Category:Sin categoría
Sin Dios y sin Santa María, por la chimenea arriba!… parten las brujas volando en escobas o transformadas en cárabos… rumbo a Cernégula… The afternoon falls in some lonely and secluded place in the imposing and wild Caroig Massif Natural Park. After a long day traveling along paths and roads, I arrived at the edge of an immense forest, after having crossed an endless sea of olive trees. I see in the distance flocks of finches, pipits and starlings wandering […]
The house sparrow (Passer domesticus) is an emblematic bird of the Spanish urban landscape, extremely linked to man who has always been with us and which is now experiencing a marked decline in its populations. There used to be more sparrows in the streets of cities and towns throughout Spain. It is scarce in places where there are no towns and is absent in higher altitude areas and in forests without any type of human construction. But that balance that […]
When the cold arrives in our region, many species of birds that have migrated south have already left us for a few weeks, such as the swallow, the bee-eater, the oriole and other summer birds, which will spend the winter season in their barracks in Africa. On the other hand, when temperatures drop and winter shows itself in full force, other birds from more northern latitudes adapt to our landscapes. Species such as the redstart, robin, chiffchaff, wren, Eurasian siskin… […]
The European Owl (Athene noctua) is a nocturnal raptor that has been part of the Valencian agricultural landscape since time immemorial and for which I have a very special predilection. I still remember the first photographs I took of an owl with my analog film camera in those wonderful and nostalgic pre-digital times. The little animal was on top of a tile, in a small house in ruins, on the Font de Poveda road. The images I got were dark, […]
In this entry I am going to talk about a beautiful arthropod that is worth knowing. It is quite common, but on many occasions it goes unnoticed by our eyes. The green lacewing, Chrysoperla carnea, is a fascinating insect of the family Chrysopidae, widely distributed in different parts of America, Europe and Asia, which has inhabited the Earth for 300 million years, saving itself from the Permian extinction that wiped out 9 of every 10 species. In their larva stage, […]
The grosbeak cocothraustes cocothraustes is the largest of the Spanish finches. A bird that mostly winters in our latitudes, it visits us very irregularly during the coldest months of the year, where the practically non-existent sedentary population of the Iberian Peninsula is joined by a significant contingent of migrant individuals from Central Europe. Stealthy and difficult to observe, it is one of the most robust and compact birds of the European avifauna, with a short tail that together with a […]
During my long walks in early spring, in any corner of the forest, I am accompanied by an unmistakable and peculiar fluted song (tiri-oliuuu), which can be heard from a long distance, alternating with harsh calls reminiscent of the squawking of corvids ( cueejj). The protagonist of these sounds that will occur in the early hours of the morning and at the end of the afternoon from the thicket, and at the top of the trees, is a very discreet, […]
The skull or death sphinx (Acherontia atropos) is a very large moth, with a wingspan of between 9 and 12 cm. It has a long, thick body, with two pairs of wings, the front ones, blackish triangular on the back with yellowish spots, and the rear ones, smaller and yellow with black serrated stripes. On its thorax we can see the drawing of a human skull, an attribute that helped this invertebrate appear in such famous works as Dracula1 or […]
The Barn Swallow Hirundo rustica is part of and heralds the good weather in our towns and fields. Insectivorous bird with a fast and acrobatic flight, delicate, graceful and aerodynamic, black in color, with metallic blue reflections above and creamy white underparts. It has a red forehead and throat and a black collar. The wings, long and pointed, show white tones on the lower front part. They build their nests, in the shape of a bowl of salivated mud, placing […]
Summer of 2012 ran when I found myself immersed in a passionate photographic project for the ‘Generalitat Valenciana’ about bats, by then I had already been applying and perfecting the “high speed” technique developed by the master Ricardo Vila for almost a decade, which consisted in introducing artificial light of flashes at very high speeds of the order of 1/20,000 per second, together with many hours of observation and patient waiting to obtain a satisfactory result. This technique allowed me […]
