Bulgaria 2007: Wheatears

I loved wheatears from the first picture of them I ever saw in a book, and one of the things I was really looking forward to on my Bulgaria trip was to see, perhaps, a couple of species I hadn’t seen before. We would not be disappointed!

Surprisingly, the wheatear we saw least of was Northern Wheatear, the only species I’d seen before. A small confiding group, perhaps a family, working a parking lot provided our only sightings of the entire trip.

Even more surprising was the abundance of Isabelline Wheatear, particularly as we moved east. I hadn’t really expected to see any, but we found large numbers of them at several steppe-habitat localities. 

 

My photos are poor, but I came away assured that I might well notice one should it happen to occur far out of range, like in, say, Arizona. And this species does wander, as Betty and Alan so nicely established when they discovered the first record for Australia several years ago.

Two other wheatear species were targets for the entire group. Mladen had pinned down a couple of sites for Black-eared Wheatear, in both white-throated and black-throated morphs, and though views were distant, we greatly enjoyed seeing this dramatically patterned bird, all sandy white and jet black.

And the shores of the Black Sea gave us the real prize among the Oenanthe, startling numbers of Pied Wheatears. With their black backs and faces and bright white crowns and underparts, these were among my favorite birds of the entire adventure, and it didn’t hurt that they allowed close approach.

This is a male Pied in typical habitat: the 2,000-year-old ruins of a Roman fortress on the Black Sea.

Everyone knows, of course, the slightly scurrilous origins of the English name “wheatear,” but the scientific name is charming: apparently, Northern Wheatears arrive in Greece when the grapes are starting to blossom, giving the bird the label “wine flower.”