Where birders dare

What you see in a landscape depends, to a large degree, on what you are interested in. When I lived in the medieval Basque fortress town of Hondarribia, on the Txingudi estuary, in 1978, my focus was on the political conflict convulsing the region, as a novice reporter for this newspaper. So I was much more likely to notice a revolutionary poster on a lamp post than the buzzard perching on top of it or the fern growing out of it.

My childhood passion for birds was occasionally revived when we drove into the Pyrenees, whose northwestern foothills overlook the town. Huge birds, with wings the size of blankets, soared elegantly overhead. It’s hard to ignore your first vultures.

But it took me nearly 30 years to grasp the ecological significance of the intersection of this relatively low edge of the huge Pyrenean mountain barrier with the once-vast Txingudi wetlands and the Bay of Biscay, and how it funnels continental bird movements in spring and autumn.

"This meeting point is a hot spot that concentrates the flow of a multitude of species between Europe and Africa," says Mikel Etxaniz, one of the authors of a richly informative book called simply Txingudi.

Etxaniz works for Txingudi Wetlands Protected Area, which includes Plaiaundi, a small semi-restored, semi-created wetland sandwiched between the international railway station in Irun and a small airport beside Hondarribia. For many years the site was a rubbish dump. Then part of it was converted into sports fields, before the restoration project got approval, against much local opposition, in 1998.

Today, Etxaniz says, it has become much more popular with urban citizens, many of whom use it to jog or walk their dogs among its green and watery landscapes. It is also one of the few places in the Basque Country where you will regularly see numbers of birders. No wonder: it is a magnet for weary, hungry migrating waders, waterfowl and small perching birds.

I’ve seen dozens of spoonbills, large white birds with most unlikely feeding apparatus, drop out of low cloud into a Plaiaundi pond, already populated with numerous egrets, smaller waders and a scattering of avocets and black-winged stilts; all this just a few dozen metres from a strategically placed hide.

Usually secretive birds such as the water rail and the snipe are exceptionally visible year round here, and the exquisitely plumaged bluethroat is just one of dozens of smaller birds that may swarm through Plaiaundi’s dense vegetation after a migration “fall”.

Botanists can have a field day here as well. Bee orchids grow, and another orchid, the heart-flowered serapia, carpets entire areas in spring.

The Nicaraguan poet and birder Rubén Darío, who had sought out most of the great coastal migration spots of the world, described the estuary as “more beautiful than the Bosporus itself” more than a century ago. But, like so many great wetlands, including our own, most of it has since been drained and turned into agricultural and building land.

Impressive as Plaiaundi, and the nearby larger restored area of Jaitzubia, are, Etxaniz stresses that they are only fragments of Txingudi’s former biological glory. But at least a staging point has been re-established for long-distance avian travellers.

Many migrating birds, of course, are not particularly attracted to wetlands and do not drop into Txingudi at all.  They go straight through – or way above –  the lower Pyrenean passes. Three of these, Lizarrieta, Lindux and Organbidexka, are all within a couple of hours’ drive of the Basque coast, though you need cool nerves to navigate some of the roads on these borderlands of French and Spanish Navarre.

Whenever wind and light combine to motivate large numbers of birds to suddenly shift in large numbers you may see exceptional sights from these dramatic locations. Vast flocks of wood pigeons move south in autumn, and Eurasian cranes and white storks are frequently seen, as are geese. The much rarer black stork crops up also.

Perhaps more surprising is the large-scale movement of birds of prey, including buzzards, kites and eagles, sometimes offering opportunities to compare species that you don’t otherwise see in the same patch of sky.

A word of warning here, however, from a veteran local bird observer, Gorka Gorospe: the sky is vast here, and although the birds sometimes do come in spectacularly close to the passes, they are more frequently very high overhead. They are hard to spot without a good telescope, careful scanning and a great deal of patience and concentration, although hundreds may be passing at a time.

I hiked the Lizarrieta ridge trail in mid-September and saw only a single short-toed eagle, just overhead. Then I headed up to Lindux, at what was said to be a particularly good moment, and found just a handful of griffon vultures and a couple of ravens, both year-round residents.  I probably just wasn’t diligent enough in my scanning. Anyway, I seemed to have the silence of half the Navarran Pyrenees to myself on a sunny day, which felt rather good.

However, what looks at first sight like a  pristine “natural” paradise is in fact a very humanised landscape, and has been managed by farmers and foresters for millenniums.

Both Etxaniz and Gorospe warn that two conservation problems familiar to us in Ireland, the abandonment of traditional land-management practices and the intensification of agriculture, present major threats to the still abundant bird life in their region.

The first problem is perhaps harder to grasp. Abandoned small farms quickly revert to forest in this climate. Although that may sound good for the environment, traditional farms created many niches for species that need open space, especially when so much former open space has now been occupied by urbanisation and intensive agriculture.

Public support for the conservation of this key European bioregion remains weak, they both concede. “We need to make a bigger and better effort to communicate the necessity of conservation, and the benefits it brings society,” says Etxaniz.

It all sounds rather familiar.