Lanzarote Birding 1-14 March 2024

Our Lanzarote holiday this year saw us break with tradition by basing ourselves at Puerto Del Carmen instead of Playa Blanca. The hotel was not as full of Spanish Sparrows as the Princessa Yaiza in Playa Blanca but there were still fair numbers and also frequent flybys by Monk Parakeets of which there seems to be a big population. Collared Doves are everywhere and, of course, Yellow-legged Gulls.

Arrecife
On the 5th March we went to Arrecife and walked out to the Castillo de San José. In the bay, there, we found a Whimbrel and Little Egret and when we moved on to Charco de San Ginés we added Grey Heron and Kentish Plover to our list. In the area we saw a Raven and Carrion Crows

Salinas de Janubio
We didn’t have a car, so we did not do a lot of birding trips but on the 8th March we tried to use the pathetic local bus service to make our way to the Salinas de Janubio. We eventually got a number 161 from Apartmentos Caleton Blanco in Puerto Del Carmen to Yaiza where we were supposed to change to a number 60 bus to get us to the roundabout (Rotunda La Hoya) which is relatively near to the visitor centre. We thought we could scope from there.
As it happens, our first bus was so late that we missed our connecting bus at Yaiza and after waiting there half an hour we gave in and flagged down a passing taxi which took us to the usual place where we would park if we had a car (that is where the road to Los Hervideros is now still closed due to the road falling into the sea.
This gave us the advantage that we could walk around the lake as we would normally do. Although it is supposedly off-limits to the public, you can tell by the many footprints in the sand that it is generally ignored. It does seem to have put off the dog walkers however. They used to make the place a very messy area and I suspect that they scared the birds a lot. Interestingly we noticed that the birds were, in general, less flighty that on our previous visits; perhaps the have got used to people without dogs walking the area. In any case, we managed to get quite close to the Black Winged Stilts and Ruddy Shelduck before they got nervous.
Apart from the Black Winged Stilts and Ruddy Shelduck we also saw a Common Sandpiper, a single Redshank, a pair of Greenshanks, sixteen Turnstones, a Grey Heron and Yellow-legged Gulls. Additionally there were the usual black-necked Grebes on the water near the middle of the lake and we also got good close views of a few Trumpeter Finch. Amazingly we didn’t see a Kestrel though we did get a couple of Canarian Ravens. There were Berthelot’s Pipits aplenty.
We walked around the various bodies of water then returned to the car park. We walked to the Mirador de Janubia and sat outside and had a beer, then walked back to bus stop near the roundabout (1 ½ miles in all).
The buses as unpredictable as usual so instead of going back to Yaiza we eventually got a bus into Playa Blanca bus station where we got a 161 bus back. At least we had seat all the way. The nearest stop to us was Las Vistas (where the Biosphera is) so we walked downhill to the hotel. Pretty bummed out about the unreliability of the busses and glad to eventually get home.

El Jable
The only other planned birding we did was a morning out on El Jable on 12th March. I had looked at the Eco Insider web site that is our usual contact point for Carmen who has been our guide previously. Their web site said they were closed for good but Anne emailed her personally and she actually replied quite quickly. She had family commitments off-island now and in general their bird guiding stuff collapsed over the Covid period when tourism fell off a cliff. Her usual guides had to take full-time jobs elsewhere to make ends meet so that’s what they are all doing now. However, she said that Joachim (who I think guided us before – he is German) would drive us out for the morning and she even arranged for a friend of hers to taxi us from our hotel to El Jable where we met Joachim. She charged us 55 euros (inc 5 euros tip) which is a lot cheaper than getting a taxi there and back and much more convenient. We paid Joachim 120 euros (55 each and a tip) so the total cost for the day was 175 euros. On the plus side we were the only people on the tour so that worked well for us.
Unfortunately we did not see any Stone Curlews but we did manage to get all the other things we expected. I do not know if this was due to the slightly different time of year (March instead of our usual January) or the fact that it had been very dry and there wasn’t much life in the desert. When we were las tin El Jable, it had been quite wet and there was a lot more vegetation. We had also noticed this at the salt pans which were bone dry and flowerless. It seems that the Houbara Bustards start to display with the first rains of the year but since it hadn’t rained much we weren’t sure how much luck we would have seeing them.
As it happens, Anne spotted almost all of the birds, as usual, so we got good views of a pair and also a group of four Bustards in various parts of the desert – although mainly in the area we normally go to on our own (between Munique and Soo). The Cream-coloured Coursers were harder to find but Anne eventually found them for us and again we got a pair and then, later, a group of four. Other regular birds were Southern Grey Shrike, Berthelot’s Pipits, Short-toed Larks, Trumpeter Finch, Collared Dove, Feral Pigeon and, of course, Spanish Sparrow. Perhaps the oddest sighting was a pair of Ruddy Shelduck sitting on a shed roof at a farm in the desert.

That was basically all the birding we managed to get in. We had hoped that it would have been easier to get buses around the island but they were almost always late, almost always full and you had to go into Arrecife first before going out in any other direction which made trips quite long. In all we got twenty-two species but several of them are target birds for us so were good to see. Given the time of year and the difficulty getting around the island we were reasonably satisfied. If only the local transport were better !!

Route taken to Salinas de Janubio

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Route taken to El Jable and around the desert

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Bird Sightings : Salinas de Janubio, Lanzarote 8th March 2024

Species	No
Berthelot's Pipit	20
Black-necked Grebe	5
Black-winged Stilt	10
Common Sandpiper	1
Greenshank	2
Grey Heron	1
Raven	2
Redshank	1
Ruddy Shelduck	6
Trumpeter Finch	2
Turnstone	16
Yellow-legged Gull	1

Bird Sightings : El Jable, Lanzarote 12th March 2024

Species	No
Berthelot's Pipit	20
Collared Dove	8
Cream-coloured Courser	6
Houbara Bustard	6
Lesser Short-toed Lark	10
Ruddy Shelduck	2
Southern Grey Shrike	6
Spanish Sparrow	3
Trumpeter Finch	2

Bird Sightings : Lanzarote Misc 1 – 14 March 2024

Species	No
Carrion Crow	8
Collared Dove	10
Grey Heron	1
Monk Parakeet	8
Raven	1
Spanish Sparrow	20
Whimbrel	1
Yellow-legged Gull	20