My first ever sighting of a Great Bustard (Otis tarda) at the "Las Lagunas de Vilafáfila"

My first ever sighting of a Great Bustard (Otis tarda) at the "Las Lagunas de Vilafáfila" - or Vilafáfila freshwater Lagoons, near Zamora on the windblown Spanish cereal steppes. 

We visited the Lagoons and bird hides around them yesterday in an attempt to avoid the relentless rainfall that has been battering Vila Real, where I live, for the last 2 -3 days. It was still pretty windy and wet on the steppes, but nowhere near as bad as the weather we left behind us in Portugal when we set off in the morning.
The Spanish cereal steppe is a flat, almost totally treeless landscape, cleared centuries ago for cereal cultivation, sheep herding and hunting of the Great Bustard and plentiful hare. Many of the shallow lakes and lagoons that once dotted the steppes have been ploughed over for cereal crop production.
Somewhere in size between a large and leggy turkey and a very vertically challenged Cassowary, the Great Bustard is one of the heaviest flying birds alive today. It is found on steppe type landscapes across Europe and, considering the size of the bird and the relatively flat and featureless nature of steppes, it makes good (some would say easy) hunting. So good, in fact, that it was gunned out of existence in the UK and declared extinct on the sceptred isle by the mid 1800's. It is now a protected species under the European Birds Directive.
I had heard of this large and fascinating bird back in the day of "The World About Us" wildlife documentaries, when documentary makers fully understood that the viewer's attention span was greater than a gnat's because they had tuned in to see something that really interested them. I clearly remember watching a programme about the reintroduction of these birds onto Salisbury Plain, but had never seen one until yesterday.
A group of Bustards is kept in a large enclosure on the VilaFáfila Reserve, where thay can be observed, unmolested, from a dry and comfortable hide. And what magnificent big, slow moving birds they are. Despite their size, they actually blend pretty well in with the dry grasses and scrub, so they stand some chance against Mr or Ms Hunter if they don't move or raise their large grey head above the vegetation. Since they are protected by EU legislation, being shot at is something the Bustard should no longer have to worry about.
As we drove back, we saw numerous elaborate adobe built pigeon houses (Palomares) breaking up the endless steppe skyline like large, squat square pagodas. There were also round Palomares, but the square ones, with the ornate roof tiles, were far more impressive. I have never seen such ornate pigeon houses on the Iberian Peninsula. They are a pretty common feature around villages and agricultural areas, built to supplement the rural diet with meat from both adults and squabs and provide pigeon guano to fertilise crops. Many Palomares we saw were abandoned and falling apart, leaving a soft muted outline, a slowly collapsing mound of adobe where they stood. Regular horizontal lines of arched hollows made in the softly collapsing walls were fading evidence of the individuals roosts where pigeons once raised their young for the villagers' tables. Being made of adobe, and since very few people nowadays have the necessary skills to work this material to maintain them, the ghostly abandoned palomares are now literally and gradually dissolving back into the ground that they were built from.