It always takes time in an unfamiliar location to work out where the birds are, particularly if you are restricted to early mornings / late afternoons by the heat of the day (<35deg in our case) and you are relying on ‘shanks’s pony’ to get around. There’s a track that runs along an overgrown canal, near to our hotel, which has the makings of a ‘birding hotspot’. So far, along a one kilometre stretch we’ve found eight sorts of warbler, Spotted Flycatcher, two races of Yellow Wag, three different shrikes – Red-backed, Woodchat and Masked, and two different woodpeckers – Syrian and Lesser Spotted. I get the feeling that there’s more to come.