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A Bee-eater spreads its wings ready for the long flight south

The picture above was taken a week or so ago from Birding in Portugal‘s Golden Oriole Hide in the Quinta’s garden as they got ready for the start of the Autumn Migration. They’ve left now, along with the Golden Orioles too, dead on time as ever. I find it extraordinary that they’re so punctual; over the last twenty years or so I’ve been keeping records of when our local Bee-eaters arrive and depart, and they’ve never been more than 36 hours out during all those years, arriving on the 1st April and leaving on the 31st August.

But enough gossip, let’s get down to some nitty-gritty … Great news from Salgados! This is the wetland in between Armação da Pera and Albufeira that we’ve been trying to save from being destroyed by over-rapacious development. I was asked to keep stumm about this over the last year as we didn’t want my soap-boxing to spook the judges while they ruled on the admissibility of the corrupted Environmental Impact Assessment carried out by the developers.

I say “corrupted” as the developers EIA somehow failed to note the largest colony in the world of a CITES’ red-listed species of plant! This is Linaria algarviana and it only exists in the Algarve … on the proposed development site this species has one of its last strongholds and this is made even more important by also being the largest. Rather surprising that they missed it, don’t you think?! Any way, we noticed its absence from the report even if they didn’t in their assessment and we raised a stink and challenged it, and for the past year or so it has been going through the courts, but now the judgement has been made and it has gone in our favour with a total ban on any development until an impartial assessment has been carried out over the course of the next year.

We’re not out of the woods by any means, but for the time being we should celebrate this small stepping-stone victory and thank those hard working souls behind the scenes who have gained us some breathing space, principally SPEA, A Rocha, Quercus, Almargem and their lawyers who have got us this far.

Our local Kingfisher

Next bit of good news is the Birdfair Raffle winners’ names, and the Kingfisher above is one of the birds you’re most likely to see when you claim your prize, as this was shot from our Water Rail and Kingfisher Hide down by the riverside a couple of days ago.

This is a Raffle Prize that we give away every year when we attend the British Birdwatching Fair in Rutland, UK. This Fair is the largest of its kind in the world and is always one of the highlights of our year, for as well as running the Raffle on our stand there, (whose prize you can read about below), we also give away a week’s accommodation as an item in their auction to help raise funds for species protection.

The Raffle itself has the same prize as that of the auction – the first prize is one week’s accommodation in a room for two here at the Quinta anytime between now and the end of October 2015 or from March 15th to July 15th 2016 – subject to availability of course! – and the winner this year is Liz Hughes.

Congratulations Liz, and thanks for contacting us; we look forward to welcoming you to the Quinta.

One of the runner-ups has contacted us and wins three mid-week nights accommodation at the same remarkable venue during the same time-frame and with the same conditions, so we look forward to welcoming him here too.

For those unlucky enough not to win this year, my commiserations … better luck next year.

Polishing the cutlery

This time of year seems to be a never-ending series of meals – and before each one all the cutlery has to be polished. Over the last few weeks I’ve taken to doing it myself when I can, (yes, it took me by surprise too!), and the above is a normal August meal’s worth. I know, a bit pernickety to polish them and then lay them down like this just to pick them all up again a couple of minutes later and lay up, but it looks nice for the short while they’re there!

Ready for the “Off”

Ten minutes later and, bingo, the table’s laid …

Lively conversation

… and ten minutes after that, aided by a nice glass of wine or two, there’s the hubbub of lively conversation while we all get stuck in to another of Daniela’s delicious meals …

Barbie Pink skies

… while outside the window Nature lays on another stunning light show for us across the lake!

Oh, I nearly forgot, our new website is going live any day now, (so let me know what you think please), and one more thing … the Quinta’s exhibiting at the Birdfair in Rutland next weekend so come and see us if you’re able. We’re on Stands 90 & 91 in Marquee 2 under the name “Birding in Portugal“, (not “Birds and Nature” or “Birdwatching Tours in Portugal” who are one of our dastardly competitors!) . See you there!

Back in the day!

Through sheer force of geographics we’ve always been “eco” here, long before it became fashionable, and slowly, slowly we’re always working towards becoming better and reducing our carbon footprint; I doubt there are many “establishments” our size in Europe that are so totally reliant upon solar energy even nowadays. To begin with, more years ago than I care to remember actually, our sole source of light was candles and paraffin lamps like that above … then we managed to get hold of some small solar panels – from Wales if I remember correctly – and rigged up a second-hand car battery and 12 volt lights, then we doubled it all up and became 24 volt. The light was never enough though, and trying to run a business – even a tiny one like the Quinta was back then – on 24 volts was a right headache, so over the years we slowly expanded our solar arrays to become 240 volts like everyone else, but with a huge bank of batteries, and this process of expansion has continued ever since. This winter we took another huge leap forward with a whole new array and a new inverter.

This array was going to be BIG, and to start with we had to give it a solid foundation with an 8 cubic mt reinforced base,

The “Cage”

four below ground and four above, (and it’s nice to have a post with two photos of Archie, some 25 years apart),

New Solar array base

and now it’s all operational, pumping out megawatts!

The new Solar Array

We also built a birdwatching hide down in Santa Clara this winter, overlooking the slow-moving river, and have had all kinds of brilliant sightings from it – Water Rails, Bullfinches, Cirl Buntings, Rock Buntings, Cetti’s Warblers, Otters and even yesterday a trio of Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers. We built it not just for “Birding in Portugal” but for the community in general, but, as ever, we had to keep the costs as low as possible, so we built it more or less from scrap and old building materials we had left over from building projects at the Quinta.

Building the Water Rail Hide

Old pallets, shuttering boards, old floorboards and bits of roof, anything we could lay our hands on, and it’s turned out better than even we expected, (probably because we had the help of the SAS!), with wicked views over a water lilly covered pool with reeds to our left and right.

The view from the hide

Our primary species here was Water Rails, and in that we haven’t been disappointed as there’s a pair nesting nearby and we regularly see them walking along the shore opposite oblivious to our presence – a fantastic opportunity for photographers as they’re a rareish and extremely shy species scarcely ever seen out in the open. We normally see them on their own, but occasionally they take a stroll together and I’ll close this post with a shot of the couple – to see two together like this is as rare as dragon poo in Oxford St!

Success!

The Week on Socrates

I don’t enjoy crowing – but I am so fed up of living in a state where corruption on a truly massive scale is simply taken for granted, something that is so normal as to rarely warrant a mention in everyday life, that I am overjoyed to bring you the news that our last Prime Minister is now awaiting trial in Evora Prison on charges of corruption, money laundering and tax evasion.

The article above is from The Week, (a newspaper that I endorse as being bias-free, enjoyable to read, interesting and informative, and a subscriber to which I have been ever since its inception), and it pretty much sums it up – apart from some lovely intercepted phone call quotes along the lines of, “I’m far too big a fish for them to catch – they wont have the balls to try to get me”. This is the man that until a few years ago was the leader of our country.

Following on from the latest bank failure where it was just the same, all buddies “loaning” each other cash that wasn’t theirs and truly believing that if they had all their own wealth in their family members’ names they could never get caught, it is a welcome piece of good news when a courageous judge goes for the very highest. We await the fall-out and hope against hope that it is the start of a new story for this beautiful land.

Another piece of good news – apart from the awards that we’ve been given this year by Tripadvisor that I’ve mentioned before – is last week’s article in The Telegraph where the Quinta is chosen to be one of the top 5 Activity Holidays in Portugal.

Happy New Year to you all and I hope we see more than our fair share of you this coming year!

My apologies for such an absence.
The Quinta’s been buzzing lately and time is always short during the Spring as our Nature activities here mean early morning starts.
Today however I have some news for anyone interested in our battle to save Salgados.
For those who don’t know, this is a wetland down in the Algarve and here at the Quinta we’ve been actively engaged for over ten years in trying to save it from an unwanted development.
There’s a full report over on my birding site, but in short we’ve discovered the largest colony in the world of a red-listed plant, Linaria algarviana, growing on the site to be developed, so we have hopes that this will put the kybosh on the destruction of the site. Nothing in the bag yet of course as there are some large players with deep pockets involved, but at least there is hope and the issue is beginning to be reported on by the local news channels.
What else? Oh yes, despite my rant back in January, we’re rather proud to have won the industry’s highest Guest-generated award!

It’s not often that I become this wound-up – well, not that I show publicly in any case – but right now I’m steaming. It’s all to do with Tripadvisor.

It’s a brilliant concept of course, (and we wish sometimes that we had the same sort of thing for some of our less welcome guests, but that’s another story!), but what a lot of people don’t realise is that it’s not free. It looks free, sure, and of course it remains free to the general public and if you don’t want to “use” its marketing potential, but at this end of the equation we pay for our “Business Listing”, and for those of us who do promote our position in its rankings, for those of us who DO use it, it is an expensive tool, and this is especially so of places like the Quinta, i.e. small independent enterprises.

To date it has been worth the money – even if it was expensive – but I’m not so sure any more and the attitude shown towards us by this massive company has left such a sour taste in our mouths that we will be actively searching alternatives from now on.

Y’see, we’ve always told potential guests, “Check us out on Tripadvisor and see what other guests have said about us.” In other words we’ve increased their hits in our own tiny, tiny way, but there must be many others just like us around the world, and taken together we must be HUGE, and this is where their attitude and actions towards us have made me so upset.

They have just re-vamped their website – not that anything needed re-vamping as it worked fine just as it was – but with this unnecessary re-vamping has come a price increase. “So, what’s so bad about that?”, I hear you ask. Well, they’ve worked out their price rise via our Tripadvisor ranking and the number of rooms we have, that’s what.

In essence it means that the better we are the more we have to pay; if we’ve put a load of effort in over the years to be a wickedly good place to have a holiday and asked our guests to write reviews on their site, sent potential guests there and generally interacted positively with them, thus increasing their hits and securing excellent rankings on their site, WE ARE CHARGED MORE than someone who never sent anyone their way at all.

It’s not peanuts either; last year the cost was 350 euros – this year it has increased by 17.5%, (yes, that’s not a typo – in the worst recession in a century they’ve increased their charge to us overnight by 17.5%) to 446 euros.

You will understand why I am not putting a hyper-link to their site into this post … I will be researching this further starting here …

Now, where’s that stiff drink?