Roaming in Romania - Day 9: Full Circle

Four weary photographers head forth on the final session of our photography tour of Romania. Three of us had opted for another session with the technicolour bee-eaters whilst Michael decided to go off stalking larks and bunting in the minibus with Zoltan. The two temporary hides was set-up once again next to the sandbank with the bee-eater colony with Hans in one and Rene and I sharing the other. I had decided for this session I would try and get some bee-eater flight photos as I have none in my library at the moment. I took a couple of portrait photos, while waiting for the light to increase,  before getting down to the business of some flight images.

Being squashed into a pop-up hide with someone else whilst trying to do flight photos is not ideal or particularly easy so all you can do is try and make best of the session and I managed to come away with a few photos before the minibus returned to collect us.

Our final moments of the trip with the cameras were spent near trying to photograph some Spanish sparrow around a car park area and some kind of visitors centre. However, my attention was drawn to a Crested Lark gathering insects  and also a very dirty looking Stork that passed very close by on slow powerful wing beats with a beak full of nest material.

As we drove back to the main road we came across a couple of yellow wagtails and a Great Reed Warbler. The latter kept climbing songs before bursting into its loud warble. This proved to be my last photograph of the trip. I had finished the visit to Romania photographing the same species as my first photographs in the country. I had gone full circle and the trip was complete.

It was just a question now of the the minibus journey back to Bucharest, two flights back to Manchester and a car journey home. I finally got home around 9:30pm in the evening having gained 2 hours time difference en route.

Overall it had been a very memorable trip. I had enjoyed it as the photographs did not always come easily and you had to work to get the images but that made it all the more rewarding. I also really liked the mobile aspect of this trip rather than being locked down in fixed hides for a week on standard perch set-ups. Eastern Europe really is a wonderful place for the bird photographer and I will definitely be returning again in the future.

So to finish off I would like to express my thanks to:

• Zoltan for working tirelessly to make sure all went smoothly and using his magic bird locating powers. 
• To the boatman for his excellent boat handling skills on the Danube Delta.
• Rene, Hans and Michael for being such excellent company on the trip.
• To Sakertours for another superb and extremely well organised trip. 

Thanks for following me on my roamings around Romania and I will be returning to some UK mammals in my next post.

Roaming in Romania - Day 8: Blood Donor

The last words from Zoltan the previous evening were to make sure we applied some insect repellent the next day as we may encounter a few mosquitoes. So when I rose at 5am, I liberally doused myself in Avon SSS dry oil assured by the claims that no midge or mosquito would come anywhere near me. Our first destination for the day was the lagoons as Vadu on the edge of the Black Sea and the target bird was Collared Pratincole. This is an unusual but attractive bird that is classed a wader despite it not really looking much like one. The approach was going to be stalking on foot, or more accurately should I say on stomach, as we crawled our way through strange coloured salt marsh vegetation to photograph the birds in the soft early light.

As we stepped into the dry basin like lagoon, clouds of mosquitoes erupted off the short vegetation. I suspect these mosquitoes had recently flown in from the east of Romania having been under some intensive training at the Vlad the Impaler school of blood sucking in Transylvania. The supposed repellent properties of the Avon oil was useless and the mosquitoes were instantly enjoying a good corpuscle breakfast at my expense. I reckoned I could take about 30 -40 minutes of this blood draining onslaught. We soon got in amongst the Pratincole that were glowing in soft dawn light. After taking some portrait photos and some of the birds in flight it was time to beat a hasty retreat before forced anaemia took hold. During my brief time in the 'mosquito lagoon' I had managed to accumulate over 80 bites on my forearms and hands to add to the ones all round my head and face. The suffering was worth it to finally get some photos of these birds.

These birds look quite unusual in flight and look even less like waders than when on the ground with their swallow like tails.

We were soon back in the minibus and heading back up the road to a large area of rolling grassland near our hotel at Sinhoe , part of which was being used as a local rubbish dump, where we would spend the rest of the morning. Here we split into two groups with Rene and I taking first shift on some temporary hides that we set-up next to a Bee-eater colony whilst Hans and Michael toured around the grass plains looking for Souslik and other birds.

Setting up next to the Bee-eater colony.

I love photographing bee-eaters as not only are they such obviously incredibly beautiful with their rainbow plumage but there is always plenty of activity with birds coming back and forth to the colony with various insects they have plucked from the sky. The following photographs are a selection taken during a relatively brief but productive session. I do not apologise for posting quite a few images of these wonderful birds.

Birds of a feather stick together.

Sharing a butterfly for breakfast

The early morning ruffled look.

Coming in to land

Perched amongst the short grasses of the plains

The last moments of a dragonfly

It was all to soon to swap our hide places with Hans and Michael and we were heading along the dirt tracks looking for some Souslik to photograph. The light was starting to get harsh now and the heat haze starting to develop. I lay down next to a fairly active looking burrow and sure enough after a short wait was rewarded with the ground squirrel appearing.

After spending some time there, slowly baking in the sun, we carried on and found some more Souslik feeding away on wall barley heads.

On our trail around these grasslands we also picked up a few birds including Hoopoe, Juvenile Isabelline Wheatear and a Crested Lark that was perched on top of a dry stone wall.

It has been a very enjoyable morning, despite the mosquito bites now starting to get itchy, and we headed back to the hotel for some lunch and the by now routine afternoon siesta before heading out on our final late afternoon and evening session.

Roaming in Romania - Day 6: The Macin Mountains

Another very early alarm call pushed me out of the bed. It was quite strange to hear the sound of occasional traffic outside rather than a chorus of frogs.  After a brief bit of stumbling around my room to gather my belongings I headed down to the hotel reception, where I had chance to grab a quick coffee before boarding the minibus with the other three photographers. Our destination today was the Macin Mountains. After about an hour we turned off the main road and headed up a dusty dirt track across a patchwork of flat farmland to finally come to a stop at the lower slopes of the mountains.

Our plan for the next two day was that we would split into two groups with two sessions in a drinking pool hide, the only fixed hide of the whole holiday, and two sessions going round the farm tracks seeing what birds we could find. Hans and Michael took the first hide session while Rene and I headed off in the minibus with Zoltan.

As we travelled down the dirt track away from the hide, the occasional Corn Bunting could be seen flitting between song perches and Isabelline Wheatear dashed on to the track to grab an insect. I noted there were a few puddles on the track from recent rainfall. The first bird we managed to put in front of the lens was a Short-toed lark quietly calling from a large boulder in the early sunlight.

We carried on along the dust track for a while before we heard the ubiquitous cuckoo call and decided to stop for a while as Rene was keen to get some photos of the three birds that were preoccupied  chasing each other around.

By the time we had finished with the cuckoos the sun was well and skyward with the light becoming increasing harsh. However, more importantly and has been my experience of photographing on farmland previously, a heat  and water vapour haze was very quickly developing. Heat haze is a major cause of people thinking  their camera has malfunctioned as the wobbling air can make it very difficult to produce sharp images. This was well demonstrated as we came across a perched European Roller but the images all went in the trash. There are only two approaches for these conditions which are to pack up or to get very close to the birds to reduce the amount of wobbling air between you and them. Even if you can get very close there is still a need to take a lot of images as a good proportion of them will not be sharp.

The next bird which we managed to get very close to was the familiar sight of a Goldfinch which was busy pulling apart a globe thistle seed head.

Onwards down the track and we came to a small section  that was relatively busy with birds including Tawny Pipit and a new species for me, the Crested Lark. The latter is very similar in an appearance to a Skylark but with a permanently erect head crest.

Conditions were getting more and more difficult and after a failed attempt to find an Ortolan Bunting we finished the session with a close encounter with a singing Corn Bunting
.

The dry dusty farmland with its assortment of sandy coloured birds was a stark contrast to the lush vibrancy of the Delta that we had recently left. We returned to the hide to collect Michael and Hans who reported a very slow morning with only a Turtle Dove and out of condition Hawfinch showing up. The drinking pool hide at Macin can be very productive particularly during prolonged hot and dry conditions. However, the puddles on the tracks were a sign of recent rainfall providing the birds with other places to find essential water.

We all headed off into Macin to check in to another hotel where we would fortunately only be staying for one night. To say the hotel was very grim is an understatement. My door lock was hanging on by a single screw having obviously been forced open on several occasions. Certainly somewhere to sleep on top of the bed covers with your boots on to prevent being eaten alive by the mattress wildlife and also allow a quick exit if needed. Everyone quickly decided it was not the place to leave any camera equipment which would now stay with us for the rest of the time in Macin.

We had a pasta lunch outside of a roadside restaurant before heading back to the farmland and hide. Rene and I were dropped off for our afternoon session. For those of you not familiar with a drinking pool hide it is basically an infinity pool for birds with a hide at one end. The design of the pool tends to force the birds to visit the far end and the low set hide allows photography near water level.

As we sat and waited in what felt like a mini-sauna, there were sounds around would have been a delight to any bird lover's ears. In the tree behind the incessant calling of cuckoo and gentle purring of Turtle Dove, to the left the metallic jangle of a Corn Bunting, in the large distant tree ahead the flute-like calls of Golden Oriole and in the bush to the right the scratchy warbles of a Red-backed Shrike. In front of us to photograph....nothing. Eventually a bird appeared in the shape of a male Ortolan Bunting, a promising start. The attractive bunting stayed for a while on a small perch before deciding it was safe to bathe.

Another hour past with no signs of birds except the occasional flash of a male Golden Oriole chasing away a cuckoo. The next arrival was a Corn Bunting which paused briefly before getting down to the important business of cleaning its feather.

 

After the bird departed we were forced into a prolonged wait once more. We sat there hoping that a Golden Oriole might come in to bathe but it never happened. The arrival of the next bird did jolt us from our late afternoon lull, a stunning male Red-backed Shrike which has been there the whole afternoon just out of sight in the bush to our right. For me this was definitely bird of the day.

A Jay was the next visitor. When these birds decided to get a bath they don't mess around and soon the bird was completely soaked.

The final bird to arrive was a Turtle Dove. These are such beautiful birds but under so much pressure across Europe from intensive farming and hunting pressures. In the UK, this once common bird, is very sadly rapidly heading towards extinction as a breeding species. Efforts are being made to try and help the species in the UK but I wonder if the external pressures are too great and it is too little and too late to save this attractive dove.

That was the last bird which visited and we soon heard the rattle of the white minibus returning to collect us. Overall it had been a reasonable day but fairly slow, particularly in the hide where long periods of inactivity were punctuated by the occasional bird. We went straight for a meal before heading back to the 'roach motel'  where I quickly fell asleep on top of the bed still wearing my boots.