The great haze of February 2020, the worst that the Canary Islands have suffered in 40 years, with all its airports closed for two days, not only dragged thousands of tons of dust to the islands, but also numerous desert birds, some of them rarities never seen before in Spain.
During the 2020 carnivals, the Canary Islands were engulfed by a huge cloud of dust from the Sahara that left thousands of air passengers on the ground and made the air in the islands almost unbreathable, in a situation that is being revived this week - on a smaller scale - in peninsular Spain, from the Mediterranean to the Cantabrian.
The winds that caused this phenomenon, particularly intense from February 22 to 24, pushed numerous species of birds to the islands, some of them caught in the middle of migration, but others simply dragged towards the Atlantic from their natural habitats in the deserts of the Sahara and the Sahel.
The result was a true festival for ornithologists and for the hundreds of people who travel to the islands in winter from different parts of Europe just to observe the birds. This is reflected in the first issue of 2022 of "Dutch birding", a magazine dedicated to the avifauna of Europe and North Africa.
Up to eight "rarities" from the Sahara were seen in the Canary Islands those days. It had happened other times, with previous haze, but never with so many species, nor with so many specimens, and much less with sightings on practically all the islands.
In those days, for example, a specimen of Sahara shrike never before seen in Spain was documented in Gran Canaria, for which it is not easy to find a commonly used name in Spanish: the Lanius elegans elegans, known in English as "Desert grey shrike".
An ibis lark (Alaemon aludipes) was also detected in Tenerife, which had only been seen eight times before in the Canary Islands, but always on the islands of the province of Las Palmas, the closest to the coast of the African continent.
Likewise, a bird of which there are only four previous sightings in the islands, the Bar-tailed Lark (Ammomanes cinctura), could be seen in both Tenerife and Gran Canaria.
In addition, up to 85 specimens of Desert Warbler (Sylvia deserti) were counted, a bird that had only been located eight times before in the islands; one Atlas Warbler (Sylvia deserticola), a species that had only been seen three times in the archipelago; and two Saharan Warblers, of which there were only six precedents.
Bird enthusiasts photographed and reported those days in the Canary Islands 27 specimens of Isabelline Wheatear (Oenanthe isabellina), a species that is not strictly African, but spends the winters in the Sahara region. There were only two previous references to its presence in the islands.
Finally, the presence of a specimen of Moussier's Redstart was reported in Tenerife, which had only been documented in the Canary Islands twice before, once in La Palma and once in Lanzarote.
The enjoyment for bird lovers those days did not end there. To these desert species were added three other rarities from other types of habitats: the Kelp Gull (Larus dominicanus vetula), the Egyptian kite (Milvus aegyptius) and another variety of warbler, the Sylvia Curruca.
The authors of this work emphasize that what happened those days in the Canary Islands thanks to the haze is "unprecedented" in this area of the Atlantic. "For example," they point out, "the number of specimens of Isabelline Wheatear and Desert Warbler sighted exceeds the number of sightings to date in all of Spain."
