On to Praha!

Truth be told, I wouldn’t mind being on my way home right now, and while we are technically moving in that direction, we’ve got one more stop to make because it would be a crying shame to come all this way and not stop in to visit the “the historical capital of Bohemia,” which my two buddies from Milwaukee have not yet had to pleasure of seeing. Thus, we’ll be catching the train to Prague in a couple of hours, and I won’t have time to look for more Polish wildlife this morning. As luck would have it, however, I’ve still got a few pictures from Germany and London that I never got to show you, so here we go.

In Germany, we stayed in a nice old inn on the outskirts of town, which was surrounded by forests, and we didn’t yet realize that the fuel line in one of the vehicles had developed a leak, so we thought we had plenty of time and planned on a nice leisurely start to the day.

My first momentary poser was this stunning hawfinch, which I’ve only photographed once before, and that was in Riga, Latvia at the end of last summer.

Then this equally gorgeous European goldfinch horned in on the act.

The nicest surprise for me, however, was getting to see my very first mistle thrush (Turdus viscivorus), hopping around on a big lawn just as the description predicts.

Okay. If you are a birding purist, you probably should stop reading now because I’m gonna show a couple more pictures from that menagerie I stumbled upon in St. James’s Park, London.

Here’s a common pochard, of which I did get one poorly-lit picture when I visited the coast in South Holland, so I wasn’t too surprised to find one on a pond in London.

Here’s a red-breasted goose (Branta ruficollis), which “breeds on the high arctic tundra … and winters mainly by the Black Sea,” so a long-distance migrant, and London is not completely out of the realm of possibility.

Finally, here’s a black swan (Cygnus atratus), “which breeds mainly in the southeast and southwest regions of Australia,” and there’s no way in heck it got to London on its own. Dang.

I’ll be looking for some Czech beauties to show you tomorrow, so wish me luck!