My son Leo has been at home for the summer but he is soon off to London for a work placement with PWC as part of his degree course at York. Despite having been here for several weeks we never managed to organize a fishing trip. This evening we put this right. Continue reading
Category: Natural history
An odd thing happened a couple of weeks ago. We put our names down for a friendly padel event at our local padel courts. This was a competition of sorts (winners were promoted, losers demoted and their was a lot of swapping around of players). The most interesting thing was not the tournament, though, or any of the players. It was the birds.
When we arrived at the courts there was a Harris hawk sitting on a post and a barn owl on the ground. Another hawk was also nearby. As it happens all three birds belonged to a local falconer who was competing in the padel tournament with us, and the three birds were tethered while their owner was out on court working up a sweat. Continue reading
It has been a few years since I visited the National Park at Montfragüe in Extremadura but the chance arose last week and I didn´t let it go begging. Montfragüe is about half an hour´s drive north of Trujillo and runs in an east-west direction. The Río Tajo passes through it on its westward journey, ultimately to the Atlantic close to the city of Lisbon. In the National Park at Montfragüe the Tajo meets one of its major tributaries, the Tietar which joins it from the Northeast.
The Tagus is a hell of a river. It is over 1000km long making it the longest River in the Iberian Peninsula. About two thirds of the river runs through Spain before passing into Portugal. At Montfragüe it is already a very sizeable river although there it is a little constricted by an ancient seam of Ordovician rock at the famous Salto de Gitano. Here the Tajo struggles to push through the unyielding rock which is thrown into vertical cliffs. The skies here are full of vultures. Continue reading
The ibex is what the locals would call the “cabra de montaña” or mountain goat, which stands to reason because it is a kind of wild goat and the mountains are where you will find them.
I was lucky enough to come close to a female ibex and her kid the other evening as I was paddling around in my float tube casting into the margins. The two ibex showed little alarm and spent a while grazing in the vegetation close to the waters edge and I was lucky enough to get some reasonable photographs. Continue reading
From time to time I have come across the remains of crayfish on the banks of the Guadalhorce river but had never seen any live specimens until yesterday evening when I chanced upon three individuals which I must have disturbed from the marginal vegetation. They scurried out into the shallow river leaving a trail of disturbed silt in their wakes. Continue reading
I´ll let you in on a little secret. One of the most beautiful places I have seen recently is where the Río Verde joins Concepción Reservoir near the town of Istán. It is not easy to reach and if you get there, chances are you will have the place to yourself.
Last weekend I paddled my float tube about a kilometer to reach it and it was well worth the effort. The river was crystal clear and flowed through a beautiful rock pool before making its way into the reservoir. Continue reading
Like nearly every fly fisherman I know I have a particular soft spot for trout and was very excited recently by the prospect of fishing for the little wild trout of the upper Guadalquivir. I caught only one of these but I was nevertheless delighted. It may only have been little but it was as pretty as a picture. Continue reading
The Guadalquivir is a hell of a river. It is over 400 miles long making it the fifth longest in the Iberian Peninsula and the second longest to keep itself within Spain and not to go wandering off into Portugal.
We spent a couple of days fishing the upper part of the river around the town of Mogón and further upstream into the section that falls within the Parque Natural Sierras de Cazorla, Segura y Las Villas.
You should see the river here. It is just beautiful and it provides the wild trout with everything they need; cold, clear and richly-oxygenated water that conveys the aquatic invertebrates and terrestrial insects that they need to sustain themselves. Continue reading
Every now and then my wife tells me off for using bad language. She points out that a blog post is no place for profanities and so I will refrain from using them in describing the tiger mosquitos that are causing a plague on the lower reaches of the Guadalhorce river.
Tiger mosquitos are not endemic. They hail from Southeast Asia but they have become quite widespread as a result of their association with humans. I must confess I did not know very much about them but am now a little wiser having read about them on Wikipedia. The article usefully pointed out that they are not to be confused with tigers which, apparently, are wild mammals! Continue reading
I don´t know about how high the cotton is but fish are certainly jumping, or at least they were last Saturday. The Guadalhorce was looking good after having been shaken up a little by recent rains. The fish were in the fast water and I managed to catch some barbel, 10 I think, in the faster stretches.
Heading back home I stopped to take in the view of the fish milling around in the water at the foot of a weir. There were mullet, gypsy barbel and carp all packed together just behind the white water. Continue reading
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