Extremadura Bird Guide

If you are looking for a Extremadura bird guide (person), in this article you can find some key information. If you are looking for a Extremadura bird guide (in paper), here you can also find some valuable information. On the one hand, although this website is not an atlas or a bird guide, I try to give some tips to differentiate the most similar species. On the other hand, the option of hiring a bird guide in Extremadura can be very interesting. A guide knows the terrain in detail and will help you find the species you are looking for.

How to learn to identify the birds of Extremadura?

If we go to an area that we do not frequent or if we are just starting out in birdwatching, it is likely that we will have some difficulty in identifying birds. My recommendation is to buy a paper atlas or bird guide. It is very important that you invest time in familiarising yourself with the different species. If not, you will see a lot of birds but without knowing which bird it is.

Birdwatching in their natural habitat is essential and we will have to invest many hours until we can identify them with some accuracy… However, as difficult as it may seem, with the passage of days and accumulated hours, we will do it more and more easily. Simply by the position of the wings, how they move, the habitat in which they are found, the time of day, the time of year… All this will give us clues as to which bird we are dealing with. If we are going to observe the birds from a lookout, the use of a telescope will help us a lot.

What are the best bird guides?

There are many very complete guides. I would recommend Aves de España by Eduardo de Juana and J. Valera and Svensson’s Guía de Aves de España, Europa y región mediterránea. However, there is a lot of high quality material on the market. They are guides to the birds of Extremadura and the whole peninsula, in fact the latter includes birds from all over Europe. I think it is important to take the time to look through the guide, read the information about each bird and of course look at the pictures and illustrations. It is always going to be much easier to identify a bird on paper than in the field…. But if we are not able to identify it from a photo, we will hardly be able to do so in reality.

On the other hand, there are several useful websites and APPs. The website of SEO Birdlife of course it is key but there are also more recent websites that can help you a lot like EBIRD.

I recommend always going to the field with either a paper or digital guidebook and every time you make a sighting and think you have identified a species, corroborate it with the guidebook. At first it can be a bit cumbersome but there will come a time when we will not need the guidebook. We will know “by heart” 95% of the birds we see on each outing.

Why hire a Extremadura bird guide?

When you have a limited amount of time to visit a particular area, you always want to make the most of it. Hiring a guide will always help you to make the most of this time, investing it in the most productive areas. They will also be able to show you spots that you would never discover on your own and, above all, know which are the best places to visit at any given moment.

For example, there may be an extraordinary area to see waterfowl in winter but not in spring. Many birds are migratory and if we do not know the seasonality of their movements we can waste our time looking for them. And of course, there are some very elusive birds that, without the help of a guide, would be very, very difficult to locate. All this is coming from a person who loves to investigate, to discover new areas by himself. I spend hours looking at google maps, searching for paths and trails to reach certain areas…

Googling will always help us, but there is a lot of information, a lot of experiences, a lot of knowledge that we will never be able to find in google. In this website for example you can find an article with the best areas for birding in Extremadura. But if you want to know which are the best specific spots and, above all, which are the best depending on the time of the year you will have to hire a nature guide. If you are interested do not hesitate to contact me, let me know your preferences, availability, etc. and I will give you the best advice.

Extremadura bird guide

In the last few years we have been able to observe birds in Extremadura on a regular basis that were not observed years ago. It is difficult to find them in many of today’s guidebooks. For this reason we have decided to make available to you this completely updated list with all the birds that we can observe in Extremadura today. If you click on each one you will find images and a brief description.