A rare bird in Canaries

To escape the cold I migrated south to the Canary Islands for a couple of weeks.

At first sight Lanzarote is not a promising place if you have an interest in natural history. This is not just because of the tourist development, it’s also because most of the island’s wildlife has been eradicated by recent volcanic activity. The last major eruption was in the 1820s and 70 years before that there was a catastrophic event that lasted several years and covered practically the whole island in lava and ash.

Some hardy plants and invertebrates survived and more have colonised the island since or been brought in by people. But for the first few days I hardly saw any birds, apart from a pair of collared doves that joined us for breakfast on the patio every morning.

Driving into the countryside and stopping to take a walk across a jumble of solidified lava revealed some interesting things. The rock was covered in a wealth of lichens which were obviously involved in the slow task of breaking it down to form soil. There were also some plants, but they were very strange plants and difficult to identify. Many of them would make you say ‘cactus’. But all members of the cactus family come from the Americas and the only ones on Lanzarote have been imported.

The fact that many of the native plants look like cactuses is an example of convergent evolution. They have adapted to hot and dry conditions by turning leaves into spines and using thick, fleshy stalks to store water and do the business of photosynthesis. Many of the island endemics are in fact euphorbias and related to Irish spurges, though they don’t look in the least like them.

But at the end of the holiday I spotted a very rare bird. The drive back to the airport involved an early start and a road through the centre of the island. From the car window I spotted a large black and white bird flapping slowly along a mountain contour. At first I thought it was a cattle egret, but there was too much black on it. Did white storks visit the Canaries in the winter? Then I realised this was an Egyptian vulture.

They are relatively small black and white vultures that have an extensive range across Africa, southern Europe and much of southern Asia. They are classed as endangered and numbers have plummeted in recent decades but this vast range means that they can’t really be called very rare birds. In fact, I’ve seen them several times before in various parts of the world.

But Egyptian vultures in the Canary Islands have been separated from the rest of the world for a very long time and are a distinct sub-species. In 2000 it was estimated there were only 130 of them left with as few as 25 to 30 breeding pairs. That is a very rare bird.