Notebook

LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF A BIRDWATCHER FROM ZEMUN
Birds Make Us Better
People who study, photograph and understand birds seem to have an unspoken brotherhood of their own, above profession, guild or personal enthusiasm. They have their own language, signals, principles of solidarity and alliance. Some mental, geographical and symbolic maps of their own. They read their environment and the person in it with much more warmth and depth. They know that 365 species of birds have been recorded in Serbia so far, that they have names, characteristics, species history, and the right to life. (...) This is a personal testimony of how a famous Belgrade archaeologist entered that world and stayed in it

Text and Photo: Josip Šarić

I have a habit of joking and saying that in my youth (not counting girls) I had two first loves. It usually confuses the interlocutor, but everything becomes clearer when I emphasize that the first first love was archaeology, while the second first love was photography. By chance, and to an extent by surge of passion, archeology became my professional commitment. Photography followed all the events from the background and only lurked for the moment to occasionally take archeology off its pedestal, until it has irreversibly taken over the winner’s podium in recent years.
The bird watching that is discussed in this article was born from the combination of love for photography and building of a bridge. Namely, in early 2015, I stepped for the first time over Pupin’s Bridge, which had been opened to traffic at the end of the previous year, and I visited an area I had never been to before. A completely new world opened up before me across the river, the so–called foreland of the left bank of the Danube. Walking along the embankment built in the late 1920s, which was supposed to prevent flooding of the low–lying land on which numerous settlements were located, my attention was first drawn to the landscape. Indescribable and enchanting were the changes in the colors of the dense vegetation that accompanied the change of seasons. And then I started noticing the ”natives” of the foreland. Wild boars, roe deer, rabbits, jackals, nutria and – birds started to come out of the bushes. Birds flocked from all sides. They appeared from the swamp vegetation, were on the water in so–called ponds, pecking at the coastal mud, chirping in the branches of willows and poplars, white–tailed eagles cried at heights where I could barely see them with the naked eye, kestrels and buzzards patiently stalked their prey from dried branches.
In those days, my bird watching started without me even being aware of it, or even having the basic concepts about it. And then, during one of my walks on the embankment, I met a man who was carefully following the flight of some birds, unknown to me, with binoculars. A casual conversation began and I found out that I had met Dragan Simić, an ecologist by education, a passionate bird watcher and traveler who had traveled to the Balkans, the Mediterranean, South Africa, India and Central America in search of birds. Not even a sporting accident in which he suffered a serious injury while falling from a cliff did prevent him from this dedicated bird watching. After two years of rehabilitation, he realized that he could engage in bird watching from a kayak, and he started that activity right on the foreland area where we met. On parting, he gave me a small guidebook Birds of Serbia and Areas of International Importance, of which he was one of the authors.

DIFFERENT PEOPLE, SAME PASSION

The illustrations with the birds that can be found most often in our area and the list of areas in Serbia that are of international importance for birds started to ignite my interest in observing and recording the birds that I met and that I slowly began to recognize. ”If you don’t have it in your head, you have it on Google”. With that slang proverb, I started browsing the internet. During my search for data to expand my limited knowledge of birds, I came across the website of the Society for the Protection and Study of Birds of Serbia and, of course, immediately became a member. And then I slowly began to discover another world – the world of bird lovers and the many interesting people who make up that world. All of them, people of the most diverse professions and profiles, are united by a common passion – love for nature and respect for the rules it sets up.
Among the bird lovers is Milan Ružić, doctor of veterinary medicine, president of the aforementioned Society, from Čačak, living in Novi Sad. He has been studying birds professionally for more than twenty years, has published dozens of scientific papers and a large number of popular texts. He always emphasizes that Serbia is located in one of the six European centers of biological diversity and that on the territory of our country, which covers less than one percent of Europe, about two–thirds of the bird species inhabiting the Old Continent are nesting and met seasonally.
Primarily as a photographer who unexpectedly found himself in the world of birds, I very quickly noticed images on the Internet that caught my attention due to their quality. One of the authors of such photographs is Čedomir Vučković, known among bird watchers as Wolfson Birdman, a versatile personality in which anthropologist, journalist, photographer, musician and bird watcher combined. According to him, bird watchers are divided into three categories. In the first category are those who observe birds and record data on their appearance and behavior, in the second category there are nature photographers who observe and record birds, and in the third category there are those who combine the activities of the first two.
In Serbia, the presence of 365 species of birds has been recorded so far, and in the area where I first paid more attention to them, in Beljarica (that’s how that part of the Danube foreland is called among bird watchers), the presence of 183 species has been observed so far, although these figures are subject to constant changes. Considering that, for now, I count myself in the second category of bird watcher according to Čeda’s definition, I am more focused on photographing birds than on systematically recording observed species and searching for a new species that will mark my photographic portfolio. However, even I, a beginner, got lucky in the first days of bird watching. While I was sitting gathering strength to continue hiking, on 08 May 2020, a bird with yellow feathers on its head landed on a dry branch just a few meters from me. Camera in the bag, I am unprepared for such an encounter! My wife, who was filming the swamp ibis not far away, calls: ”Take out the camera, take a picture, what are you waiting for?" Reluctantly (but dutifully as a spouse), expecting the bird to fly away immediately, took out my camera and miraculously faced the gaze of a completely calm bird that allowed me to take a few shots. When reviewing the images and trying to figure out from the manual which species it was, I concluded that it was a yellow wagtail. But a retraction immediately followed: Milan drew my attention to the fact that it was a yellow-headed wagtail. It turned out that my camera recorded its presence on the territory of Belgrade for the first time, and it was the 169th species in Beljarica, and at that time only its fifth appearance in the territory of Serbia.

SURPRISES IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

We often hear the birds before we see them, and this especially applies to the warblers. In such situations, it is crucial for the bird watcher to recognize the call or song of the bird in order to know what species it is, and then having an insight into its behavior to make a strategy how and at what moment he can expect to see it. It goes without saying how important it is for the photographer-bird watcher. My ears are still quite ”hard”, so I get a lot of help from another friend who has excellent hearing and perfectly locates and recognizes birds by their calls. It is Sever Nagulov, a geographer by education and the best postman who ever appeared in the area where I live. He is a bird watcher listening to birdsong to a great extent, diligently recording data on their appearance and selflessly informing interested bird watchers about where some rarer species have appeared. One almost anecdotal event is related to Sever. The winter before last, I went to Kikinda to see and photograph small owls in the city of owls. It was a nice experience and a memorable encounter with dozens of these attractive birds tucked in the branches of trees in the pedestrian zone. However, not long after, Sever informed me that in the crown of a pine tree that grows ten meters from the entrance to the building where I lived, there was a small colony of six or seven long-eared owls. I could reach them with about twenty steps. However, I took the most attractive shot of a little long-eared owl on an abandoned farm not far from Kovilovo, where we patiently looked into each other’s eyes for the duration of the shooting, which lasted several minutes.
Bee–eaters are among the most beautiful European birds. In the places where they hunt, people will often hear them, and in the heights and against the light, they will be difficult to spot. In order to photograph the beekeepers, I spent hours craning my neck and watching them fly over the embankment quickly and undetectable by the lens on Beljarica. The failure of photographing in Beljarica led me to search for them in Deliblatska peščara, which was also unsuccessful. Learning that there is a colony in Višnjička Banja was promising. And to paraphrase Caesar: I came, I saw, I failed! And then a surprise. From another bird watcher, also a neighbor from the settlement, Dejan Kovačić (a precision mechanic currently working in a glass tempering plant), I learned that a colony of beekeepers resides in nests excavated in a loess profile near the small gorge, which the people of Zemun know under the name Goveđi brod. So, the beekeepers that I chased around Banat were flying about three hundred meters from the building where I live. This was followed by crawling through gardens and nettles up to my waist, avoiding an unfriendly stray dog, forcing a barbed wire fence and finally – a close encounter with beekeepers and photos that I will probably never take again.

STEPS ON THE BIRD WATCHING WAY

As my bird watching days passed, interesting experiences followed. Last year (2021), together with my friend Petar Petrović (graduated in geological engineering), I tried for a week to record the ibises in Beljarica that other bird watchers had seen days before us. We finally managed to see them and somehow take a picture, waiting for them to come closer to the bank where we were hiding behind some vegetation for the more attractive shots. Then a car rushed over the embankment, scared the nervous river gulls, which took off screeching, and were followed by ibises that rose into the air and disappeared into the distance. Only two disappointed photographers-bird watchers remained on the embankment. And then this year, we both went to the Sebeš canal in Borča so that he could record the great reed warbler, a marsh songbird with a not very sweet voice, but with an attractive figure while singing. While looking for a place to shoot reeds, in the empty pools of the ”Mika Alas” pond, I saw four ibises, which this time I shot properly without being disturbed. Among those shots is one showing three ibises in flight, their dark feathers shimmering in the full spectrum of rainbow colors, justifying the name they have in some other languages – glossy ibis.
After several years of bird watching and intensive bird photography, it happens to me that when I am walking with acquaintances or friends, and some unfamiliar bird appears in front of us, when asked what species it is, I completely spontaneously and unintentionally give its name in Latin as an answer. I didn’t notice how those names imperceptibly began to be engraved in my memory. Maybe it is a sign that I have passed the first, true amateur step in bird watching. And the very process of bird watching, no matter how one defines bird watching, shapes a person in a special way, even if he starts doing this activity relatively late. The birds that, being born in the city, I took for granted and noticed only as vague outlines in the air, became much more than that. I started to think about the fact that these are actually creatures that inhabit the planet Earth incomparably longer than humans, so maybe they have some greater rights than those that we deny them in the constant plundering of natural resources. Meeting more and more species, I begin to see different characters among them, similar to the ones we have among humans.

THE BIRDS ARE NOT CHASED, BUT WAITED FOR

Birds have their lives colored by habits and instinctive behavior, and this requires a bird watcher interested in taking photos to play with them both physically and mentally. This includes kilometers walked both on a hot summer day and on a cold winter day. This includes filming birds during autumn and spring migration, when weather conditions can be unpredictable. You should definitely not carry a tripod or monopod made of carbon fiber with you, because they are real bait for lightning. Mosquitoes and a host of other annoying insects are regular companions. I also realized that in the search for a good photo, you don’t chase after the birds, but wait for them. To This means knowing their behavior and accordingly making a strategy where and how to record them. Accompanying elements are prolonged waiting under a camouflage cape in the summer with sweat dripping from the forehead that makes the eyes burn, rubbing frostbitten fingers in the winter to be able to press the shutter button on the camera at the right moment, and wet feet from shoes that turn out not to be waterproof.
Before every departure to observe and record birds, I remember the words of Milan Ružić who said in an interview: ”Birds have so many noble qualities that it is a real joy for a smart person”. And just by watching birds you can get better. Watch a couple of pigeons from your terrace, you will see what love means, how they bring twigs for the nest, how they carefully guard those two eggs, how they try to nurture those chicks, how they teach them to fly.”
I am sure that each of us, even if we are not dedicated bird watchers, watching those feathered neighbors of ours flying around buildings and in parks, can see the world we live in in a different way; pay more attention and respect to it, finding perhaps a hidden and unspoken empathy for everything that surrounds us, and the birds would take credit for awakening such an often deeply subdued feeling. I think they helped me in that. The first thing I will do after finishing this article will be packing my photography equipment and going out to meet the birds and their fall migration this year.

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No Age Limit
Bird watching definitely does not recognize age and this is confirmed in the best way by Mr. Vladimir Ristić, retired teacher of general technical education and head of the photo section at the elementary school ”Stevan Sinđelić”, who in his late eighties is regularly present at some of the bird watching spots. When we meet, we must report to each other what we saw, where and when. He says that these ”escapes” from the city center fill his day and dispel boredom. And judging by his vitality, they allow him to still be young in body and spirit.

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Encounters to Avoid
Last summer, in the company of Gojko Kukobat (graduated IT engineer), I visited the sedimentation tanks of the devastated sugar factory in Padinska Skela. Instead of the expected birds, in the thicket we noticed traces of intense presence of wild boars in that area, so we concluded that it would be wiser to take shelter before an unwanted encounter with these unpredictable and sometimes very aggressive animals ensues. The sugar factory sediment tanks are still waiting for our return to that bird watching zone.