Category Archives: Umzu

Schildkröte

Since the weather was still unusually balmy and sunny for November André and I went for another long walk yesterday, Sunday. We went to the Wagbachniederung, which is a protected area not far from us. It is known for attracting birds, especially migratory birds, as the area is very boggy and has large areas of water and reeds.

Auf der Seite von Norbert Kühnberger kann man nachschauen, welche Vögel in den letzten Wochen (bis Jahren) dort gesichtet wurden.

We took our binoculars and saw a lot of the species that we expected, for example around twenty Great egrets (Silberreiher), which are not usually found in Germany. Of course we also saw the much more common Grey heron (Graureiher) and hundreds of cormorants (Kormorane).

I was most surprised though when we saw this animal:

See it right in the middle of my horrible cellphone photo? It’s a turtle!

Unfortunately it was too far away to make out any details, so identification is difficult. It might be a European pond turtle (europäische Sumpfschildkröte), but it’s quite large in that case. Another possibility is that it is a Blanding’s turtle (Amerikanische Sumpfschildkröte) that has escaped from captivity. I guess we’ll have to take a proper camera with a good tele lens the next time we go there…

Fall Walk

Yesterday André and I went for a nice long walk around our village to enjoy the balmy 20°C (68°F) weather and stopped by two small lakes nearby. Besides the usual mallards (Stockenten) and coots (Blässhühner) we saw two Egyptian geese (Nilgänse) on the first lake, but they were too far away to photograph. I’ve seen them there before, though. The Egyptian goose is an invasive species that has established self-sustaining populations all over Germany.

This is the second lake:

On this one, there were four grown white swans and one adolescent one which looked quite young for the season and was following another swan, presumably its mother.

Rodalber Felsenwanderweg

A few days ago André and I took advantage of the sunny fall weather and spent two days hiking the Rodalber Felsenwanderweg (offizielle Homepage auf Deutsch, Flyer mit Karte), which is a 45km (28mi) loop path around the small town of Rodalben in the Palatinate Forest, about 100km (60mi) from where we live.

Despite being not very far from the town, most of the path is actually a very narrow footpath through the forest, and it passes about 130 sandstone formations that are at least 15m long and 3m tall, but can be as big as 500m long and 18m tall. Many of them reminded me of the sandstone we’ve seen on our trips to the Southwest of the USA, but instead of being in a desert, these are in the middle of a large forested area with many rocks covered by trees, bushes and smaller plants like moss.

We were very lucky with the weather on the first day (Monday 26 October), which was very sunny. On the second day the sun didn’t manage to break through the fog which rose in the morning, so our hike took on a more mysterious air. The following photos were all taken on the first day.

The Bruderfelsen (brother’s rock) is Rodalben’s landmark, with a legend of two brothers who fought over one woman to go with it.

Detail of a sandstone formation:

There were many, many different mushrooms growing from the ground or tree stumps. Here’s a fly agaric (Fliegenpilz):

Fall colors: