Birding trip to the Balkans 2019.

Susan and I have just arrived home after a road/birding trip through Bulgaria and Romania. We visited a diverse selection of habitats ranging from deeply forested valleys to expansive steppes and high alpine-like meadows and mountains. We sampled many different local cuisines, which in the main were very good indeed. We were in the company of our own private guides who knew the countries and their terrain in minute detail, enabling us to see many species that otherwise would have been impossible to locate. Both our guides Vlado and Dimiter were expert birders, and a great many thanks must go to them for their hard work, both in terms of navigation and finding a variety of difficult species. The company we booked with was Neophron Tours based in Bulgaria who have been providing wildlife tours in the Balkans since 1996 and we can highly recommend them. Everything was taken care of, from a seamless pick-up at Sofia airport in Bulgaria, accommodation, transport to all locations, all food - (and plenty of it), and drop off at Bucharest airport in Romania. In short anything we requested was provided without hesitation, so if you want to see the Balkans from a cultural point, or Birds, Dragonflies and Butterflies then they have an expert to guide you.
A series of blogs will follow and as usual a full trip report will be available in due course.
In order to lighten our equipment load while travelling, all images within these blogs and the subsequent birding trip report were taken hand - held with a Sigma 150-600 f5 -6.3 contemporary lens. I left my Canon ef600 f4 is ii lens at home purely because of ergonomics.