A note on birds and animals

It is day 70 of the trip and we are nearly home so it seems appropriate to say something about the different animals and birds that we have encountered.

We started writing this post ages ago, probably back in Hungary, so some animals that were prominent then aren't with us any more but they still feel like a distinctive part of the trip.

Bears
We have never seen bears in the wild before so it was amazing to see them in Romania. Although we saw more of them on our brief trip up the Transfagarason road, those ones felt more like circus acts than wild animals so it was only when we saw one while we were out walking the day before that we got a sense of how scary seeing them in the wild could be.

Jackals
We didn't see jackals at any point but we heard them a lot in Bulgaria, usually just after sunset. From a distance, it is a lovely sound.

Golden Oriels and Scops Owls
For large parts of this trip we have gone to sleep with the sound of scops owls and woken up to the sound of golden oriels. Nice!

Storks
For a few countries, probably starting in Bulgaria right thru until the Netherlands, storks were everywhere, often on top of telegraph poles with a nest full of young or walking around in fields. I don't think we have ever seen them in the UK (though we think that there are some??) so that made it unusual for us.

Stray cats and dogs
In Greece, Bulgaria and Romania there were stray dogs and cats everywhere. The cats were in pretty poor shape health-wise but, being cats largely ignored us. The dogs likewise... but there were one or two occasions where we felt a little intimidated by them and it certainly put me off going out running first thing in the morning and we started always carrying walking poles when we went walking.

Frogs
Sara's nemesis! They have been everywhere and are so much more vocal than frogs in the UK, often sounding like someone walking around very loudly in wet galoshes! I think we have only seen one live one but boy can they make a racket!

Tortoises
I think we started seeing these in Croatia and then again in Greece. It is very unnerving to see a tortoise crossing a busy road!

Hedgehogs
We have seen a lot, I mean a lot, of dead ones on the roads all over Europe. Given that we hardly ever see them in the UK this is both a positive and a negative thing I guess.

Obviously, we have seen a lot of other birds, particularly buzzards, kites and other birds of prey, but we also see these regularly in the UK so haven't highlighted them here. We looked for golden eagles in a couple of places but can't say categorically that we saw them.Read more