Photographing Birds in Germany
After a couple of weeks of biking around sedate York County, VA, however, I never saw anything of particular interest, and I got tired of carrying the camera. So one day I left it home. And on that very day, as I rode past a lake, I saw a heron, or as it might be, an egret, fly up and past me, and then perch on a tree branch far overhead. I was stunned by this – I’d never seen it before. I turned around and rushed home for the camera, biked backâÂ?¦and it was gone. I was extremely annoyed. First unusual thing that had happened to me and I didn’t have my camera.
Of course those of you who are familiar with herons (or, as it might be, egrets) are laughing at me. Yes, as I found out in doing some research later that day, they do nest in trees, but it had never occurred to me that big, long-legged birds like these would make their nests anywhere other than the ground near the shore of a lake. (I’d come from a lifetime in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I’d noticed only the red-breasted robins on lawns and the gulls in the parking lotsâÂ?¦and now I was in York County, VA, with water, water everywhere and lots of water birds around.)
This incident ignited my interestâÂ?¦.not in bird watching per se, but bird photography. I’d have a reason to carry my camera again, and goals to accomplish each day, to catch sight of a ‘new’ bird and get an in-focus photo of it. Not as easy as you’d think, with a digital camera without a special telephoto lens. Takes skill, it does!
Birding in Germany
Upon arrival in Mittelbrunn, Germany for three months (June-August, 2006) I vowed to take as many photos of German birds as I possibly could (among many other topics, of course).
Mittelbrunn is a tiny farming town nestled in a valley, near to the bigger cities of Landstuhl and Kaiserslautern, in the southwest portion of the country. As I walk down the cobblestoned streets, I am accompanied by the sound of bird-song everywhere. But when I look around there are no birds to be seenâÂ?¦they’re all hidden behind the lush foliage of trees and bushes. The only (wild) birds I’ve seen so far have been perched on telephone wiresâÂ?¦invariably in front of a rising or setting sun. They’re rather drab…I asssume they’re house sparrows.
Domesticated Birds
This isn’t to say that I haven’t captured some photos on my perambulations around this tiny townâÂ?¦ I was not to be denied. Several houses have chicken coops attached, and I came across a yard filled with striking black chickens and a rooster, and had to have a photo of them. Loud shrieking cries brought me to a house that had peacocksâÂ?¦several females and a male, and I got some photos of them. Yet another house has a couple of emu wandering aroundâÂ?¦and I’ve got a photo of them – although unfortunately I couldn’t get close enough to take the photo through the fencing, rather than from beyond it.
In order to give captions to the photos I wanted to upload, I had to do research to identify the various birds. It took me a while to find out what kind of chicken it was. It turns out its called a Minorca, and the species is a “common black fowl of Spain.” I discovered this on a website called Poultrymad, a British site that talks about breeding chickens for shows…apparently there are lots of new species of chickens, specifically bred for color (Buff Orpingtons were created because showers wanted to have a brown chicken), or for large-size eggs.
I thought I knew all about peacocks, but I decided to do research on them as well, and discovered that they’re more appropriately called peafowl. The male with the tail is the peacock, the female is the peahen. There are only 3 species of peafowl still in extant, the Indian, the Green and the Congo. They originated in Southern Asia or Malaysia and are popular around the world because of their decorativeness.
The emu, of course, is the classic “large, flightless bird” of the crossword puzzle. They look a lot bigger in real life than they do in photographs, that’s for sure…
So frankly, even though I haven’t yet succeeded in photographing any wild birds, I have gotten some good photos and learned some things I didn’t know ….which is what this trip is all about.
Wild Birds
As far as wild birds go, there are 497 species of birds that call Germany home. Of these, 14 are “globally threatened”, and 8 of them are “introduced” species – not native to the region.
In the next three months, I should be able to get photographs of several of them.
I stopped in at a German bookstore and picked up a book called Taschen FÃ?«hrer VÃ?¶gel (VÃ?¶gel is the German for bird), which I’ll use to identify any that I see. Of course the birds are identified by their German names, but it’s an easy matter to look them up in a Germany-English dictionary. And of course, some of the names are very easy to recognize – flamingo stays the same, Kormoran instead of cormorant, Schwan for swan, Falke for falcon, Eule for owl.
And some of the birds are recognizable, to even a beginning birder like myself. Chickens look alike the world over (except for their coloring) and they are called huhn in German. The adler is the eagle, and so on.
Like all good birding books, the species are also identified by their scientific name…so one could also identify them by comparing them to a list, in English, of birds found in Germany , which also includes the scientific names. (Check out the Avibase website: http://www.bsc-eoc.org/avibase/avibase.jsp?region=de&pg=checklist&list=clements).
Birds know no boundaries, of course, and many of the birds I expect to find here will also be found all over Europe as well. So birders in Germany have quite a challenge. But, as I have come to discover, that’s the joy and fascination of birding.
