Originally, I had planned to visit the Fichtelgebirge today, in order to find an obviously tame Three-toed Woodpecker that had been reported on ornitho.de. However, this morning I skipped this plan, as yesterday evening a Thrush Nightingale had been discovered in the Mohrhof-Weihergebiet. The eastern sibling of the more common Nightingale looks and sounds very similar to the latter and isn't actually easy to identify. So it is quite understandable, that I'm normally a bit sceptical when I read about Thrush Nightingale sightings beyond eastern Germany, which is by the way its western distribution boundary. Nonetheless, since both sound recording and record shots had been uploaded to ornitho.de, this case was naturally different.
I started as early as possible and went straight to the location where it was seen last. At first it remained very quiet there (well, some other birds were singing of course, but not the one I hoped for) and I had to wait quite a while until finally the striking song of the Thrush Nightingale could be heard. Sadly, during the next twenty minutes the bird didn't hop out of its bush a single time, but still I'm happy with my sound recording, which is a lot better than nothing at all.
Afterwards I spent another hour or so walking around in the area, where I could add Little Bittern, Purple Heron, Savi's Warbler and Sedge Warbler to my year list. Generally, this site is very nice and many rare species like Black-necked Grebes breed there, although it is not always easy to spot them from the paths.
As I was already rather close to Erlangen, I made a detour to the suburb Tennenlohe before driving back home, where my second target species of this day, a male Red-breasted Flycatcher, spends now its second summer in a row. Despite no female is anywhere nearby it's singing the whole day and has apparently adapted to the permanent presence of humans. So I got very close to this small guy and was able to take some decent pictures, although the light was far from good.
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