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Cape Verde 2 : six days on Santa Antao

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 Our first two big bonuses were that we managed to agree an extension on the villa hire and that a company based at the dock had a car for hire for the whole period. The villa was a pig to find as the instructions got lost in the ether until we actually arrived. Once we did find it it was a great base for us. The sea views were a bit too distant for birds though and despite a lot of staring out I did not see a cetacean all stay. Our villa was in the N E corner between Ribiera Grande and Sinagoga. It was a great base with a bedroom each and 5 bathrooms along with a large kitchen and lounge. The pool was frankly only used by Jim and the two Jacuzzis were wasted on us.  For future reference we found the villa on VRBO hosted by Lolo Fildes and described as a luxury villa. I would not hesitate to recommend it. Birds. First and foremost our plan was to follow up on Peter Stronach's sightings of Black-capped Petrels. T do this the team scoped out likely sites for seawatches while I n...
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Cape Verde 1 : in search of rare petrels and new insects

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 A year ago an intrepid Scottish birder called Peter Stronach discovered a likely breeding colony of Black-capped Petrels on the island of Santa Antao in the Cape Verde islands. Having had an interest in seabirds since university, this seemed a great opportunity to follow up his observations. Accordingly 4 of us set off from Bristol airport on Monday Jan 29th 2024 to try and follow in his footsteps. Santa Antao is not straightforward to reach so we first flew to Lisbon and overnighted in a Holiday Inn Express.  The next mornig we caught a TAP flight to Sao Vicente where we planned to explore and seawatch for a few days while working out if we could get ferries to other islands and watch from them. While this sort of planning seems simple in the world of the internet, it doesn't work like that in the cape verdes. Our first contact, however was superb meeting us at the airport and handing over our hire car at his office. No paperwork seemed to be involved and we simply set off f...
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 After my success with the Duke of Burgundy butterfly I was inspired to go for another species I have not seen for years. This was the Small Blue and I chose Stoke Camp. Again, like the Common Clubtail dragonfly I only saw one individual but this was more down to me abandoning it early when my camera battery gave out and my spare appeared to be empty so all my own fault. One is still so much better than none though and I was happy with my initial shots I also got an underside view  There were not many butterflies on the wing despite a temperature of 20 degrees but I did get close to this Small Heath and I always enjoy seeing Brown Argus Otherwise a Painted Lady was a surprise migrant and the first Meadow Browns I have seen this year barrelled past in the stiff breeze. These will be species I suspect that I will see many times later in the year
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