I arrived on Saturday August 1, and left Thursday August 6 with 108 species on my Texel island list.
The island is a popular place for tourists for obvious reasons. It has a lot of sandy beaches. Despite all the tourists there was still tons of space to feel alone on the small island (25 by 4 km in size). Not a single person on this huge beach:
A sense of the birding - thousands of shorebirds all over the island!
Another highlight for me were the Eurasian Spoonbills - they were also common throughout the island:
The ferry crossing to the island is a great way to photograph gulls in flight! They approach very closely looking for handouts of bread.
One of the first birds, and the first raptor, I saw on the island was this Griffon Vulture (Eurasian Griffon) - there are very few records for the island (less than 10) - but was already known about before I came across it:
Common Eiders of the nominate mollissima sub-species were easy to spot:
I wasn't expecting the abundance of Yellow Wagtails - it was nice to re-familiarize myself with their flight calls:
Eurasian Kestrels were quite common and surprisingly tame:
Oystercatchers - they are beautiful, but also obnoxious! Worse than Greater Yellowlegs :p
Lots of shorebirds!!
Great Crested Grebe:
Euro Herring Gull.... I still don't know how to reliably tell them apart from their American counterparts...
Bar-tailed Godwits were extremely common! I probably saw over 10 000 of them!
This was my hotel:
