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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jos Stratford" data-source="post: 3365611" data-attributes="member: 12449">Daily Log.13 February.Evening flight from the UK, four hours, arriving in Ponta Delgada at 9 pm. Picked up a rental car, drove into town and stayed at a cheap hotel.14 February.Sierra da Tronqueira & Ponta Delgada.From Ponta Delgada, the slopes of the Sierra da Tronqueira mountains lie about an hour to the west, accessed by either a fairly direct northern route or a more windy southern route. Either way, there is a sixteen-kilometre dirt road that zigzags up and down the mountain between Povoação and Nordeste that offers the best possible options to find the Azores Bullfinch. As said, several reports do mention folk failing to find the birds, but generally the basic idea is to slowly travel along this road, stopping at areas of laurel to search for birds, productive areas often being the first few kilometres from the Povoação end and near the Tronqueira viewpoint midway along the track. With not a breath of wind and glorious sunshine prevailing, I had high hopes on this first day, stacks of Island Canaries and Common Starlings being amongst the first birds seen as I arrived at the starting point for the track at about 8.00 a.m. Distinctive island-race Chaffinches abundant in the lower forests, Goldcrests, Blackbirds and Robins also proving common, plus occasional Grey Wagtails and Blackcaps too. Put in quite a bit of effort to find the Azores Bullfinch - walked all areas of reasonable looking habitat on the Povoação end, drove up to the summit and explored there too, sitting quite some at the viewpoint scanning the vast valley of laurel forest beneath. Drove slowly down to Nordeste, stopping here and there. No Azores Bullfinch. Turned round and repeated the drive, walking all areas again, listening and scanning. Yet again, no Azores Bullfinch. Hmm, a tricky bird, still I comforted myself with the thought that I had plenty of time. Slowly however, the time ticked by, I covered the entire length of the track again, also trying the narrow twisting road to Bartolomeu Peak, another locality reported to be good for the bird. No shortage of Robins and Chaffinches, several Common Buzzards overhead. No Azores Bullfinch! Arriving at the viewpoint for the third time, the likely difficulty of the task began to dawn upon me ...though the laurel forests were relatively limited in area, most of the best habitat was on slopes totally inaccessible across the valley. Hectares and hectares of the stuff that there was no way to get anywhere near, certainly enough territory to hide 150 pairs of birds with ease! Another couple of hours of unsuccessful search, basically covering the same areas as already checked, and I decided enough was enough. It was now late afternoon and I opted to return to Ponta Delgada to end the day at the city's harbour. This fortunately was rather more successful - on pontoons chock-a-block with Azores Yellow-legged Gulls, a careful scan through revealed not only a handful of Greater Black-backed Gulls, but also two first-year Ring-billed Gulls and one first-year Glaucous Gull, a stunningly pale individual. Day one was now over, I had seen a total of 26 species during the day, unfortunately not including the Azores Bullfinch!</blockquote>

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