Our first full day in Crete, after a long day of travel yesterday enlivened only by a lunchtime stop at Agia Reservoir, where 3 or 4 Little Crakes creeping over the floating algae were my 2000th bird species...
Overnight a howling gale had blown up, putting paid to my plans of walking around the headland: storm force winds and precipitous drops don't generally go well together. So instead we ambled about in the lanes and fields around Plakias. Our first introduction to the flora of Crete included plenty of interest, including some nice endemics:
Muscari spreitzenhoferi, a pretty endemic hyacinth of sandy places
Petromarula pinnata, a Bellflower-relative that sometimes goes by the inglorious name of Cretan Rock-Lettuce...
Scutelaria sieberi
Just after a heavy rain shower came in off the sea, I heard a brief 'prrt' of Bee-eater calling. Or should that be bee-eater... A while later, coming back into the village through an area of old olive groves, one of the group suddenly said 'Bee-eater in the tree!', and there in a dead tree just next to the path a few metres in front of us was the obvious silhouette of a bee-eater, against the (finally!) blue sky.
"He must be resting out of the wind", says I, raising my binoculars...
But instead of being greeted by the crazy rainbow of a European Bee-eater, I found myself looking at an almost all green bird, with sleek black mask, orange and yellow throat and beatiful motmot-blue eyebrow and cheeks. An adult Blue-cheeked Bee-eater, a bird certainly not on my radar for this week! With only around 40 previous records for Greece, a VERY nice start to our trip!
He (I say 'he', mainly based on the very long central tail feathers) sallied out from his favourite tree three or four times, flashing orangey-cinnamon underwings and each time coming back with a bee (amazingly enough!) which was bashed and dispatched. And then his fifth hunting flight took him round the back of an olive tree... and away, not to return. Or least not for us.
(edit: it would now seem that this was the 13th record of Blue-cheeked Bee-eater for Crete: not a bad record at all! Although not quite as exciting as 2010's Trumpeter Finch in Romania...)
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