Tagus River Estuary - Portugal (June 2022)

The Tagus River is the longest river in the Iberian Peninsula. It arises in mid-eastern Spain and flows 626 miles (445 in Spain, 29 along the shared border of Spain and Portugal and 171 in Portugal) where it empties into the Atlantic Ocean, on the south side of Lisbon. The Tagus Estuary is its mouth and covers 131 square miles and is the largest estuary in western Europe. The water in the estuary has a maximum depth of 33 feet. The Tagus Estuary Natural Reserve was established in 1976 and covers 35,070 acres. Most of it is in the upstream (northern) area of the estuary, but with a small portion in the vicinity (both north and south) of the eastern end of the Vasco de Gama Bridge. We had a guide that picked us up from our hotel in Lisbon at 7:30 a.m.. We crossed the Vasco da Gama Bridge, the second longest bridge in Europe. We basically drove counter-clockwise around the upper end of the estuary, crossing the Tagus River at Vila Franca de Xira, and returned to Lisbon on the east side of the estuary. I counted 38 species of bird, including 20 I'd never seen before. Birds I saw included the crested myna, Eurasian jay, European greenfinch, great cormorant, little grebe, European honey buzzard, pallid and common swifts, black-winged stilts (nesting and with chicks and juveniles), nesting Kentish plovers, a nesting booted eagle, a common shelduck, many greater flamingos, glossy ibis, black kite, Iberian magpies, yellow-crowned bishops, mallards, black-crowned night herons, Eurasian collard doves, gull-billed terns, a little bittern, little terns, western yellow wagtails, a couple of Eurasian hoopoe, European bee-eaters, a European serin, white-bellied barn swallows, a red-rumped swallow, carrion crows, cattle egrets, Eurasian spoonbills, European stonechats, grey herons, purple herons, little egrets, white storks and a Eurasian kestrel.

Publicado el julio 16, 2022 05:42 TARDE por rwcannon57