Kraków morning 2…

We had some rain last evening in Kraków, which did a nice job of cooling things off a bit. Even better, the rain and most of the clouds it blew in on had departed by morning, so it was a great time to go out looking for wildlife.

After finding the gates locked at a cemetery and a botanical garden, both reliable wildlife locales in the past, I headed to the river, and found a section I hadn’t visited yet, which was nicely lined with reeds in spots. From those reeds, I could hear great reed warblers singing, so I tried to see if I could get a better picture than I managed yesterday, and as I was creeping towards the water’s edge, look who I found sneaking through the reeds below me. That, Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, is my very first bittern in the whole world, and a little bittern (Botaurus minutus), to be exact. Woo Hoo!

Given how long it has taken for me to finally spot one, none of us should be surprised that it almost immediately bolted, but by then I had my camera out, and I knew what I was looking at, so here’s a nice fuzzy shot of it coming in for a landing on the reeds growing at the far riverbank.

There were other singers in the vicinity who were nearly as loud as the reed buntings, and those were these marsh frogs (Pelophylax ridibundus)

These mallard ducklings, on the other hand, were quiet as ghosts, …

and so was their mom as she kept a watchful eye on the riverbank traffic.

Finally, the bittern was not the only bird new to me today, and here’s my very first Caspian gull (Larus cachinnans), standing on a huge fish floating down the river and from which it was pulling out chunks and gobbling them down. Hurray!

Lastly, I did go out and find the swans that my buddies reported seeing yesterday, and they did indeed have cygnets. Hurrah!

Tomorrow we start to go our separate ways, and three of us will be catching the train to Prague, so keep your fingers crossed that the Czech wildlife proves as accommodating as the Polish has.