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Two years ago, I was counting active nests of Rooks in the flat agricultural landscape north of Belgrade, Serbia. We drove for about 290 km through the 400 square kilometres expanse of Pancevacki Rit and found 8 breeding colonies with 252 occupied nests, or a density of 1.6 And that is where I started to experiment with the eBird.
“I would certainly recommend Serbia to visiting birders. My own trip was not an intensive birding experience, and August is clearly not the most productive month. Black Stork and three pairs of White-tailed Eagles breed here. In some years, Spanish Sparrows were reported breeding inside White Storks nests in Sakule.
Above them, on limestone cliffs, Alpine Swift and Crag Martin breed. The good side of this popularity is presence of restaurants and inns (from personal experience I can recommend a place for carnivores called Vodopad – By the waterfall). Forest covers 70% of the area (hornbeam, beech and oak).
I have asked myself that same question many times over the last six months, until last week, when I was involved in an opening ceremony of five new bird hides at the Palic Lake, by the town of Subotica in the very north of Serbia, along the border with Hungary (all photos are from that area). They got the message right. And so did I.
In the Old World, Horned (Slavonian) Grebe breeds in a wide belt stretching from Scandinavia to Kamchatka and it spends winters along sea coasts, from Japan to China and from Norway to France, plus the Adriatic and the Black Sea (west and east of the Balkans, respectively). As a consequence, this species is only a rare vagrant in Serbia.
I counted them very roughly, but I do have a lot of experience estimating flocks. The next specialty is the Red-footed Falcon in the Deliblato Sands Nature Reserve in the east of Serbia: “Two European Rollers await us on the wires, while one Eurasian Hoopoe flies by. Then 20 more joined them, so I entered 100 in my notebook.
And I had a friend working in the museum, who put me in touch with their birds curator (with whom I recently birded the Griffon Vulture gorges of western Serbia) and who answered all my questions at the time. I still believe that choosing the right approach may be the most important phase of any research. What more would I ask from eBird?
As you know, I started to bird from a canoe, exploring the Danube backwaters in Belgrade, Serbia. What I have always missed there and what I still miss is to experience presence of the European Beaver. And the Serbian Government opted to forget about the international ecological corridor and its responsibility to protect it.
” Landfill often made me wander off into some half-forgotten gulling experience of mine. Caspian gulls have a strange quality: they’re more aggressive than herring gulls but also I think more beautiful.” At one moment I even realised where I’d like to be while reading it: deep in rural Norfolk.
This map shows the distribution of the World’s bird species, based on overlying the breeding and wintering ranges of all known species. I used to live in Botswana, where there are about 450 bird species in an area a few dozen miles from the capital; then somewhat naively moved back to Serbia with mere 250 species around the capital.
Technically, it was a possibility, but if that was the case, he would never defend a PhD thesis on birds breeding along the high voltage powerlines in a treeless agricultural landscape. What made the story better (and a worse experience for him) was the fact that the cops had seen the Dogs of War. In real life!
For the majority of species – unless they have a second brood or live higher up in the mountains – by the end of June the breeding season is over and very few birds still sing or bother to defend a territory. A humid subtropical climate sounds like a very good description of what we experience in warm part of the year, but is it true?
Yet, it takes great logistical effort to organize the census all the way from Germany to Austria, Hungary and Serbia in the same day, to count on numerous volunteers and hope for the best February weather. Yet, David, who has much more experience with bustards, isn’t convinced: “In winter, some females develop bristles, too.”.
I’m sure many of you have had similar experiences. I’m wondering as I write if you are shaking your head, uneasy that all these FACTS will interfere with your love of observing owls, an experience that easily borders on the mystical for some of us. But what do we know beyond these commonly seen and heard behaviors?
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