As the fourth and final series from the south of Mallorca 2025, I would like to show you a few scenes that were created with a manageable amount of effort, to be honest.
As I reported last year, some bird species are very common in the south of Mallorca - these include kites and hoopoes, which I have ‘portrayed’ in the past two years. We were still a little early for the peak of the mating season for many breeding birds. For example, many red-headed shrikes did not return to their usual areas until early April, shortly before the end of our trip.
Nevertheless, there were some great sightings. First of all, we had a great place to stay - from an ornithological point of view too. I took the following picture from our terrace, but of course I'm more interested in the habitat in the Mallorcan spring 😅
In this habitat I saw hoopoes, greenfinches, goldfinches, crested larks, red-legged partridges and redstarts every day. Even booted eagles were seen flying overhead every day. Once a falcon attacked a booted eagle, perhaps 20 metres above our garden.
I also saw cirl buntings, siskins and various species of heron, but not every day. My highlight was a whole troop of triels right in front of the terrace, which unfortunately flew away when I tried to photograph them....
Another unusual picture was the sight of several golden plovers in a meadow behind the house, where I was able to get a photo with a very long focal length:
And another bird is also very common - in particular, I kept seeing and hearing it in the morning, no matter what photographic subject I was working on. It's the corn bunting. They sing very persistently on higher branches and are not very shy - another documentary photo.
In my actual photo series, I was particularly pleased to see photos of two species that are new to my portfolio: the Kentish plover and the cattle egret. I would particularly like to emphasise the cattle egret. How long I have been trying to get a few decent pictures of a cattle egret, which you feel you see on every street corner in southern climes. I had often seen them in the beautiful flower meadows and a white bird on one of the pastel Mallorcan flower meadows was always my dream.
My problems in the past were always the same...
- The light is almost always unfavourable for this white bird (as soon as even the slightest bit of direct sunlight falls on a white heron, the surroundings quickly become dark. A summery yellow-white flower meadow then becomes a rather brownish environment
- Especially if you want to realise a pastel picture, you need very specific lighting conditions, so you either need them completely shaded in soft light or in bright clouds with light/oblique backlighting)
- Or they were too shy and I couldn't crop them well because they were too far away (the cattle egret is also tiny compared to a great egret, for example)
- It was often not possible to get a low perspective
- They were wet from the morning dew, which meant that the beautiful feather structure didn't really come into its own...
And this time it finally worked, with at least a handful of pictures 🤗
On the penultimate day, early in the morning, at the end of our little road, of all places, less than 100 metres from our finca. And then I realised: how beautiful does a cattle egret look in its mating plumage? Everything happened so quickly on site because they were very hectic and the perspective was very challenging for autofocus and photographers - but at home on the monitor I first saw these reddish hairs; I had to google them first as I initially thought they were a subspecies. So I was even more pleased about this than about the photos of the Kentish plover, which is of course much rarer to see.
Unfortunately, I only had an hour with them before they flew on; I would love to spend several days photographing cattle egrets at photo distance, as their behaviour was also totally interesting and varied, but in the corner they are only faithful to their location when roosting and it is always a chance encounter.
I hope you enjoy the pictures.
Best regards,
Thomas
I hope you enjoyed the series 👋
Many greetings👋