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.”

June 11 was truly a red-letter birding day. Raptors were the theme, and thanks to Mladen’s excellent local scouting, we got great looks at Asian Imperial Eagle and Lesser Spotted Eagle, both lifebirds for me and both seen impressively well. I was especially pleased to see the Lesser Spotted in the expert company of Mladen and Gerard; even given the excellent views, I would have puzzled over the identification much longer.

The day also produced the more expected accipitrids, including Black Kite, Western Marsh-Harrier, a fine male Montagu’s Harrier, and Common Buzzards, along with the usual Common Kestrels.

But for me, all these hawks paled next to their smaller partners in predation, the shrikes. In all my European experiences before this trip, I had seen only two species (and only a single individual of Northern Gray Shrike, in Switzerland); our Bulgarian expedition produced four, and several days turned up tallies of no fewer than three shrike species.

It was extremely gratifying to find Red-backed Shrike a common and conspicuous feature of the rural landscape. In several small towns and villages, in fact, the birds were nesting in unkempt gardens, something I had not seen in western Europe before. Hurray for extensive agricultural practices and sloppy yards!

Woodchat Shrikes were nearly as common some places, and nearly as beautiful; my day’s high count was 15, a figure virtually impossible to conceive of in western Europe.

Shrikes are earnest birds, it seems to me, but I could never shake the feeling that the Woodchats were smiling back at us.

Even rarer than Woodchat and Red-backed is Lesser Gray Shrike, a stunningly elegant gray-and-black shrike with an extensive mask. We were fortunate to have great views of this bird several times on the trip.

But the real prize was Masked Shrike. Mladen had two pairs staked out, and the second performed beautifully for us in a shade-dappled oak grove. It quickly became apparent that they were attending a nest, and we withdrew to a respectful distance, from which we watched them hunt and perch. Another of the fantastic birds I had never dreamed of actually getting to see. Tick!

There were moments last week when we found ourselves looking, mirabile dictu, at things other than birds. I took a few pictures of organisms we found pretty or interesting.

Cool mornings brought out the slugs and the snails, including good-sized edible snails.

As the day warmed, butterflies emerged, sometimes reaching impressive densities in fields and along woodland edges. This is a small tortoiseshell, a description and a name.

Salty puddles drew large numbers of blues.

Some of them were even BLUE.

I think that this was a green-veined white, nectaring sluggishly in the early morning.

Of the apparently several fritillary species, the silver-washed was most common and most conspicuous.

And it was good to see peacocks again, even if they did elude the camera’s eye (or at least its focus).