Sport has a lot of interesting traditions. However, few are quite as crazy (bordering on the psychotic), or fanatically violent as what’s known as the Eternal Derby, the soccer match between the two Serbian teams Red Star and Partizan. Essentially, the huge groups of “ultras” who support the two teams, use the game as an excuse to riot and set off an unsafe amount of pyrotechnics. This game was something I had wanted to witness for years, so when I found out it was scheduled for this week, I just had to go.
The Eternal Derby!
The game was crazy, exhilarating, memorable, and loads of fun, but this is a birding blog, so a Balkan orgy of violence isn’t the point. What is the point, is the birding I was able to do in Belgrade before I returned to Sarajevo.
Serbia has one of the largest (and best?) birding community in the Balkans and I was excited to experience it. I was lucky enough to be invited to join Dragan Simić, a Belgrade ornithologist and bird blogger, to count pygmy cormorants flying up the Sava River to their roost. In a rare event last winter, the Danube River froze, leading to massive mortality in the very large and important population of cormorants that overwinters in the city. The count was to determine exactly how much of the population had survived.
Pygmy Cormorant (taken the next day but whatever)
I met Dragan in a bar on the banks of the Sava where we carried out the count over beer (this is Europe after all). At first the cormorants came by in a trickle, most alone, occasionally in a small flock. As it got closer to dark however, the trickle turned into a stream and big flocks over a hundred birds spilled past, doing their characteristic short, choppy flight style, as if scared of being late to the roost. By the time it was too dark to see, the stream and died down again and we had ended with around 2,100 birds, a higher number than expected. According to Dragan this means that 60% of the population survived, likely due to the Sava remaining ice free. At this point, I was invited to attend the upcoming Birdlife Serbia meeting happening in a few days in Novi Sad, but I had to decline as college applications beckoned me back to Sarajevo.
I was however able to do some birding the next morning before catching my bus. The Danube and the Sava intersect each other in downtown Belgrade, and this spot has proven a boon for migrating and wintering waterfowl. The island in the middle of the two rivers is also home to a pair of white-tailed eagles! Quite impressive for the middle of a major capital city. It was this spot I wanted to check out.
I arrived that morning to find Eurasian coots and mallards swarming all over the place: typical. Moving away from the shallower areas, the swarms of coots turned into swarms of black-headed gulls, a number of which had quite a lot of the black left in the hood. This was odd since neither the gulls last month in Albania, nor those last week in Bosnia had any black at all. Are these birds molting into basic plumage late? Or into alternate plumage early??
Black-headed Gull
I also began to pick up on the big flocks of common pochard scattered along the shore. A bit of scanning even turned up a crisp male ferruginous duck mixed in! The more I see these birds, the more beautiful I think they are, definitely in the top five Western Palearctic ducks.
Common Pochard
Ferruginous Duck
Loads of cormorants of both species were present too. Presumably this was my second meeting with these pygmy cormorant individuals since, in theory, we saw the whole population the night before. I will simply never get tired of these birds though. They’re like little tiny, long-tailed double-cresteds with the slim, snaky necks of an anhinga. Fantastic birds!
Pygmy Cormorant
Doing its best anhinga impression — nice try
Around this point, the number of large gulls in the river began to increase and I began my long descent into insanity. The majority of the large gulls here are yellow-legged. However, in the winter, the number of Caspians picks up. The latter is a bird I needed for the Western Palearctic and wanted badly to find. However, this ID is a tricky one and my experience with European gulls is slim as it is. Needless to say, I spent a lot of time staring at distant gulls and taking tons of photos. Eventually I found a few birds that looked satisfactorily Caspianesque but I will have to return to analyze photos more thoroughly before I am satisfied. Gulls are not a fun time.
Yellow-legged Gulls
When I turned around to walk back the way I came (pulling some tufted ducks in the process), I noticed big groups of mallards and black-headed gulls taking flight and knew to turn my attention skywards. Lo and behold, there it was, a massive white-tailed eagle spiraling up over the Sava: a lifer! Europe’s largest eagle wasn’t a disappointment either but unfortunately, when a suspiciously Capsian-y gull came by, I took my eyes off the eagle for 30 seconds in which time it managed to vanish. Oh well, I’m sure to see one to my satisfaction at some point this year.
Eared Grebe (not an eagle)
Thus ended my time in Belgrade as I headed to the bus stop for the, always agonizing, seven hour bus trip back to Sarajevo. It had been a great opportunity to get acquainted with the Serbian birding scene and I’m sure to be back in Belgrade sometime, maybe as soon as January. Better looks at white-tailed eagle next time? Maybe a great black-backed gull? Velvet scoter? Only time will tell.
The Birding Place 