Looking back over this year’s photos, I found some gems I had overlooked at the time they were taken. During our birding explorations of southern Spain in April-May of 2022, we visited La Dehesa de Abajo (literally, the meadow down below).

The Dehesa is a nature reserve just 15 miles southwest of Seville located within the greater 52 square miles of the Donana national park and nature park system.
Among the many wonderfully different birds we saw at the Dehesa, the European Bee-eaters were the most colorful and interesting (to me) to watch. These vibrantly colored, slender birds are distant relatives of Kingfishers, but are only found in southern and central Europe, parts of northern Africa and western Asia during the spring and summer. After breeding there, they migrate to tropical Africa for the winter.


Pairs were actively foraging for insects among the flush of wildflowers in the meadow, with males often bringing food to females, and perching near them. In fact, couples were perched everywhere — often next to each other in small groups.

European Bee-eaters are highly gregarious and nest colonially in sandy banks, into which they excavate 5-foot long tunnels for their nest. Both parents incubate the eggs and feed the 5-8 offspring to fledgling. Once out of the nest, adult and juvenile Bee-eaters roost communally in long lines of birds huddled closely together.
Despite their name (and they do eat a lot of bees, wasps and hornets), male Bee-eaters catch larger items like dragonflies and butterflies to feed to their mates during courtship. We watched a pair of Bee-eaters in this ritual for a few minutes as the male made several trips to feed his mate. The first image is a composite of his flight in. The second image shows him bringing a dragonfly to her (barely visible in his beak), and the third composite image shows his departure on another foraging trip.



Although Honeybees do make up 60-80% of their diet, their collective impact on the bees in an area is minimal; studies found that they ate less than1% of the worker bees from a particular hive. Bee-eaters do remove the sting from the bee before swallowing by bashing it against a tree limb or fence post.
Such gorgeous little birds, and such fun to watch. But there is much more to see in this richly diverse area of Donana, Europe’s largest national park. More on this topic later.