Nico's birding blog: Great weekend

This was a great weekend for me. I did two trips, one to a pelagic on Tarragona and one to Remolar-Filipines.
On saturday, my mum and me took the 7:33 am train and traveled to Tarragona. Once there, we took the boat and we started to sail. on the harbour we saw a Shag, a quite unusual species. We continued and reached the end of the harbour, there, the guides started throwing the fish they had brought to attract birds. The first Audouin and Mediterranean Gulls started following us. After some time, the first Shearwaters and Common Terns joined the Gulls. We continued sailing until someone shouted "Reed Warbler". I found it a bit strange as we were some miles to the nearest coast. I asked where it was, looking at some point of the sea until someone told me that I should look at the ships antennae. There was a very tired Reed Warbler indeed. Someone managed to capture it after it had been sitting a while on a man's shoulder. They put it in a bag and released it once we were at land.
I asked my mother for the camera to make some pictures of the gulls. When I had just returned it to her, observing a Shearwater, a guide localised two Puffins, a scarce species in the Mediterranean and a lifer to me.
After some time, we had seen a lot of species, including some Storm Petrels, Cory's Shearwater, a Great Skua and a couple of Parasitic Skuas but the main attraction of this trip, the Pomarine Skua hadn't shown yet. I asked my mum for the camera again and went down to the inferior level to make some shots of the Shearwaters an then finally the Pomarine Skuas appeared. Three at the same time were following the boat, and we could localise another one. I made a lot of shots of this really beautiful birds. They followed us almost until we reached the harbour where they was another Shag.

On sunday, I went to the Remolar Filipines reserve. I took my mum's camera, who wasn't coming with us. As I was walking to the hides I heard a very familiar and nice noise, Bee-eaters. At the hides there wasn't much going on except for some Collared Pratincoles, some Litlle Terns and some Little Grebes who had their babies. There were also Squacco Heron, Hoopoe, Purple Gallinule and some others.
After the hides we went to the beach, but there were only some Terns.