Paxos News - Wildlife on Paxos in the autumn and winter.

AUTUMN

The autumn is a wonderful time here on Paxos. It's like a second spring. The birds return on their way back to wintering homes and the wildflowers all bloom again.

The Olive groves are full of cyclamen and olives. The birds bring the groves alive with their singing and from time to time we come face to face with Buzzards and other birds of prey. Also flying around the island are a number of the smaller birds including the blackcap warbler and many members of the tit family. One of the most common birds is the red robin who seems to be everywhere and many of them too!

In the olive groves we saw the following during the autumn months and heard that someone had even seen an Egyptian vulture! Cormorants are commonly seen on the front flying around the islets.

From time to time we see the common grey heron in Loggos Bay.
We have a full list of various gulls flying over and around the island, and noisy they are too.

The white ducks in Gaios and Lakka and the geese in Lakka are doing well and survived the cold spells.

The sparrow hawks are fairly regular visitors to our olive groves and so is the common buzzard. We've also seen the beautiful peregrine falcon and kestrels around the olive groves near our house.

On the front in Loggos we have seen the dunlin, and in the car park and also in various other parts of the island a fairly common visitor is the wagtail of which we have recognised the three variants - pied, grey & yellow.

Also common to the island although they'd be better off somewhere else where they weren't a delicacy is the pigeon and the dove.
As those of you who stay in the country when you come to Paxos will know we are well know for the scops owl and we have plenty in the olive groves around our house (we hear them every night - but never see them).

Of the birds that mark the spring we haven't seen any swifts or swallows and only the odd hoopoe (one of my favourites).
Other common birds include the pipit, the robin, the stonechat, the black redstart, the wheatear, many warblers (the most common being the blackcap), the pied flycatcher, and various of the tit family including the long tailed, and the sombre as well as the great tit, and the blue tit. One of the smallest birds around has to be the wren who can be seen all around the various olive groves. There are the cheeky little Spanish / Italian house sparrows in their hundreds as well as the chaffinch and the goldfinch and a little less common is the greenfinch.

That's the list of birds that are easy to spot and recognise for the present time. There are still plenty of birds I don't recognise and I'll try and sort them out - they don't all wait around in the trees to be recognised! The only glimpse I get of many is as they fly above the trees and I see them for a couple of seconds - just long enough to let me know its not one of the birds in this list, but not long enough for me to take details so I can look it up!!!

In the spring we have many more birds passing through and that is a very exciting time to go around bird spotting. The only problem then is identifying the various birds when you just see them for a couple of seconds in amongst the trees of the olive groves or the cypresses.