We like looking at wildlife, but to be honest an Epic Journey does not have the best wildlife-spotting opportunities because:
a) we do not get up early enough, so by the time we go past most of the wildlife is having a nice little post-second-breakfast nap;
b) we are rushing past at huge speeds of between 8 and 30 kph. Mostly 8, but that still is a bit speedy to stop and look intently at a rustling clump of vegetation or a flutter of wings in a distant tree;
c) a lot of the landscape we are going through is farmed, it’s not hilly woodland because that’s not where the roads are;
d) we don’t know what we are looking at.
Consequently some of the most interesting things we’ve seen have been roadkill, but pictures of a squashed stoat may not appeal to 100% of our readers – as they are either runny or they are crunchy – and we are very conscious that this blog may one day attract a wider audience (but it is great that we have at least 3 current readers, hooray, HELLO WORLD, we love you, keep up the reading and we will spare you pictures of ermine intestines).
So we have a live if slightly dopy-looking badger – we were warned that unexpected docility in wild animals is one symptom of rabies so we gave him a loving look and a wide berth – some flat weaselly-looking things, both black/white and tan/white (ok black/white/red and tan/white/brown but I will stop being graphic now) and several snakes. The two best snakes didn’t look like snakes at all from a distance. The one on the road into Lepenski Vir looked completely like a child’s toy rubber snake – I stopped to laugh at it thinking a child had dropped it from the gift shop, and after a while it got fed up with me and wriggled off into the bushes. The other one was in a wide sandy layby on a fairly busy road and looked like a piece of discarded yellow hose off a lorry – maybe 2ft long. Both very satisfying, both unphotographed and unidentified but I know you will forgive me that. We’ve seen tons of skinks and today we saw a large green lizard (large as in body 4″ long).
On a more micro-scale, we’ve had snails, beetles and hairy caterpillars crossing the road. And as I’ve mentioned various butterflies including the LOBBs which we keep smacking into – I saw one uninjured on a plant while I was grinding uphill so stopped to take this picture of it. (ok maybe I had a rest at the same time, but we wildlife specialists have to make sacrifices for our art.)
Here in Bulgaria we have seen every colour of roadside flower, from yellow to blue, from orange to deep purple. Little spriggy things, small daisy-like things, just ask a small child of your choice to draw a flower using a random crayon and we’ve seen ones like that. I could regret not knowing the names, but then you don’t either, so just ask Mr Google for “wildflowers in Bulgaria” and enjoy what you see. I sacrificed some more of my uphill progress to take some pics by the side of the road pant wheeze gasp.
Coming over the mountains (ok hills) from Elena we demonstrated our eco-sensitivity by photographing the patch of alpine strawberries we found. It goes without saying that you are not supposed to pick anything in that area as it is a National Park, but rumour has it that they taste great too. As we furtively wiped the strawberry juice off our chins we also passed some locals going back to their car with a suspiciously baggy look to the front of their T shirts, trying not to meet the eyes of the forest staff “oh! these mushrooms?? they just er fell in there, such a nuisance, I am plagued by mushrooms, it’s just as well I can shake them out into this bag in the back of my car”.
We’ve been surprised by the large areas that some birds cover. We first saw storks in Germany and they are still here. Ditto swifts or house martins or whatever those quick, insect-eating, chirpy, darty birds are. I took a picture today of a classic stork’s nest and you can (rather fuzzily) see the swifts on the wires round it, and you can’t (rather fuzzily) see that they’ve actually built nests on the underside of the stork’s nest. Mrs Stork is looking at us saying “this used to be such a nice area until those noisy neighbours moved in”. And the swifts are saying “it’s fab living by storks, they are such slobs that they are completely surrounded by flies, I just circle the nest with my beak open and yum burp that is dinner sorted”.
Oh also jays and magpies, they are still down here in Bulgaria. And of course sparrows which are everywhere making colonies in bushes so you cycle past a loudly-tweeting bush; and for some unexplained reason there are gulls in central Bulgaria. We’ve seen lots of LBJs (birder-abbreviation for unidentified Little Brown Jobs) and also lots of BBPs (any birder worth their salt would know which Big Brown Predator they are looking at but let’s say they were kites or buzzards or maybe perhaps the fabled Bulgarian Lowland Eagle).
Sounds. We mentioned the Danube Duck-or-Frog thing that made huge amounts of noise – a sort of cross between quack-quack, croak-croak and rivet-rivet. Now we are firmly into cicada territory with its own distinctive noise.
And finally let’s talk smells. It was really thrilling yesterday to come down out of the hills from Elena into Tvarditsa and realise that we’d made a transition into Mediterranean vegetation. Hot, sandy, pine woods have their own distinctive smell, I love it. Earlier of course it was wild garlic in the woods but we’ve long left that behind. Today there was a clear smell of green coriander. All the field margins are unsprayed and the roadside verges are unmown so there’s lots of room for stuff to grow – and also although a lot of this area is now agribusiness there are still large uncultivated areas.
It’s also very zen to think that these animals and plants have been living their own lives all the time that the strange ape-tribes have been quarreling over this region.