Although birds are the most popular class, they’re probably my favorite animals. The difficulty of observing mammals of Extremadura during the day (many of them are nocturnal), their distrust, and their ability to blend in with the environment in which they live only increases my motivation to stalk them.
Once again, Extremadura is a top community in which we will see great herbivores, a great variety of carnivores and an enormous biodiversity of the other groups.
Sighting of mammals from Extremadura
To observe large ungulates the best advice is to try to do it from the car. These animals are very accustomed to living with vehicles, from farmers or ranchers, which pass through the roads to attend to their farms. Travelling along dirt roads in areas that are very pleasant, slowly and of course very carefully, is a good way to get close to them. We can see deer, fallow deer, wild boar… Even if we are lucky we can come across some carnivores, rabbits and hares or rodents.
If we choose to look for them on foot, we will have to bet on either the first or the last hours of the day and move around quietly. Most mammals concentrate their scarce daytime activity at dawn or dusk. Their smell, sight and hearing are several times superior to ours and they will have no trouble locating us before we have seen them.
And finally, if we want to locate the bats, we must look for caves, caverns, abandoned mines and surrounding areas. Both in the north of CĂĄceres and in the Villuercas there are interesting concentrations of several species of bats.
I have decided to classify the mammals of Extremadura by their respective orders (except erinaceous, thalpids and soricids which have changed their taxonomy), to facilitate their location. I hope that these little “tips” will be useful to you and that you will be lucky to coincide with all kinds of mammals.
