Lots of little surprises…

I didn’t give you much to go on in my last post, other than “back to the Alps”, so if you guessed “it’s gotta be Liechtenstein,” then you should definitely buy a lottery ticket. At just 62 square miles, it’s smaller than Washington, D.C., so you shouldn’t be too surprised to learn that neither Anne nor I have ever visited, and since we were already in the neighborhood, we thought we’d finally give it a try.

We’re staying in the capital, Vaduz, which has fewer than 6,000 residents, so it’s a pretty short walk to get “out into the countryside,” and the weather this morning was cool and partly cloudy, but not windy or rainy, so I was optimistic. As you will see, Liechtenstein did not disappoint.

The Rhine River flows through the valley, just over a kilometer west of our hotel, and it was chock full of little birds this morning. I saw white wagtails, grey wagtails, black redstarts, and this little cutie, only our second water pipit ever.

Another bird that seemed drawn to the stones that make up the river bottom was this gorgeous European stonechat, which we’ve also only seen once before, but not quite as nicely as this.

Almost as soon as I spotted the first stonechat, and before I even figured out what it was, I heard an incessant call from the top of the levee behind me, and it turned out to be from our very first yellowhammer (Emberiza citrinella). I had heard the call before, when we were waiting for hours to cross the boarding from Poland into Ukraine last June, but I was never able to get eyes on that one, and roaming into the woods was frowned upon at the time, so it sure was great to finally see the little stinker today.

Lastly, the Rhine is not the only waterway in Vaduz. Since they built such huge levees to stop the Rhine from flooding the valley, they had to build a canal, the “Liechtenstein inland canal,” that runs parallel to the Rhine to collect water from all the tributaries that used to flow into the Rhine.

There’s still plenty of snow on the mountains that surround the valley, so water in the canal was flowing pretty good this morning, and there are a few rocks sticking out, which made me think of “dippers!” Well, as luck would have it, my intuition was pretty spot on, this one time, and I didn’t have to follow the canal very far to find this stunning creature, our very first white-throated dipper (Cinclus cinclus). Hot diggity-dog!

I see that there are only five species in the genus Cinclus, which means we have only three more dippers to go! Woo hoo!

Anyway, Anne and I start our trek home tomorrow, first with a bus ride down to Sargans, Switzerland, then with a train back to Geneva, and eventually a flight back to Chicago. Wish us luck!