Bird Feeder, Madrid Live Cam

A feeding station in the hills above Madrid sits in front of this camera, at Collado Villalba below the Guadarrama. Birds come and go through the day.

The blue-grey bird with the black cap is an Iberian magpie, which lives in Spain and Portugal and nowhere else in Europe. Its closest relative is in eastern Asia, six thousand kilometres away; the split was long taken for a human introduction until fossils in Gibraltar showed the birds had been here all along.

The rest of the traffic is sparrows, tits, blackbirds and woodpeckers, with hedgehogs and mice under the table after dark. The regional park on the ridge behind holds griffon vultures that occasionally come down this low.