Ría de Santoña in New Year’s provides cracking winter specialties: brant geese, horned grebes, loons and waders. Mega red-breasted geese and redpolls are bonus additions to an awesome short trip.

On a legendary seawatching day with friends, while twitching Richard’s pipit and ring-billed gull, we connect with great skua, black-legged kittiwake and Castellón’s 4th red-throated loon and 10th velvet scoter.

Estaca de Bares is the ultimate seawatching location in the Western Palearctic, offering dozens of shearwaters, skuas and jaegers, two fulmars, a Wilson’s storm petrel and a cracking brown booby.

The Atlantic Islands of Galicia National Park is composed of four small archipelagos. Among them, Sálvora bears different herp gems: Boscá’s newt, Lusitanic wall lizard and the island-endemic ocellated lizard race.

The fieldwork of a new ornithological project in Cabo Cope y Puntas de Calnegre provided great views of trumpeter finches and rufous-tailed scrub-robins, as well as numerous migrants and other highlights.

A pelagic outing reaches Illes Columbretes, a Mediterranean archipelago inhabited by the Eleonora’s falcon. Dozens of shearwaters and gulls, storm petrels, parasitic jaegers and sunfish add to the show.

Two common eiders showed up in south Alicante after the deadliest storm of the century casted over Valencia. Looking at the sea seems promising this incoming winter, with jaeger, gannets, and shearwaters seen too.

While birding in Norwegian Lapland with friends, a recent oil spill has affecting numerous seabirds. We notice its impact on common and thick-billed murres, Atlantic puffins, and black-legged kittiwakes.

I join the monitoring staff of the local wildlife rescue center for a day to ring and count chicks of Mediterranean storm petrel in the caves of Benidorm Island, a breeding bulkward for this seabird.