Catharus Wings

I had mentioned before that I felt this was an age of re-inventions and that I, too considered it necessary to frequently take a critical look at my blog's content and direction and see what could be changed and improved.
This post is an attempt to provide my dearest readers with yet another fundamental change, a true Bell Tower Birding revolution:

I have decided to write something useful.

Oh, please, remain fair, I didn't say this post was going to be useful. I wrote it is meant as an attempt!

Get on with it, I think I hear you, so here goes the birding part.

The identification of Catharus thrushes (including the Wood Thrush as it sometimes is included in the genus and sometimes not but is a bird too neat to be left out) is simply a superb task:
challenging and interesting yet not impossible.

The differences between the species, most of which have several subspecies, are quite subtle and I have often asked myself how one could possibly ever identify a hybrid in the field and if such hybrids are known to occur.
The most recent case in which I considered the possibility of a hybrid was a strange immature thrush Charlie observed in New York.
I am sure you know the story and even though Wood Thrush was to be considered, the bird was widely thought to be a Hermit Thrush of a more Western origin.
One thing that finally convinced me that the bird was a Hermit Thrush was its wing pattern.

Wing pattern?

But aren't the main field characters the exact head pattern, the amount of spotting on the breast and the colouration of the tail?
Yes they are, but there might be more.

I am aware that I will venture out upon thin ice now and I am neither an identification expert nor someone with excessive field experience or access to a multitude of museum skins. Nevertheless, I have come to notice something that might work as an additional identification character for Hermit Thrushes and that as yet I have not found in any of my bird guides.
Surely I am not the only one who's noticed it and the reason for not finding it in any of the guides is that I have only the "rough" and general guides and no special identification literature.
I expect this to be yesterday's news really, or rather "cold coffee" as we say in German (I told you: the culture thing), but I hope some blog visitors might get a chuckle out of reading it and that'll be good enough for me.
Oh, and before I start: this whole post is only about the thrushes one might see around the Great Lakes, no idea how it would work out in the West!

The wings of most Catharus thrushes are quite uniform and show the same shade of brown as the back and mantle.

Here, for example, we have a nice and lovely Swainson's Thrush.



See what I mean? No contrast on the wing at all. Okay, if we look closely, we might notice that the tips of the primary coverts are slightly darker, forming a miniature dark wing bar, but this is nothing obvious or striking.
This uniform colouration is even more apparent in the Gray-cheeked Thrush (presuming it is not a stray Bicknell's we're looking at, a rather safe assumption around the Great Lakes I shall say)


Just a brown bird, no contrast, not much pattern at all.
Hey, this is still a very nice bird!! Just thought I'd mention it, in case anyone got a different impression.
The Wood Thrush is right on the other side of the scale of different shades of brown, but nevertheless shows a very reduced pattern on the wings. Basically the whole wing looks like the back and mantle, with only a slight dark bar formed by the tips of the primary coverts.
Here it is, my only picture of a Wood Thrush, and that stick right across the tip of the primary coverts, well, very useful indeed ...


Now we get to the equally lovely Veery and hurray, some form of pattern starts to show on the folded wing. The Veery also shows the aforementioned dark bar across the primary tips but there is also a slight pattern at the tip of the primaries! The tips of the reddish brown outermost primaries show a decreasing (towards the body) amount of dark brown which produces a distinct pattern at the tip of the folded wing, beyond the tertials. Furthermore, the secondaries are slightly duller than the bases to the primaries, producing yet another slight contrast on the folded wing.
Here are two rather bad pics of Veeries to demonstrate my point, the best I got in 2007, and please no complaints here in public.



Still unsure as to what I am talking about? Yes, this primary pattern is pretty hard to see on a Veery, so never mind.
But now finally we get to the Hermit Thrush, which has mastered this pattern to the fullest. Here's a cropped version of a Hermit's wing, and the red lines and arrows indicate all those neat contrasts I was trying to convey before when I was writing about the Veery.



A rather distinct patterning of the folded wing seems to be unique to Hermit Thrushes around the Great Lakes and might serve as yet another supportive character to identify tricky individuals as Charlie's bird from New York City's Central Park.
To sort of prove my point, I have added 4 images of Hermit Thrushes taken last May at Crane Creek, Ohio. All show the contrasting wing pattern quite neatly. The last two pics are of a bird Laurent and I had struggled with for quite some time as it was unusually dull, the reddish tail wasn't as reddish as one might expect, the spots on the breast seemed rather strong and an eye ring was basically lacking. Nevertheless, we were finally able to confirm the bird's identity as a Hermit Thrush by - amongst others - the tail movement and the wing pattern.
Of course, it could have been some crappy hybrid or Western form, who knows, but that's beyond the scope of a blog post anyway.

Enough said now, here are the pictures.


Feel free to comment or point out images of other thrushes that also show such a pattern to the folded wing.
Birding is one huge process of constant learning. Please, provide!

I Now Know How Sibley Knows

This post is dedicated to Peter, a friend's friend!
Keep up the fight!!

You can't escape it, you can't avoid it and even though you can't know when, what and why, you've got to have an opinion on it: the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

No.

Don't worry, this won't be about what I think of the current discussion or even the status of the bird. Instead, it's all about what Sibley says.

Apparently, he's quite a smart guy, that David Sibley.

How do I know?

Well, he's sold a lot of books and - something that must rank even higher - Nuthatch is fond of a lot of the things he said, but most of all he just published two remarkable posts on his blog that I'd like to refer to today, to show you that David Sibley is a guy that can apparently be trusted when he's talking about birds and birding.

Mr. Sibley recently wrote a well-balanced and rather neutral essay on the current discussion of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, as can be seen here. Possibly the most interesting lines, as they reach beyond the woodpecker, are his comments on the value of sight records and how easily even the most cunning and experienced observers can ... well, simply ... be mistaken and fooled.
To make his point more clearly, he wrote a nice follow-up here in which he demonstrates by his own example just how unbelievably wrong one can sometimes be.

Of course something like this has NEVER happened to me.
I have never mistaken a Grey Heron for a Peregrine Falcon, or a Great Grey (Northern) Shrike for a Hoopoe and certainly never identified a piece of candy wrapping as a Black-eared Wheatear.
Nope, that was the other guy who just happens to look very much like me.

My absolutely brilliant and perfect and clean birding record however got its first major scratch last Monday, the day I learned that Sibley knows...

It may be interesting to note that I am in a good position to judge upon Sibley's expertize as up here, along the Baltic coast of Germany, we have quite a similar issue to solve: the Black Woodpecker!

Okay, as with the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, we at least know it once existed up here. We have museum skins, old photos and so on. But recent records? Well, a few birders claim they have seen one, some even say they know of breeding areas. Heck, our breeding bird atlas even estimates that this part of Germany holds a healthy population of up to 1,700 breeding pairs.
But whenever someone comes up with such a claim, I ask: where's the proof? Where are the pictures, the video sequences, the recordings? Where the hay are the birds??

The problem with these records is that I even managed to have two birding experts flown in from abroad to do a thorough follow-up search on such claimed sightings, and both searches came up empty-handed (the reports are here and here).

Now, who do you trust? The claims of single observers, mostly based on fleeting glimpses of "large black birds flying off the back of a tree trunk", or do you feel that all those fruitless hours of searching sum up to form evidence of absence?

Well, I still do trust myself - incredibly - so I took and still take every chance I get at looking into the Black Woodpecker saga myself by looking into the forests of my home patch.

As you may remember from reading my last post, I spent my lunch break in the pine forests of Peenemünde a week ago. This area is known to be within the (former, claimed or whatever) range of the Black Woodpecker. This is always good to know, and I fear the possibility - no matter how massively unlikely - of an encounter was there in the back of my mind.

And then it happened, the moment that changed the way I look at bird identification.
While I was following a small path along the forest's edge as seen below...


...I caught a fleeting glimpse (!!) of something large and black moving amongst a few tree trunks not too far off.

I turned my head, something inside my head screamed "Black Woodpecker", then it got quiet again and I stood there and watched, observed, every nerve cell of my body programmed on visual perception.


There!! On the tree trunk facing me ...


... a huge black woodpecker with a red partial cap! This just HAD to be a Black Woodpecker, there's no mistaking such a unique and impressive bird!

Of course I immediately knew of the importance and significance of the observation and got all excited about the perspective of fame and fortunes, but in a sudden moment of sanity I remembered to re-gain my calm, concentrate and look again at the bird critically to make sure the important field characters are verified.

So I rubbed my eyes, cleaned my binoculars, aimed them well, focused and to my utter surprise...



... Not a Black Woodpecker after all, just some common forest bugger you see all over the place up here.

Gosh, the disappointment!!

It had happened. To me: the one immune to failure and mistake, the beast of birding!

This was the moment I fully appreciated the knowledge of Sibley. He is right:

"Such is the Power of Suggestion"


Cheers, Peter! Get well soon!

I and the Bird # 61

I and the Bird #61 is up at the Drinking Bird.

It is brilliant.

Go read it right now, right here.

Cheers!

The Absolute Hammer

In an age of re-inventions, I have decided to add another aspect to my bird blog, and as a matter of fact, it's all about building metaphoric bridges and tearing down language barriers, so it's a culture thing.
I thought it would be neat to use birds and birding to introduce my inclined readers to the fine art of speaking German. Of course I am not going to teach you German bird names (who needs them but us Germans, and the Swiss, and the people from Austria, and a handful of people in Namibia).
You are also unlikely to learn here how to politely ask for the rest room in a German restaurant (but now that you're wondering: we're rather direct. "Wo ist die Toilette bitte?" Where's the toilet please?).

Nope, not like that.

Instead, it's all going to be about some typical German proverbs and the things we say that don't make sense but are in wide use anyway.

How often have you been scratched and bitten when you walked outside while it was raining cats and dogs?

You see, that's the kind of thing I am going to tell you about.

Like the word "Hammer" which translates to - and this will be difficult to memorize - hammer.
We like a good hammer once in a while here in Germany.
Certainly this might pertain to the old Germanic god and avid craftsman Thor and as such would make for a cool story, but I am afraid it has nothing to do with it. Hammer is just a cool word, and that's all there is to it.

We use it in a variety of situations:

Hammerhart - "hammer hard" or "as hard as a hammer" is used when something is really hard to do (and not hard as in not-soft).
Hammer used by itself means "amazing".
And when we say something was "the absolute hammer", it was something that completely blew our mind and knocked us off our feet.

Like last Monday.


It is now official, and this is how the birding part begins: Geese don't like me this year.
They really don't.
I have no idea why this is the case, but they do all they can - and quite successfully as well - to avoid being seen by me. I mean, I do see them reasonably well from a distance. Like during the morning of last Monday when my job assignment was to record their daily flight path over the small city of Wolgast.


This was quite a nice morning thanks to the geese, although that particular morning was so cold that my kidneys still hurt somewhat today.
But then I set out to follow them to their feeding areas, to count them and scan their flocks for rarer species. Here along the Baltic and amongst the Anser geese, we have Greylag, Greater White-fronted, Tundra and Taiga Bean Geese on a regular basis. If you get a chance to scan through a few 1,000 you are likely to find a Pink-footed Goose as well, and if you are extremely lucky or show extreme endurance, you might find a Lesser White-fronted Goose, with the latter not having come my way yet. Not really at least. But to find these two rarer species, you've got to get decent looks at the flock, so it shouldn't be too distant and a free view is desirable.

And this latter aspect, the distance and the unobscured view, are just not working this year.

This below was the only "flock" I found that was close enough and out in the open enough to potentially allow me to find one of the rarer species. But at a flock size of less than 100 birds, it was no use anyway. Still, it contained all of the 4 regular forms, so I was not completely frustrated.


Finally I found a somewhat larger flock of possibly 2,000 to 3,000 birds. This flock can be seen here if you take my word for it.


For some reason that might make sense when you're a farmer but is a nightmare when you're a birder, the farmers this year cut the corn stems quite high above the ground during their harvest. The geese still like it, obviously.
But you don't even want to know what I think about this!
Thanks, guys!


I then remembered the lessons I learned in North America: go for songbirds!!
And so I did.

And I liked it very, very much more.

Let me demonstrate to you why:

On the way up to the Northern tip of the island of Usedom, still in a desperate attempt at finding a few identifyable or even countable goose flocks, I came across a small group of songbirds feeding right besides the road.
I stopped the car around 50 metres away and looked at them through the windshield.

Nice! A small flock of 8 Twite, or is it Twites? Anyway, of 8 Scandinavian birds that are not rare here in winter but still uncommon enough to appreciate every single sighting. Of course I wanted to take some pictures for the blog, but they were too far away and seemed to flighty to be approached any closer. Then came another car that passed me, flushed the group and guess what happened?
Had it been geese, I am sure they would have flown all the way to the Netherlands.
But these were - YES!! - songbirds, so they were flushed, flew around a bit and landed ... right besides my car!
So here they are, my pictures of the brilliant Twite: brown and plain, yet neat!


The neatest thing about those brown jobs is their rosy butt in breeding plumage. When they are here in winter, they mostly don't show this unexpected addition of colour to a somewhat drab
appearance. I have actually only seen it maybe three or four times in all those years, so the bird on the right of this picture below was hailed with exaltation.


I then decided to spend my lunch break at the beach and in the pine forests of Peenemünde, where I had been a few days before with Hendrik and Corey.
This is the beach at Peenemünde, a good spot for watching shorebirds/waders, gulls and terns.


Despite the extensive mud flats, there was nothing to be seen but Herring Gulls and Black-headed Gulls. The most exciting sight therefore was of two nutcases with suicidal tendencies who were looking for amber along the beach.


Amber in itself is a nice thing to find. But then, the word Peenemünde might ring a bell or two, and indeed, it is the very same Peenemünde where the Nazis built their V1 and V2 rockets, a place that was subsequently very heavily bombed during the war.
Quite a few of those bombs were accidentally dropped into the Baltic just off the coast of Peenemünde and some of these bombs contained phosphorus. So every once in a great while, one of those old bombs breaks open, the phosphorus escapes its rotten tomb and gets washed ashore, just to be picked up by some naive amber searchers who all of a sudden find their jackets or pants on fire after the phosphorus is ignited by their body heat!
Honestly, Peenemünde must be the last place on earth anyone should go looking for amber.

Expecting to see more birds away from shore, I ventured into the pine forest.


And as this was not goose habitat but the realms of songbirds, my expectations were exceeded.
Certainly I didn't find any Siberian vagrants, but a mixed flock of Great, Blue, Marsh, Coal and Crested Tits, Treecreeper, Nuthatch, Great Spotted Woodpecker and Goldcrests were a pleasant sight. Of course the light was lousy and this shot of a Crested Tit was the best I achieved, but it was still better than trying to spot a goose among a sea of corn stems.


Every lunch break comes to an end eventually and I ventured out again to search for more geese.
Ha, ha, very funny, I know, but I had to try, it was my job assignment after all.

And then something remarkable happened, although I don't really have a picture to come along with the story, and this will bring us back to the hammer aspect of the introduction to this post.
I drove by a small sandy field on a hill, a field that often held roosting songbirds in the past few years and was frequently checked by me for some special species. Of course, I never saw anything special there during the 20 or so visits, so I wasn't really expecting anything while I scanned through the skylarks, linnets, meadow pipits and corn buntings that hopped around on the ground. Here you can see the field with a skylark in the centre of the picture.



And then all of a sudden, this one particular bird hopped into view. It took me a second to identify but about two hours to comprehend: I was looking at a Little Bunting!

Now, this was the absolute hammer!!

The Little Bunting is a Northern species that breeds right across Siberia and reaches West into Northern Finland, with a few pairs in the far North of Norway and possibly Sweden. It is quite uncommon though in Scandinavia and as it migrates to South-East Asia, it must be considered a vagrant to the rest of Europe. However, it is one of the more regular vagrants to Germany, with roughly 5 sightings or so each year, but of course these sightings occur mainly on the off-shore islands along the North Sea coast, mostly Heligoland which must surely rate as one of Europe's best birding places.
But seeing a Little Bunting on some field in the "Hinterland" was completely amazing and unexpected, like seeing an Asian Phylloscopus warbler not on some island off Alaska but a hedge row in a backyard of Washington or Oregon.

The Songbirds delivered!!

As it was getting late and the light started to fade, I decided to call it a day (and what a way it was to end a day's birding) and drive back home to Stralsund, but of course not before I had checked the parking lot of a nearby shopping mall for the Bohemian Waxwings that had been recorded there for the past few days.
Sure enough (the songbirds delivered), they were there. And even though the light was lousy and the ISOs high, I enjoyed watching them and even took a few pictures.

I really like songbirds, I honestly do. I also like watching geese, but if they don't comply, I'll always be happy with finding a Siberian vagrant and watching Twite and Waxwing instead.

Good things come to those who bird.

Magic Mallard Moment

Well, today is sort of a "Wordless Wednesday" on this blog.

Why?

Because I have to work all day, and today's work assignment is an especially tough one:

a) drive to the nearby city of Wolgast
b) find as many geese as you can
c) map their movements
d) bird all you can when there's no geese around

And as I have to leave early, like ... 10 minutes ago ... there'll be no more words but a handful of pictures I took two days ago of a drake Mallard on the Strelasund coast.

It's funny how it looks all beautiful and nice and smooth but changes into Daffy Duck the moment it shakes its head.

Bird of the Month: Common Crane

The general as well as the birding public usually has a firm pattern of associations when suddenly confronted with a particular month. I give you a few examples. If I shouted "May", your thoughts would immediately shift to "Warblers!".
"August" - "Shorebirds/Waders!"
"October" - "Hawkwatch!"
"December" - "Gulling the local dump. Wait, I forgot: and Christmas!"

These associations are both individually and geographically variable but some are so dominant and obvious that they can be considered common knowledge. Like the month of October - and let me check my watch... yepp, it's about that time of the year right now - up here in the far North-East of Germany.

October to us is the month of the Common Crane, Grus grus.

As with so many bird species, this area of Germany must rate as one of the best to experience the migration of the Common Crane, which I will simply call "Crane" from now on in this post as it makes for more pleasant reading.
Basically all of the Scandinavian Crane population (and believe me: that's a lot) cross the Baltic Sea from Southern Sweden into this part of Germany to stay here for a few weeks, get fat in a decent way and then move on to the wintering areas of Spain or Morocco.
The largest concentrations can be found within the "Western Pomerania Lagoon Area National Park". Of course that is an awkward name and the German version sounds much nicer, but at least I was able to find a link to wikipedia in English here. I have tried to find other links to the area and its Cranes in English but failed miserably except for this one here, which is pretty useless.
Anyway, no links - more words.
Crane migration usually starts in the last days of September, peaks in late October and then numbers drop until almost all Cranes have left the area in early December. As with other bird species and staging areas, it is a constant coming and going here as some Cranes move on to Spain while others drop in from Sweden. The maximum number roosting here at a given time is around 45,000 in late October. This year is different however in that we have experienced a lot of coming but not much going yet, which translates to an all-time maximum count of 70,000 Cranes right now.
Some may think that's not all too impressive but while this may be true for species like locusts or even European Starlings, 70,000 birds the size of a Bald Eagle are a sight not easily forgotten.

The downside of all this however is that the Cranes are very strongly concentrated in a relatively small area, mostly north of Highway 105 between Stralsund and Ribnitz-Damgarten (in case you want to challenge GoogleEarth) and the West of the island of Rügen.
Other parts of Germany's North-East also get their share of Cranes, but flocks there will only number in the 100's or low 1,000's.
This year, despite the record numbers, I was not able to visit the main Crane areas, yet. This is why I have only a handfull of rather lousy, heavily cropped images.

Here we go, a group of Cranes the way I usually see them - a few hundred each day from my office window: flying high above the city of Stralsund.


The adults can be recognized by their nicely patterned neck and head: black and white stripes with a red dot on the head.
Neat.
This year's young birds look more like Sandhill Cranes (sweet memories) in that their head is more uniformely rufous or brown. This is quite variable though and this particular young bird here is rather pale.
Still, neat.


When seen from behind, a Crane's head looks quite appealing, too:



Thinking about it: how much do you think such an image was worth if it was taken in Florida? Surely enough to take me up North and visit Clare, I presume!



The most exciting aspect of these high concentration of Cranes is to scan them for Nearctic or East Asian vagrants and on one lucky morning this year, I was fortunate enough to find a flock of 15 species right in downtown Stralsund. Here's the photographic proof:


Well, I might have just been kidding you. No, as a matter of fact, this migration corridor is so far off the corridors of the Common Crane's North American or Siberian cousins that there has - as far as I know - never been a single record of another species. All the same: Grus grus grus grus grus.
It's okay though. Nothing is perfect, not even Crane migration along the German Baltic sea coast.

Of course it's not all sweet Roses here for the Cranes and although they (and their food supply) are being managed, they also face a few dangers while staging here.
The most recent addition is the new bridge that connects Rügen to the mainland, right here in Stralsund.
This is an image of the bridge a few weeks ago:


It surely wasn't very friendly of the engineers to put these steel wires up right into a flight corridor of Cranes and in the mind of the general public (okay, make that: the minds of a few birders), the bridge is perceived as and thus called a "Crane Shredder".
Hmmm, of course we all think and hope it won't be too bad but if you have to take care of such a treasure, you don't like to see things like this...

After a few years of construction, the bridge was finally opened to the public last weekend with a huge opening ceremony and celebration. The whole bridge was illuminated and they had something like 30 searchlights that performed all sorts of patterns and movements not unlike a giant laser show. Here's what it looked like, and it was quite a sight for sure:



Despite the bridge, Germany is still a country where we take environmental impact assesments seriously and of course, the danger such searchlights might pose during the opening ceremony to migrating birds was accounted for.
To keep those flocks of thrushes and other songbirds from following the lights and colliding with the bridge, they had some huge fireworks to scare them off, and that must have helped for sure.
Here, again, is a little visual impression of the scene:


I hope you have enjoyed my little excursion into the migration of the truly Common Crane through my home patch.
It's early morning now, the sky is pink, I am at the office and the first flocks should soon arrive over the city, heading south towards their feeding grounds.
Therefore, no more blogging for now: I am off to do some office birding!

The New Bell Tower

This is it then, my first post from Germany. It's been quite a while, more than a month to be precise, and just about a month longer than I had thought it would take.
I have missed blogging quite a lot, and reading other birder's blogs, too.

During the last month, I would have rather been bird blogging or even birding, but then there were planes to catch, and apartments to find, and jobs to do and all sorts of other nasty things to cope with that left no room for putting down thoughts in words.
I am done with most of that now, except for the jobs to do which will still go on for about ... well ... 40 years or so, 30 if I am lucky. Still, I now feel I have just about enough spare time at hand to write a post.

So now, let me introduce you to the New Bell Tower, the current territory of yours truly.

For the moment and possibly the forseeable future, I reside in the beautiful city of Stralsund, on the German Baltic sea coast right next to the equally beautiful island of Rügen.
The old city of Stralsund -which together with Wismar is actually a UNESCO world heritage site - is positioned on a small island. The eastern side of the island is bordered by the so-called Strelasund, a narrow strait that separates the island of Rügen from the mainland. All the other "coasts" of the small island are actually artificial as they comprise of several ponds that were dug out hundreds of years ago to protect the city from unwelcome visitors, like foreign armies or the plague. People today hardly ever appreciate the peaceful times we're living in.
This map gives a rough yet artistic overview of the old city of Stralsund.


In case you were wondering: No, this is not how we still write today in Germany, that's just art to make the map look even more ancient and historic.
And this is a bird's eye view of it, admittedly a view a bird might get on a very cloudy day...


This sculpture was actually designed to allow blind visitors to experience the city's architecture, which I think is a very neat and rather fabulous idea. Beat that, NYC!

My new home after the Ann Arbor flat and the in-law's closet (where I was tolerated and allowed to stay for the first 3 weeks after my return to Germany) lies right at the city harbour on the coast of the Strelasund and can be seen here.


To give you a general impression of my new home patch, here's my route to work each day!

I get up far too early - you don't even want to know, but people are serious about work here - and look out of my bedroom window.
First thought: I'd rather be birding...


Then I drag myself into the livingroom/kitchen area and check the view towards the harbour and the Strelasund there.


Second thought: Darn, still too early in the season for an Ivory Gull at the harbour.

I finally leave the house (we don't have coffee there, only at the office, so that helps a lot) and walk through the inner city until I reach the ponds.
You can cross the belt of ponds at a handful of locations, but the most beautiful spot to cross them is the "White Bridges", and as my office is right next to the White Bridges, I choose that route each morning.


Not the worst of choices, I must say...


... especially when looking back towards the impressive St. Marie's church.


After another five minutes, I let myself fall into my office chair just to glance back at the inner city, the ponds and my beloved bed in the far too far distance:



Now, to the birding, at least a few words (and you knew I'd get there eventually):
Despite the fact that this is all happening within the core area of a 60,000 people settlement, the birding around the city isn't that bad.
Take the view from my office as seen above: the window list now stands at more than 120 species, mostly fly-by's but still nice.
And the White Bridges are always good for nice views of the more common species.
Like the Black-headed Gull, surely the most easily photographed wild bird in Germany.


I like them, I really do, and it might not be a pure coincidence that I chose a picture of a Black-headed Gull both for my first ever real post on Bell Tower Birding and my first ever post on the New Bell Tower Birding.

Full cirlce, I am back again!