All "Birding stories" from the current blog are now moved to a new address www.NatureMonitoring.com: февруари 2013

вторник, 19 февруари 2013 г.

Dalmatian Pelicans photography

Well, here am I finally back from the trip for photographying Dalmatian Pelicans. The weather was not the best but still managed to do a couple of thousand shots ;) I just started selecting the images from the trip and couldn't resist posting a few. Well here are the first ones:

Stay tuned

събота, 16 февруари 2013 г.

Photography trip to lake Kerkini

From Germany, I am going directly to Greece. Well, I had to spend a night or two at home to do the washing but here I am on my way to the South :) Greece, lake Kerkini.

A photography trip at the lake is one of the dreams for every wildlife photographer. Opportunities are endless. The diversity of birds there is huge. Not all the birds are easy to photograph but still. For a day birders can see over 50 species. Migration time is the best. Anyway, I am now going for a photography trip. The main focus will be the Dalmatian Pelicans which are known to stay quite close to the bank and present suitable photography opportunities for everyone with rich imagination. Pelicans are so tame that can literary do what you want them to do. Thus you can plan your background, action or interaction. Well see what happens.

Here is some info about Dalmatian Pelicans from Wikipedia. You can see some images from my former post here.

author: Iordan Hristov 2012

Hope to add some some nice images of Dalmatian Pelicans and other birds. Stay tuned for more of those ;)

Germany: Gottingen by night

One of the evenings of the workshop we spent in Gottingen. A lovely place. Unfortunately I only had a couple of minutes to get an idea about the place but here are some images. You will love it. Very beautiful town.

the restaurant where we had an 'official dinner

the entrance of the restaurant where we had dinner

вторник, 12 февруари 2013 г.

Back on the road: Germany, Göttingen

This time it is a business trip. A colleague of mine called me last week to ask me to go to workshop instead of him. It is in Germany after some discussions within our organisation and with the organisers here I am on the road to Germany stuck at Vienna airport waiting for my delayed flight. Anyway at least I will have the time to do something useful as writing this blog post ;)

The focus of the conference is Agri-environmental policy and its impact on birds. The interesting bit is the interaction between the "West and the East" policies on agri-environment. Programme and abstracts are here. There is got to be quite interesting debates and presentations on the topic. My task will be to do a presentation on the state of common birds in Bulgaria (see the latest report here). The idea is to show whether agrienvironmental policy in Bulgari has any effects on common birds as indicators for the state of environment. Colleagues and I are now working on a paper to compare the trends of common birds before and after the Bulgarian accession into the EU and the corresponding effects from relevant policies. Unfortunately our data is not too extensive so most probably we will not be able to do much with the data but see what happens. Looking forward to seeing the results.

On my way to the workshop I will stop by to meet a friend based in Bad Nauheim not far from the Frankfurt airport. The nice thing is that the place is on the way from Frankfurt to Gottingen where my workshop will be. Gottingen seems to be a lovely place. See the link to Wikipedia here. I will try to post some images later on in the trip.

I think I should be going for my flight soon :) Ohh I forgot to mention that there is more snow here in Vienna than in Sofia. OK. bye :)

вторник, 5 февруари 2013 г.

Hide photography

The results from the last weekend are quite nice. Not very many but a few lovely images of some common birds.

I spend three days in our bird photography cottage in the North East aiming to photograph the local visitors at one of the hides there. Unfortunately because of other work I couldn't spend as much time as I wanted but still. Two photography session with 4-5 hours each. Here are the results:

Blue Tit photography by Iordan Hristov

Blue Tit photographed by Iordan Hristov

Great Tit photographed by Iordan Hristov

Marsh Tit photographed by Iordan Hristov

more images are coming soon...

In total I heard from the hide 15 species one of the days and 10 species on the other day.
Some of the birds are:
1. Common Buzzard
2. Goshawk
3. Golden Pheasant
4. Fieldfare
5. Sombre Tit
6. Blackbird
7. Great spotted Woodpecker
etc.

Here they the birds that landed in front of the hide:
1. Sombre Tit
2. Hawfinch
3. Brambling
4. Greenfinch
5. Marsh Tit
6. Blue Tit
7. Great Tit
8. Jay
9. Magpie

Other than these images, I spend some time travelling around the area of the cottage. My colleague and I selected a lovely place for a new hide which would be for water birds. We should finish it by the end of March to get the migrating birds. We want the hide to be on a mobile raft so that it is not affected by the difference in water levels during seasons. So, stay tuned for more news on that hide.

We also visited couple of sites to select a spot for a hide in a woodland but at this stage we are not very optimistic. There was only one more or less suitable spot. It is in a small glade in the middle of a valley. There is apparently a track of animals so the area is often by Wild Boar, Golden Jackal and Roe Deer. Other animals like Pine Marten, Red Fox, Wild Hare are also possible. The downside is that the light comes in fairly late in the day which might be a problem. Anyway, we plan to build a woodland hide so you will be the first to know when we finish it.

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вторник, 19 февруари 2013 г.