A picture series of Little owl from my window at home in Cáceres, and a video of a pair

A Little owl (Athene noctua, Sp. mochuelo), perching on an aerial of a ten-story house, in town, in Cáceres. Yesterday afternoon, we heard the double 'ki-iu' call and there it was, on the rooftop of the building across the street. This was a perching favourite for a family of kestrel last spring, too. You see, as I keep saying, Extremadura should translate into English as 'Birdland'. The same as we have Greenland or the Netherlands (the low lands), Extremadura should and no mistake be called Birdland. This afternoon at around 1 p.m. I looked in the same direction just in case and there it was, again. By the time I took out my videocamera, some maintenance work scared it but at around 4:30 p.m. we at home heard the unmistakable call and there it is yet, as I write these very lines. A pity work is also calling me, and a long working weekend, for one, awaits me, depite the beautiful afternoon we're having at the moment. That's life in the mid-sized Spanish city, I suppose.

Saturday: today, in the morning, it called again but it wasn't alone...

... and on Saturday afternoon I finally caught its eye, bright olive, to my delight:

And evening came, fledged with different,
golden hues:



Finally, I got a video of the pair at dusk a week later:

Field Trip: the Monroy-Trujillo (Cáceres-Spain) road: cranes, dehesa and snow backdrops

IN the picture you can see some wintering cranes, full of expectation in a break from feeding from acorn and other, under the canopy of holm-oak dehesa. Their pic was taken on Valentine's Day, this year. A shiny one after the long, hard winter in the Southwest of Spain, in Extremadura. They will soon be going back to their breeding havens in northern Europe: Germany, Scandinavia, Russia...

See the video here:




Link for more pics: album of the trip. I took them on a journey full of great surprises, nice weather after the hard winter days of this seemingly never-ending season and good company. Dehesa, cranes and some of their azzure-winged magpies as companions, a red-legged partridge, kestrel, griffon vulture and some nice backdrops of snow capped mountains of the La Vera district with holm-oak dehesa on the foreground.

I hope you enjoy it as we did!

Jesús

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Videos taken in the past:


Always curious and playful to the layman eye, these azzure-winged magpies (Cyanopica cyana, Sp. Rabilargos, local: Rabúo, Mohino) are actually looking for breadcrumbs and leftovers of fruit and the like that visitors to Monfragüe National Park leave there. After a while, flocks of them will range the area and come closer enough and ready for a snapshot or a video recording like the one here. This was taken during the FIO '06 International Birdwatching Fair of Extremadura, Spain. During a visit to the fair and the park by 1st year Tourism students at the Faculty of Business Studies and Tourism, University of Extremadura, Cáceres, Spain.



A Grey Heron (Ardea cinerea, Sp. Garza real) swallowing a catch, a carp maybe at "El Salor", one of Cáceres nearby reservoirs, Extremadura, Spain.