My sincere apologies for not having written anything for far too long, but there’s simply been too much going on for me to keep up-to-date.
First it was this year’s migration south which this year was stunning, and we saw a good fall of Flycatchers and Northern Wheatears like those above, which in their turn attracted a great number of raptors like the beautiful juvenile Spanish Imperial Eagle and Red Kite below.
We have also been very involved with the Save Salgados Campaign. We’re going to be handing over the petition to the Portuguese Government Minister concerned on January 8th at 11.00 in Lisbon.
We had another Protest down at the lagoon itself in October, (which was aided of course by Flora and Elias as you can see above), and have been working with the various NGOs, (like Domingos Leitão of SPEA above), who are backing the campaign and we hope to serve an injunction shortly after handing in the petition. We’ve had questions raised in parliament already – principally in calls for an Environmental Impact Assessment to be carried out – and there seem to be several irregularities in the approved planning permission that have come to light which will provide the basis of the injunction.
If you can make it to Lisbon on the 8th it’d be great to see you. The more the merrier, so drop me a line if you’d like more details.
On top of the above there have been other things happening too …
Just as we wound down from the Quinta’s busy season and thought we could relax we were hit by a large storm that provoked quite a lot of flooding nearby as you can see above. The picture shows the road just south of Santa Clara which was well underwater for a day … We were fairly lucky really and were only really hit by a small part of it, (unlike the poor residents of the Algarve who took the brunt), but we still had quite a mess to clear up in the garden, though, thank goodness, no serious damage to the Quinta itself.
Thus it was that the first two weeks of our winter Maintenance schedule was devoted to chopping and clearing all the debris, but it’s been a god-send really as we took the bull by the horns and cleared out a lot of other overgrown or straggly trees and the garden’s now looking even better than ever. Wonderful new views from all sorts of hidden nooks and crannies and what’s even better is that the birds are adoring it too and we have both a lot more movement in the garden and better visibility too.
