hi folks,
in the 2nd half of april and beginning of may breaking news have been full of the devastations on the lower danube river caused by an never encountered flood. knowing how high water usually looks in the danube delta i wasn’t shocked by flooded houses and yards, drowned cars etc. and our floating ponton hotel just did it as usual through that labyrinth of water ways. at first sight. just that there wasn’t the usual labyrinth but a big slow floating mass of water over the whole surface, actually a big moving fresh water lake, interrupted by willow tops and surfaces of flat lying reeds. no mosquitos at all(!) which seemed to have been washed into the black sea entirely. this mega-flood had some remarkable and sad effects not only to the people living there: no single bittern! and no reed warbler! was singing during the 3 days in the delta! hundreds of thousends birds won’t breed inside the delta this year due to food scarceness and lack of breeding places. the ca. 2500 bp of white pelican are roaming around in smaller flocks hardly finding any water shallow enough to feed in their peculiar way encircling fish swarms. that’s why we found well over 1000 ind. of white pelican feeding and roosting south of the delta at babadag lake some days later. there was a frightening quiteness most of the time in the delta with very few birds singing. on the other hand sudddenly there were hundreds (!) of red-throated grebes visible on the big water surface, displaying and building nests, outnumbering great crested at least by 6:1.
but not only the flood: medium to strong NE-winds stopped migration of passerines and raptors to almost zero. only 2 male red-backed shrikes and 2 lesser grey shrikes were seen in the first days of may in dobrogea! and what’s even more striking: just 3 outposting bea-eaters near babadag. and no barred warbler at all!
despite of all this we managed to see “oficially” 195 species within the 9 days with the tourists, inofficially 202 (last year in the same time we had 208).
briefly, we did 2 and a half days of danube delta on the ponton hotel, 2 and a half days of northern dobrogea birding at the murighiol salt lake and the adjacent salt pan plopu, the macin-mountins in their northwestern part, the wooded babadag-hills, babadag-lake and the salt marshes and ponds near histria and vadu. after one night in braila we headed westward through the big romanian plains, the baragan, with its salty steppe lakes and visited the southern carpathians staying at zarnesti including zarnesti gorge, visits of the bran and peles castles and a trip to the bucegi-plateau. after the oficial program i rentend a car and birded some steppe lakes and rests of salt steppe in the baragan for 2 days, at some unknown places for me (after those two days i had a total of 213 bird species).
there was one lifer for me: greater black-headed gull, the “king of gulls” like JanJ says, a 2cy bird at murghiol salt lake, one of the best places for this species in romania. and: finally i found a (very probable) breeding colony of caspian gull outside the dobrogea, in the romanian plains, not known before (and long sought after). unfortunately i didn’t find the nests themselves because i had to leave the place, a steppe lake in the baragan, before a dark wall of stormy rain would transform the small dirt road into slippery, unpassable mud.
- soon i’ll post the whole list including some more nice finds.
- on the attached overview map of romania you find the official route (red), my private trip (blue) and the main observation places (yellow).
- if anyone is interested in the many different maps i use on my romania trips, please contact me personally.
what we didn't see:
- ruddy shelduck
- green sandpiper !
- caspian tern !
- sandwich tern
- tawny owl
- nightjar
- green woodpecker !
- middle spotted woodpecker
- dunnock !
- icterine warbler
- olivaceous warbler (not yet arrived)
- barred warbler !
- willow tit
- crested tit
- great grey shrike
- rose-coloured starling (firsts arrived at 17. may this year, that's normal)
- siskin !
- bullfinch
photos are by thomas griesohn-pflieger