1st Prespa Bird Weekend

The Society for the Protection of Prespa (www.spp.gr) in cooperation with the Hellenic Ornithological Society (www.ornithologiki.gr) organized an event that they hope it will become annual. The event took place during the first days of May.

The “1st Prespa Bird Weekend” therefore included two days filled with walks in the beautiful nature of the area and observation of the rich and very interesting bird fauna. Moreover, the SPP covered living expenses and feeding of all the event participants.

On the first day the participants were divided into teams and each team had to walk through a specific predefined path and to record all the observed bird species, while the second day the participants were divided again into separate teams and their task was to observe as many bird species as they can in all the Prespa lakes area.

The Prespa Lakes area is characterized by an extraordinary variety of habitats that contribute so that an enormous number of bird species (compared to the relatively small region) are nesting in the area. Among these species are the Dalmatian Pelican (globally threatened species that retains the largest breeding colony of approximately 1400 pairs in the area), the White Pelican, the Greylag Goose (the southernmost breeding site in Europe), the Goosander (also the southernmost breeding site in Europe), the Pygmy Cormorant, the Barred Warbler (one of the very few nesting places in Greece), the Golden Eagle etc.

As someone would expect I managed to find some time for photography between all the event activities. The time was limited so I decided to focus on species that are difficult to see elsewhere. Nevertheless I managed to take some decent pictures of Greylag Goose, Dalmatian Pelican, Golden Oriole, Barred Warbler and even a nice Red Fox. A small sample of these pictures are shown here. Don’t forget to click on them to see a larger/sharper version together with the Exif Data.