50 years ago
Back in 1969 – Richard Nixon became US President, Rod Laver won Wimbledon, the moon landing, and so on, but I embarked on a trip to the east, to expand my bird-list.
Together with my Dad and John Gregory, in the old man’s battered Cortina, we drove, in one go, from Doncaster, via Dover and Calais, to Vienna, no mean feat, even with three of us driving, then on the short trip to the lakeside resort of Neusiedl, then, pre-package-dealboom, something of a ‘Mecca’ for British birders.
We stayed at the legendary Hotel Leiner, and after a long night’s sleep, walked the famous railway line, seeing singing Bluethroat and Icterine Warbler, and then a Syrian Woodpecker in the hotel garden. What sounded like some kind of cricket turned out to be a River Warbler – another ‘first’ – and, to date, the only one I have ever seen!
We drove to the lake, finding plentiful Little Egrets and Spoonbill, as well as Little Bittern, then we came across the wonderfully-named Oberstinkersee, where Lesser Grey and Red-backed Shrikes vied with Bee Eaters to catch plentiful dragonflies, and Ferruginous Duck fed in the shallows.
White Storks were on the church-towers in Apetlon, and we took a look at the wide open plains bordering the Hungarian frontier, where lookout towers housed Kalashnikov – touting guards. But our eyes were on the birds, and Great Bustards were the big prize here, stalking around quite close to the road, dwarfing nearby Roe deer. Frustratingly the wrong side of the wire, we could see raptors circling over Hungary – Lesser Spotted Eagle we could identify with some certainty, but we could go no further.