driving through the picturesque but impossibly narrow streets of the old town of Arte.

A little bit traumatised by the maze we emerged eventually onto the by-pass and drove on to Capdepera and then to the coast. Like yesterday, there were gale force winds and heavy cloud.

We did manage to get some Shearwaters which we took to be Cory’s Shearwaters.   We continued on to the seaside town of Son Moll which was a bit like Blackpool on a bad day. The heaving seas gave us more Shearwaters and a single Shag of the local race was sitting on a rock just off the promenade, surprisingly close for a Shag. On another outcrop of rocks was a group of about a dozen Audouin’s Gulls.

Bird Sightings : Punta de Capdepera

By this time it was lunch and since we were driving back west we decided to stop off at Can Picafor which was actually the windiest place yet that day. Keen to get away from this wind, we decided to go to the Dupuradora de S’Illiot near Son Bosc. We took a wrong turn and went down another B road near Son Bosc but his had the happy outcome that we got really nice views of a pair of Black Redstart and Hoopoe; one of several we saw today.

Back at the correct road we passed a large flock of Starlings and there were mixed flocks on all the nearby fields of Goldfinches, Sparrows and Stonechat. On our way down to the Depuradora platform we saw another Hoopoe and from the platform we saw several Marsh Harriers and some Ravens and Kestrel. The ponds were quiet but we did get a Common and a Green Sandpiper. A ringed plover flew through also.

Bird Sightings : Dupuradora de S’Illiot

We left there and tried to negotiate our way to the observation platform Gosney mentions as site 11 of S’Albefura. We tried one track and decided we had got the wrong one so crossed the bridge and tried the other track. After walking for a while, though, we started to doubt if there was any tower there at all. He says it is a 50 metre walk from the parking place to the platform but I think he meant from the parking place to the start of the road that leads through the reserve. When I later checked the parking and platform coordinates on Google maps, it turned out that it was actually 1.7 kilometres to the destination so he has got that a bit wrong. Unsure if we were in the wrong place or whether we would end up walking for ever, we decided to call it a day.
We continued on from there to the road at the back of the S’Albufereta reserve but found it hard to find a parking space and the whole area is busier than you might expect. We rounded off our drive- through of the local sites by going from S’albufereta to our hotel via the “Pollensa back lanes” where we came across two dozen Cattle Egrets grazing in a local field. We also got yet another Hoopoe.

This finished off another interesting day checking out where some of these birding sites are and this may be the most useful purpose of our visits today because the weather and the season conspired to keep the bird species count down. Be that as it may there was plenty to be happy about and we had a very enjoyable day.

Bird Sightings : S’Albufereta and Pollensa Back Lanes