Tag: birding

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Austria: La Ronde

It’s this time of the year again: The bee-eaters, those agile, gregarious birds, have returned from South Africa and set up shop at Lake Neusiedl. By means of their sharp bills they dig their burrows up to two meters into the vertical sand stone, completely ignoring the burrows they had carved out the previous year. It’s in their nature to build a new home each June.

It’s not in their nature to find new partner, though. Bee-eaters mate for life. Their romantic fidelity has inspired poets and biologists alike. Albeit, their sex lives aren’t as straight forward as it may seem. Both husband and wife like to engage in extra-marital affairs to further their own offspring’s chances of survival, turning the colony into a stage for a veritable Ronde à la Schnitzler.

Courtship follows an elaborate protocol. The groom presents the bride with a present – a bee or a dragonfly or even a butterfly, the avian equivalent to a bouquet of roses. After a little cuddling, the female will assume a receptive posture, after which the consummation of marriage will take place. Then both will joyfully take to the skies. Love is in the air!

However, monogamy is often limited to “social monogamy” – the shared raising of the hatchlings. Copulation often happens in the hidden, sometimes it’s forced, and sometimes it doesn’t happen at all.

A couple usually enlists other birds as babysitters, most preferably their own children. If the latter however wish to start their own family, the old couple will go to extraordinary lengths to prevent them from mating. The daughter in turn will sneak out in the wee hours of the day to find herself a secret lover.

In general, as recent studies have shown, a lot of extra-marital sex in the world of birds is in fact instigated by females. Married males will not shy away from a little tete-a-tete, especially if they don’t have to take care of the hatchlings later. On a darker note: bachelors who haven’t managed to impress a female will resort to drastic measures to get their DNA spread: coercion and rape.

Comes September, the bee eaters will head South again. Many more of them.

The Austrian doctor and novelist Arthur Schnitzler published his novel “La Ronde” (Der Reigen) in 1879, causing a scandal for its frank description of sexuality. Or rather: it caused a riot. Not surprisingly, the book was banned. Then became a best seller. The Fifty Shades of Grey of its time. Passion is more colorful at Lake Neusiedl.

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Montenegro: Paradise (Almost) Lost at Lake Skadar

Millions of years ago, tectonic shifts cut off a portion of the Adriatic sea and formed a basin, later named Skadar by the Montenegrinians, or Shkodar by the Albanians, who nowadays share this charming lake, one of the largest in Europe, with no one but a bunch of birds.

While the birds have nested in the high reeds and floating carpets of sea lilies ever since, humans only settled at the lake’s shores about a thousand years ago – and engaged in battle right away: the Slavs against the Turks, the Montenegrins against the Ottomans, back and forth through times and ages, Tito’s partisans even sank a steamboat in the lake, while the storks and herons, the egrets and ibises, kingfishers, turns, stilts, dived and sailed through waves and skies.

Pygmy cormorants rise with the morning sun.

Today, in times of peace and with the help of the EU, which invests heavily in Montenegro, the lake is of dreamy tranquility and breathtaking wilderness, glittering in the Mediterranean sun. For birders it is nothing short of a paradise.

Lake Skadar was declared a National Park in 1983 and two globally endangered species, the Dalmatian Pelican and the Pygmy Cormorant, are found at the lake in abundance.

Unlike humans, the Pelicans and Cormorants have teamed up, breading in vicinity and sharing the chores of hunting and babysitting. While the regal, imposing pelicans are surprisingly elegant gliders, the cormorants excel at fishing, diving meters deep into the waters and bringing with them fish too large for themselves to swallow, but just the right size for the big beaked pelicans.

Lake Skadar could be a paradise for the birds – if it weren’t for the humans. Despite its status as a natural park, Lake Skadar has a litter problem, the occasional plastic bottle drifting like flotsam in the undulating waves, getting caught in the reeds, and clogging the freshwater springs that feed the lake.

a channel through the water lilies for the fishing boat

But worst are the left over fishing nets. Once expensive and made of biodegradable fabric, they are nowadays made of plastic and extremely cheap, to the effect that fishermen don’t bother to retrieve them but leave them swaying in the water .

Pygmy cormorants

 

For the cormorants, those masterful divers, they are a deathly trap, in which they get entangled and drown. Their dead bodies can be seen floating with the empty canisters, tins and beer bottles. But if the cormorants can’t dive up the fish, not only the pelicans will go hungry.

Dalmatian pelicans sail across the sky

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On Birding

I have always felt attracted to birds from a purely philosophical perspective: After reading the ancient Persian Sufi epic The Conference Of The Birds by Farid Uddin Attar, the idea that birds were creatures of high spirituality was planted in my mind – and left to sprout in secrecy. The first time I felt excitement watching a bird was when I almost stumbled over a hoopoe, the flamboyant leader of the Conference, in a public park in Dubai. I was instantly mesmerized by its beauty, the intricacy of its plumage and elegant elusiveness.

In the years since this first hoopoe sighting, my passion for birds grew and I would not content myself with the chance-encounter anymore, but was prepared to venture further into nature and solitude, invest in binoculars and photo-equipment, in long distance migration and bird books. I grew into a full a full-fledged birder.

Most of my friends take birding for the epitome of my eccentricity. To them birder sounds about as exciting as stampcollector. But they don’t have the slightest idea about birds: Birds aren’t beautiful things one collects in a photo album, a quaint old-fashioned romanticism.  Birds are wild, untamed creatures, and some of them are outright dangerous.

In 1932, for example, Australia, armed to their teeth with machine guns, went to war against the belligerent indigenous population of the Emus. Hostilities went on for a month until the Australians yielded defeat. The Great Emu War of 1932 was won by the Emus.

Or, a birding trip might easily lead into disaster, as happened to me a couple of months ago, when in search for hoopoes in the African Savanna, my jeep got stuck and I found myself tracking by foot through big 5 country, facing buffaloes and elephants, who were only scared away by the firing of a gun. Buffalo or Emu, who’s the bigger badass now?

All things taken into consideration, the b-word might soon sound as hot as free rock climbing.

There are many noble things to be said about birding: it sharpens eyesight, when staring motionless into verdant nature for hours on end, and hearing, when listening for the tweet-tweet-tweet, hooh-hooh, che-che-che-che, the rattling and the hissing. It turns upright citizens into valient ecological activists when the habitat of birds is endangered. And it teaches patience and humility, when the one bird one had set out to watch simply never shows up. Or no bird at all shows up.

But most importantly, birding makes people treasure the moment. In this world of instant gratification, of phony vanity and virtual reality, the sighting of a creature of pure and honest beauty is nothing less than a blessing.