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Mediterranean Summer 2026

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View of s'Albufera, Mallorca This summer, Siân and I took two holidays to Mediterranean islands: Crete in June/July for two weeks, and Mallorca in September for a week.   Crete Since we were staying in the ‘city’ of Retymno, I didn’t think I'd do much birding, so I took binoculars but not a camera. However, while by our apartment’s pool, species of note included Italian Sparrow , Alpine Swift , Pallid Swift, Red-rumped Swallow , and Sardinian Warbler ; I also heard but did not see Bee-eaters . The area we stayed in was pretty built up and dry, so a couple of local walks did not produce much more than this. We spent the time reading, swimming and eating and drinking. During the second week, we hired a car for three days to visit some beaches on the south of the island. To get south, you had to drive through one of two gorges: Kotsifou or Kourtaliotiko. On our first trip south, we took a small road through Kotsifou gorge and stopped by a small church. Here there were Crag...
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Costa Rica 2026

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In January 2026, Siân and I went on holiday to Costa Rica. The trip was a combination of travel and a beach holiday. When planning our trip with a company called Tribes, we specified that we wanted to see some wildlife, particularly animals and birds, and that we wanted to travel from the Caribbean coast to the Pacific coast via the highlands. We were in the county for two weeks and had a hired SUV for all that time. I am not a photographer, so the images accompanying this blog are essentially ‘record shots’ of some of the birds and animals we encountered, taken with my Nikon B700 bridge camera. However, I found photographing birds in Costa Rica quite frustrating. We saw many species at dawn or dusk, when the light was not ideal, and we also saw many species in the rainforest, where it is dark, or the birds are high in the trees. So, I missed photographing many of the species that we saw, but I did my best! There is a full list of the birds and the vertebrate animals that we saw an...
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