Dancing Mad God

Reptiles are out in force these days; for one reason or another, most of the snakes I’ve seen recently have escaped my lens, but yesterday I got luckier. On top of our Hausberg, I spent some quality time with this gorgeous fellow:

He’s an Aesculapian snake: quite large by European standards (up to two metres), but not venomous. Apparently they can give you a nip if annoyed, though. Here’s part of him, with a water bottle for scale:

These snakes are apparently quite comfortable around people, and this one certainly was. He came and basked a little beside me, then turned round:

and gradually inserted himself into an impossibly tiny crack in a wall:

Once his head was safely inside, I ventured a gently stroke of his tail.

While trying to get far enough away from him to focus, I almost stepped on his friend:

There turned out to be at least three around there, and presumably more, enjoying the sunny hilltop.

Also cute, if not quite so magnificent, was this little lizard — probably a wall lizard, I’m told. These little guys are interesting because they come in six different morphs, which have not only different colours, but different reproduction strategies, differing in territoriality and number of young.

There are quite a few jewels on show in the Slovak countryside at the moment. One of them, strangely, is even non-avian:

Those blue spangles on his back, it turns out, are a sign that this is a boy slow worm.

The bee eaters are … less understated:

T And finally, our local stork chicks are starting to get a glint in their eyes:      

The Morava today produced a bumper crop of birds of prey: some of the fields were being mown, and an impressive variety of predators spotted their chance. The imperial eagle stayed frustratingly high:

while the red kites and kestrels were much more cooperative:

A flock of storks also enjoyed the feast, following the tractor and picking off some goodies.

Our pair have not been dining on the most glamorous of meals:

but the chicks are growing fast: compare the beak length with a few days earlier:

The parents feed and guard in quite rapid rotation, changing over at least every hour or so:

And this never gets old:

The herons are increasingly in evidence:

And the little guys also deserve some attention. A song thrush doing exactly what it should:

A piece of abstract art:        which gradually unfolds into a yellowhammer:

And as for him: 

Spring here has got the juices flowing in the various inhabitants. At Lake Kuchajda, sex-crazed drakes are beating each other up to get access to the females. Fortunately they’re not really built for duelling, but they give it a damn good go:

https://youtu.be/GGm0GsoV1j0

After sighting our male stork last weekend, we were very keen to go and investigate the nest this Saturday. And we found:

Two slightly wind-blasted, but resplendently-chest-feathered, storks.

We were slightly distracted by the appearance of a white-tailed eagle, to which the couple responded with a display of mantling to protect their nest:

Courtship then resumed with a display of mirroring behaviour:

Then a little spot of grooming:

And the action started:

We were rather surprised at this point, because the ringed bird, which we had always thought was the male, was the one underneath. Zooming in on our pictures from this year and last, we found that it is indeed the same beast, numbered AE750:

A little further investigation turned up a splendid site, which catalogues sightings of storks born in Schwaben this century. It seems that our boy is in fact our girl, was born in 2011 on the banks of the Danube near Moosheim, and bred in the Burgenland in Austria in 2013 before hopping over the Morava to grace Devinska Nova Ves last year. Here’s to another successful season!