Wildlife Of Germany

The biggest part of this journey is the nature and for me personally (Christian) the animals are probably the best part of any journey I have ever done, including this one.

Let’s start with the insects, spiders and lizards. Might not be the favoured ones among most people but I love them, they are everywhere and when you get a good picture of one you keep that picture because insects looks so amazing, even the smallest ones. Vattie often helps me searching for critters in the ditches; I’ve never seen a dog so fascinated in even the smallest fly.

Sometimes I try to make it my mission to spot a specific animal during a day, keeps you focused and it’s a fun thing to do. I also try to measure the likelihood of spotting these animals depending on previous days weather and the vegetation and the surroundings we are in, if you don’t know me from before my specialty is reptiles and amphibians. One day I measured the likelihood of spotting reptiles would probably be really high, and I was right.

This is however only a “Slow-Worm” or “Anguis”. It’s a beautiful lizard and with its peculiar looks very fun to take pictures of. My goal of the day was however the “Vipera Berus” or commonly known as the Common Viper. I heard that there was supposed to be snakes of this species in the Black Forest but also that they were not overly common here, but one who seeks will find. And I did, it was a gorgeous yellow one that had slipped by me in the grass. First I thought it was an Anguis again but when I was about to pick it up I saw the big difference in this one. It escaped out on the road and just before I got a picture of it a couple of older hikers nearly stepped on it and it escaped into the bushes before I could catch it. The hikers had a great laugh and I was a little bit grumpy but no harm done at least.

Toads are always funny, their looks and all the different colors they can have makes them so cool. I always try to find amphibians wherever we are and it hurts me a little bit that we haven’t seen a salamander here in the Black Forest yet, but there are plenty of toads. Somehow I’m never the one to find things crawling or just laying there in the middle of the road, but Cecilia is quick to point out to me that I’ve just missed something right in front of my eyes. Like these mating toads I would have missed if Cecilia wouldn’t have been there:

We’ve seen a lot of birds and if you’ve read Our Footprints you know that birds never interested me before I went to Costa Rica, now I just can’t get enough of them.

The Red Kite (Milvus Milvus) is common in the Rhön-area and it’s a beautiful bird, we’ve seen some falcons and a couple of eagles as well but it’s harder to take pictures of flying predator birds than one would think. Mostly it’s just a black spot in the sky and you snap a picture and all you get is just that… a black spot, sometimes even blurry.

But with a little bit of luck you might actually get a bird on that picture.

We also learned that there is a project in the Rhön-area to strengthen the population of their Capercaillie birds (Tetrao Urogallus) (Swe- Tjäder), by catching wild ones in Sweden to then plant new breeding pairs in these areas of Germany. It’s interesting because it’s a bird that is still listed as “least concern” on the threat level list. Apparently they have been predated upon very much by the red fox here in Germany and that’s why they have to reintroduce more breeding pairs from Sweden. However this bird has previously been near extinction in Scotland by 2015 before and they estimated there to only be about 1000s of these birds left. We have not seen even one yet, but they are

known to exist in almost whole Europe, maybe we’ll get lucky.

One interesting thing was however the Northern Bald Ibis (Geronticus Eremita) we saw at a small free park in Pforzheim. Very few of these exist in the world now and the different zoos trying to breed them are mostly unsuccessful, because of different reasons and one main reason is that most of these captive birds get sick. The reason for that however is unknown, usually they get skin diseases and their feathers fall of but the one we saw seemed quite healthy.

Another really cool bird we saw was the Black Woodpecker (Dryocopus Martius), it woke us up one morning by picking on a stump of tree just outside our tent as if someone would knock on it. A little startled we just had to see what it was, there it was for a few seconds before it flew away, even though we couldn’t get a picture of it we’re sure we’ll see it again because there a lot of woodpeckers here in Germany.

And there is one last thing we just have to tell you: You know when you sleep in a tent in the middle of a forest and everything is dead quiet and it’s in the middle of the night so you can’t see anything either. This is when you don’t want to wake up to a barking/moaning sound that echoes so loud in the whole forest that you almost get a heart attack. Yup, this happened… Not once or twice but several times since we got to Germany. This whole thing was not only scary but also really weird, because Cecilia thought the noise sounded little like a bleating sound and I thought it was more of a Barking sound. Our imaginations just kept making it worse and first it was a moose and then a Mufflon sheep (because they exist here) finally we got enough and had to look it up. We had guessed it before but were not sure, it was the male deer’s bark we heard during the

nights.

We hope that this project will hellp maybe some of the animals in the wild, we prefer a clean nature free from plastic and trash and we think the animals would too.

See you in a week! Ciao!