Sat 4 May 2013
This year’s birding holiday for David, Steve and I was to Hungary – all arranged soon after we returned from the Netherlands last year. Friends and fellow Vale of White Horse RSPB members Malcolm and Brenda joined us on a trip organised by Hungarian Bird Tours based in Eger, and run by Roy Adams, a retired British policeman.
We flew British Airways to Budapest. Passing through Heathrow all went smoothly, though David’s cabin bag set off an alarm as it was scanned through security, prompting a thorough search and testing for explosives. It could only happen to David!
The flight was an hour late taking-off, but we arrived in Budapest only slightly after the scheduled time. Not quite sure how that happened – the pilot must have put his foot down.
We were met at the airport by Lewis, who was to be our minibus driver for the week. His name was really Louis (pronounced Loo-ish), but was known to everyone as Lewis. Our first Hungarian birds were house martin and barn swallow that were nesting on the terminal building. The drive to the Hotel Villa Völgy in Eger took about two hours. As the light faded we noticed lots of buzzards beside the motorway (see Day 7 report for more comments about these).
We were met by Roy at the hotel, and as it was pretty late we were ushered straight into the restaurant for dinner, leaving the sorting out of rooms to afterwards.
We did not meet the other birders on the tour until the following morning. These were Brian and Shelagh from Northampton, and Peter and Gill from Cheshire. On Monday Graham and Ann from Scotland would also join us and, just for Friday, Hans and Corinne from Sweden would join us for the day.
A map showing the principal places mentioned in the following posts can be seen by clicking here and the full list of species seen during the week is here.
Acknowledgements
Steve has kindly allowed me to use his bird photographs to illustrate this blog and break up my boring text. The black woodpecker photo is by Brian and used with his kind permission.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please add your comments about this post.