Surprise Sighting!

One bird we were not expecting to see on Madeira was the Osprey. It is a rare visitor to the island. So when my husband tried to point one out to me I thought he must be mistaken. But no, one was fishing in the river running into the sea in the town of Machico. It was hungry, repeatedly scanning the river then swooping down to pluck one or more fish out the water.

The osprey took its catch up onto an adjacent wall to eat. As you can see it was on someone’s garden wall!

At one point the Osprey came and sat atop the wall just along from where I was standing.

I reported our sighting to the Madeira Wind Birds naturalists who emailed me to say, “That is the first time we have a record of an Osprey in Machico river… Over the years we have seen a few Ospreys in Machico but only by the sea cliffs, never fishing in the river… The truth is that the river normally does not have so much water but as it has been raining quite a lot in the last week it now looks a bit more likely to have an Osprey feeding there…”

This is what I love about being out in nature. You never know what you are going to see and you always see something, sometimes very different to what you were expecting to see!