Vögel von Deutschland

Even starlings seem exotic in a foreign land.

 Another distracted post about Germany: this time I intend to focus on birds. We'll see how that goes. The older I get (and I feel I'm getting older by the minute which, of course, is the case), the hazier my memory becomes. That's not so unusual, but it's particularly inconvenient when my camera stops working and I have to try to remember what birds I've seen actually looked like. Not having a proper guidebook with us wasn't so helpful either. We kept meaning to stop by a bookstore to get one (as we have done in France and The Netherlands), but that didn't so much happen this time around.

 But enough with the excuses! What of the birds?

 One of the highlights was assuredly the very obliging black woodpecker, a video of which (taken by Scott on his aged iPhone), I posted a few days ago.

The cinematographer in action

 The woodpecker was in Great Garden Park (or Großer Garten if you want to practice your German) which is--I think--sort of in the heart of Dresden, though I have to admit I never developed any sense of how the city was actually laid out. It's sort of small, maybe, is Dresden; I know we ended up outside the city limits in one direction while out on a walk and in another direction when we went for a bike ride. But this park is definitely quite large. And, for the most part, well manicured. It contains an old palace, too; Scott theorized it was where August the Strong housed visitors he didn't so much want to see, though googling suggests otherwise. We heard a great many birds in the park--with Merlin id'ing all sorts of them, but the woodpecker was, I think, the only one we saw clearly enough.

Merlin ID list for video, above

 We also saw several times, but failed to get any sort of photographic evidence for, a number of what Merlin declared to be great spotted woodpeckers. Having checked out (from SPL, after we were home again) a bird ID book for Europe, Birds of Europe, I now know that there is also a mid-sized spotted woodpecker and possibly a small one as well, and I certainly can't say for sure which we saw. But I'm trusting Merlin to have been able to distinguish between their calls so I'm claiming to have seen the GREAT one. (Though I do remember thinking one of them was distinctly smaller than the others . . . )

 The Eurasian blackbird was the most obliging of birds; we saw him (or her) quite clearly on several occasions, but failed to get any proper photos. Also seen more than once was the European robin, also a mighty-fine bird. Again with no photos. And ditto the great tit, which one imagines must be related to our chickadees.

 I was pretty excited when we read that a bird we'd seen on our bike ride along the Elba was a "goosander," but now I find that that's just the local name for what I originally thought it was, a common merganser. Still, it's one of the rare birds I photographed with my real camera before it gave up the ghost, so I'm still taken with it:

"Goosander" is a better name than "common" merganser anyway.

 Also seen on that bike ride when my camera had not yet died, a whole mess of greylag geese, some of them banded:

A sampling of greylags, enjoying a Saturday outing on the Elba

 One of my favorite bird experiences of the trip was all the house martins hanging out by the Augustus Bridge. We encountered these our first full day in Dresden and I found them absolutely mesmerizing.

Trust me when I say this does not at all capture the experience

It was in Frankfurt that we saw the Egyptian geese hanging out on a bit of public grass:

A little alarming, really

 A park in Berlin--the Tiergarten, maybe--turned out to be the best spot for birds--and of course I had neither binoculars (stowed in our luggage in a locker at the Berlin train station) nor camera (ditto stowage and not working anyway). We were just taking a shortcut through the park to get from the Brandenburg Gate to the art museum with the Vermeers, you see. But then we encountered a charming hooded crow family.

Crowlet behavior is a universal constant

 There was quite a bit of activity on the other side of the path too. My attention was first drawn to what we're thinking was a common chaffinch fledge, harassing its parent, and then a Eurasian nuthatch put in an appearance, followed by what we're saying was yet another (great) spotted woodpecker. And I even sort of got some photos (Note that I'm not saying any of them are good photos!):

Young common chaffinch who first drew my attention

Adult male common chaffinch pretending not to notice its offspring

Trust me, it's a Eurasian nuthatch

 Also seen hither and yon, a grey heron, many magpies, mallards, probably common chiffchaffs, and a pigeon of some sort that seemed so common I didn't even bother taking a photo, and now--predictably--I can't find anything that's a match. There were also a number of what I assumed were house sparrows and only now wonder if perhaps they were something marginally more exotic--Italian sparrows (a cross between house and Spanish). Alas, there's no way of knowing now. We also heard what I'm assuming was a cuckoo about a million times, but never got any sort of look at anything that might have been making the noise, sadly.

 I hope to have more scintillating--or at least in-focus--photos for a future post. Stay tuned!

 

Video interlude: Black woodpecker in Dresden's Great Garden Park

Scott took a wee video of the most obliging bird we encountered while in Germany. The video should be live in about half an hour. In the meantime, a snap of what Merlin hears on the soundtrack

Deutschland für Alex (Round 1)

I've said that I'd post about the trip to Germany (Saxony, for the most part) that we took earlier this month so here I am, attempting a post. While we insisted that we had learned our lesson and were not going to try to do too much or spend all our time running from pillar to post, somehow we ended up spending a lot of time in transit and a lot of it felt like a blur, even at the time. My proper camera was temperamental for a bit before deciding to die outright so I ended up taking a lot of photos with my phone--and I'm here to tell you that an ancient Samsung is not a great instrument for bird photography. I've spent the last few hours pulling some photos off the phone, adjusting some in Photoshop and comparing others to the illustrated ebird list for Dresden. I'm here to tell you it's all a bit tedious which, I fear, this post will also be. 

A more-obliging-than-most-but-still-very-out-of-focus adult male common chaffinch

But since it's customary for me to take shots of the view out the window of wherever I'm staying--and I always do so with Alex in mind--I may start with those photos, unexciting as they might seem, starting with views out of two of the Dresden rental windows:

View out kitchen window (facing east, maybe)

View facing west (obvs) out main room window

The Dresden rental, as I call it, was absolutely fabulous. As you can see in the photo above, it was like being out in the country, but it was a short tram ride to bustling central Dresden (to be addressed in a later post, most likely, since any photos I have of that area are on the dead camera's memory card). I loved the rental so much that I interrupt this views-out-windows series for a view of the breakfast table, for what is the point of international travel if not obsessing on one's own mundane activities?

Last breakfast chez Frank

I could (and, in truth, may) do an entire post as an ode to my new most beloved baked good item, the humble Brötchen. The Seattle area offers two possible sources for a proper Brötchen (which is so inadequately defined as a bread roll or bun), but I'm also planning to try to bake some myself, probably using this recipe. But just look at that charming tea set! I never find such things in rentals and yet! Oh, I was in heaven. But back to the other rental view windows:

Night view from the Scandic Frankfurt Museumsufer

Because, it seems, I am incapable of traveling to Germany without assuming that one must start in Frankfurt, we started and ended our trip there. Which was fine, really. Scott found Frankfurt quite enchanting, and the hotel was reasonably priced and excellently located, aka within easy walking distance of both the Städel Museum (which houses a most excellent Vermeer) and the city's hauptbahnhof. It was just happenstance that it was so very convenient to the BioKaiser where my love affair with  Brötchen began:

The tea at BioKaiser was also oh-so-lovely

Our penultimate night in Germany--as well as our last full day--was spent in Berlin. We saw a few of the sights (perhaps the subject of yet another future post) and had some spectacularly bad cocktails (with very few exceptions, one should just stick to beer when in Germany), but for now, I offer just a view from that rental's window--or I would if Blogger weren't having a bit of an emotional crisis at the moment. While waiting to see if that resolves itself, I'll insert that I would not so much recommend this particular rental. It looked lovely, but it was pretty dysfunctional, with a shower with a very slow drain and a door that didn't shut sufficiently and a stovetop we couldn't convince to work. No tea kettle or tea sets, either. The location was decent, though the area might have seemed a wee bit sketchy.

It looks pretty urban but those trees were full of birdsong