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| Female Houbara Bustard, Fuerteventura |
One of the key target species of any birding trip to the
eastern Canary islands is the local race of Houbara Bustard Chlamydotis undulata
fuerteventurae. With a total estimated population of around 500 individuals,
possibly less, it is also one of the most endangered bird taxa on the islands,
and indeed the world. In truth, the division between the island birds and those
on the mainland, nominate undulata, is slight – mainland birds are slightly
larger and paler. More significant is the split between the birds in North
Africa and those in western Asia – these have now been split as McQueens
Bustard on the basis of different courtship
displays. As February is the start of the breeding season, seeing the
amazing courtship display of the male was a key goal, and we were fortunate enough
to see several displaying males on our trip.
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| Male Houbara, Fuerteventura |
Hourbara are highly terrestrial – they can fly well but
almost invariably prefer to run or freeze when they feel threatened. By viewing
from the van, we managed to get amazing views of several individuals close to
the car, and I got some reasonable photos as you can see from this post.
Houbara are omnivorous feeders, taking plants, insects, and
probably small lizards as well, but the one we saw feeding was pecking at
plants. It was probably an adult male judging by the black on the neck. The
photo I got was not especially good, but later I got much better photos of a
female that was close to the road as well, and which you can see at the top of this post. The main threats to Houbara are
their being a prime target species for Arab falconers, combined with habitat
degradation from overgrazing, desertification, and road construction,
especially on Fuerteventura. The current population is divided more or less
equally between Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, with 2 – 300 adults on each
according to most surveys.
The display of the male Houbara has to be seen to be
believed. We were not close enough to get photos, but they are usually fairly
visible when displaying – they tend to use ridges so that females can see them
for some distance. They also avoid cluttered landscapes – running around in a
circle of figure of eight pattern they can thus avoid running in to obstacles
while their vision is obscured. For a video of a displaying Houbara, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlxueVSjrso
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| Cream-Coloured Courser |
Houbaras share their habitat with a rather unusual wader,
the Cream-Coloured Courser Cursorius cursor. Waders are so associated with
wetlands that one running around in a desert looks really strange. The photo is
from Wikipedia, and the exact shade they appear depends on the light – the ones
we observed seemed much paler, fully justifying their name. Another dry country
wader that I got good photos of were a pair of the Fuerteventura race of Stone
Curlew, Burhinus oedicnemus insularum. There is another subspecies on Tenerife
and Gomera, distinctus, but this is now extremely rare, probably as a result of
tourist development of the dry coastal strip where their only habitat is found.
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| Fuerteventura Stone Curlew, insularum |
A variety of more conventional waders were also seen in
wetland areas and beside the sea. Sanderling are long distance migrants so
their appearance on the shore is unexceptional, but we were also lucky enough
to find a small flock of Kentish Plover Charadrius alexandrinus.
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| Kentish Plover |
Sadly, one
species that no one will ever find is the no extinct Canary Island
Oystercatcher Haematopus meadewoldi, which died out in the first half of the 20th
century. The cause of its extinction is unclear, as it had survived alongside
humans for well over 2,000 years. On the whole, oystercatchers (there are many
species worldwide) manage to get alongside people fairly well, but it is
perhaps significant that the rarest surviving oystercatcher is also restricted
to an island group, in this case the Chatham Islands near New Zealand. Oystercatchers
come in two basic colour patterns – white bellied species like the Eurasian
Oystercatcher and all-black species. It may be a result of limited data, but
from my reading it seems that the all-black species are more associated with
rocky coasts, while white-bellied species are associated with habitats with
sand or mud. How the Canary Oystercatcher was related to the living forms is
not clear – there appear to have been no DNA studies of oystercatcher
relationships – but in life it was apparently almost identical to the African Black
Oystercatcher show here. Presumably the African species at some point had a
wider range, as today it is confined to South Africa, and this gave rise to the
Canary species.
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| African Black Oystercatcher |
Next time, I will cover the raptors and owls of the islands,
which also have an interesting history
(Bustards and Stone Curlew are my photos, rest from Wikipedia)
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