I recently spent a week in Bulgaria, looking for those birds which are rare, and which don’t often come to East Devon! Bulgaria is a small country, but it boasts many different habitats, including mountains, rivers, steppe, woodland, lakes, estuaries and the Black sea coast, which is one of the best migration routes in Spring and Autumn. The Black Sea coastline is also a tourist area, and so is the most populated. In the mountain areas the villages are poor, as most of the young people have moved to the cities for work. We were very lucky with the weather, which was warm to hot and sunny for the whole holiday! At one point, we were very close to both Turkey and Greece, and at another, only three miles from Romania, in the north.
Our party arrived in the capital, Sofia, and soon set off to the Rhodope mountains, in the south east. We were based here for two nights, and explored the nearby rocky hills and valleys. This is a mainly Muslim area, as it is near the Turkish border. We saw lots of interesting birds here, including a wonderful view of a short toed eagle, which posed for our cameras, as he looked for his prey. Also, there were distant golden and imperial eagles, hobbies, chukars (like French partridges), black storks and many other species. We visited a vulture viewing point, from which we saw both griffon and Egyptian vultures, a blue rock thrush, alpine swifts plus a lovely male black eared wheatear.
We moved on to the Black Sea coast, which is a completely different habitat. On a pre-breakfast walk to the nearby saltpans, we were amazed by a tremendous number of water birds, including hundreds of pygmy cormorants, sandwich and common terns, four great white egrets, gulls, wild ducks and waders. Later in the day, we came across thousands of pelicans, both the Dalmatian and white species. The white pelicans formed a great raft of five thousand or so of them, and moved as one over the water. In the afternoon, we stopped on a bridge over an estuary, which turned out to be an excellent choice, because we spotted several night herons basking in the sunshine, a few squacco herons, purple herons and whiskered terns. Also, several marsh harriers. Then, someone with a telescope spotted a huge bird in the distance—a white tailed eagle!
This country is an excellent choice for those interested in birds and nature generally. There are wolves and bears in the mountains, but we did not see any! We did, however, see all the species of eagle which come to Europe.