The Science of Birds - From the Field: Birding Romania

Episode Date: May 17, 2026

👕 Bird Merch —  Get yourself some bird shirts!~~~In this From the Field episode Ivan takes listeners along on a two-week scouting trip to Romania where he explored the country's remarkable natural landscapes in preparation for a future birding tour. There's just one catch: his binoculars broke almost immediately after arriving.Despite that setback, Ivan racks up some lifers and shares highlights from two very different corners of the country. First, he heads to the Danube River Delta on the Black Sea coast—widely considered the best birding site in Europe—where he had an unforgettable day exploring the maze of channels by boat. Then he crosses the Carpathian Mountains into Transylvania, where ancient forests, castles, charming villages, stork nests, and bears round out the adventure.Link to this episode on the Science of Birds websiteSupport the show

Hello and welcome. This is the Science of Birds. I am your host, Ivan Philipson. The Science of Birds podcast is a lighthearted exploration of bird biology for lifelong learners. This is episode number 133 of the podcast, and it's a From the Field episode. I do these every so often when I'm talking about my recent travels to various places around the world for birding, for the work I do as a birding guide. And so today we are talking about Romania,

the country in Eastern Europe. I was in Romania for about two weeks, and I was there to scout for a future birding tour that I will lead for my company Wild Latitudes. That will most likely be in 2028. And this was an exciting trip. Romania was a place I'd wanted to get to for a long time, and this was my first experience in Eastern Europe.

I had a really great time, and I'm excited to tell you about how it went. Now, one interesting twist on this trip was that, you know, of course, my binoculars are the most essential piece of gear that I have, right? As a birder, as a birding guide, binoculars are indispensable. Well, my binoculars prior to this trip were starting to have a little bit of a problem with the focus knob, and I ran. out of time, I wasn't able to send my binoculars in to the manufacturer to get them fixed, which I'm sure was possible, but I ran out of time. So I just took my binoculars. I'm like,

ah, it'll be fine. No, no worries, it'll be fine. Well, not long after I got to Europe, I realized, no, it was not fine. The focus knob got really out of whack, and so anything beyond about eight feet in front of me was completely out of focus. So my binoculars were essentially useless. And that was really, a really weird thing for me because, you know, for a very long time, everywhere I go, I have my binoculars, and they're just like an extension of me at this point, right? An extension of my sense of sight. So not having them was really interesting. Let's put it that way. But nevertheless, I had a great time, and so let's get into it. Let's talk about Romania. Now, obviously, we're here to talk about birds and nature, so I'm not going to go into a long lecture on the history of

Romania. But very briefly, Romania, of course, has a very long history, some of the earliest evidence of humans in Europe that was found in Romania, dating tens of thousands of years ago. But in terms of recorded history, we have, first we have the D-A-C-I-N, D-A-N, D-A-N, D-E-N, D-E-N, and those people were dominating the region several thousand years BC, and they shared the region with some Greek colonists who settled along the Black Sea coast. And then the Dacians were eventually conquered when the Romans came in

in about the first century AD. The Romans occupied the area for a while, and they didn't leave a lot of physical evidence, infrastructure, but they did leave behind their language. So today, Romanian is the only Latin derived language in Eastern Europe. So after the Romans left, you had the medieval period, and there were these three principalities, Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania.

And there was a lot of interaction between those principalities, and they had to deal with pressure from the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburgs, and eventually they united into the modern state that we know as Romania in the 19th century. And then the 20th century came along, and Romania had to contend with fascism, Soviet occupation, and Chow Shescu's oppressive communist regime. And that finally collapsed when there was the revolution in 1989. Romania went on to then join NATO and the EU, and that brings us more or less to the present. So a very long history with many different groups of people interacting, creating the modern state that we know is Romania. The country is roughly circular in shape, and it's about the size of the United Kingdom,

or in the United States we have the states of Wyoming and Oregon, where I live. Romania is about the size of each of those states. Romania is located at the intersection of Central and Southeast Europe. It's north of the Balkan Peninsula, and it sits on the northwestern coast of the Black Sea, to the north and east is Ukraine, and Moldova is to the east, Bulgaria to the south, Serbia to the southwest, and Hungary to the west. So in some ways it sits at a crossroads between many of these countries, between east and west, north and south. Geographically and bioregographically, it's a very interesting place. In terms of climate, Romania has a continental climate because it's relatively far from the open ocean, even though it has the Black Sea there.

It has four distinct seasons, with fairly warm summers and pretty cold winters. The precipitation is fairly average for Europe, ranging from about 22 to 30 inches per year, or 570 millimeters to 750 millimeters. So pretty typical for continental Europe in terms of climate. Now, let's talk about the birds. depending on the source that you look at, Romania has between about 354 to 386 species that have been recorded. So you get slightly different numbers depending on whether you're looking at I-Naturalist, E-bird, or Birds of the World, and I'm sure there's other sources that would give different numbers.

But approaching 400 species, we could say that, that have been recorded. In terms of breeding bird species, that number is more like 250. because many of the species that are among that almost 400 species total are those that are passing through on migration. Because Romania sits along a major flyway, a major migratory pathway for birds. At a continental scale, Romania sits within the Black Sea Mediterranean flyway. And that connects breeding grounds in northern Europe,

the Arctic, the western Siberia. So those are breeding areas, and those are connected to wintering areas in the Mediterranean basin and sub-Saharan Africa. So the diversity of birds we see in Romania, in part, in large part, has to do with the fact that it is on this migratory flyway. Some of the more common bird species that are reported on the I-Naturalist app are common buzzard, Eurasian blackbird, great tit, hooded crow, mute swan, house sparrow, and common chaffinch. So a lot of birds that are seen elsewhere in Europe, nothing super unique here. And as far as I know, there are no endemic bird species in Romania.

But as a birder, if you go to Romania, you can see some species that are somewhat more representative of eastern species compared to spending time birding in Western Europe. So a few examples would be the Dalmatian Pelican, Pygmy Cormorant, Ural Owl, Syrian woodpecker, and the rare red-breasted goose. Okay, so now I'm going to talk a little bit about my itinerary, what I did when I was in Romania for about two weeks. So I started as many people would in the city of Bucharest, the largest city in Romania.

But really, I didn't spend a lot of time there, so I got out into, I went east from Bucharest towards the Black Sea coast. And that is a low elevation, relatively flat area known as the Dobruja region, Dobruja. And it wasn't very long before I got my first lifer, my first bird species that I had never seen before, and that was the hooded crow,

which is quite common in that region. So this region, the Dobruja region, is dominated by an ecoregion called the Pontic Caspian steppe. Remember, steppe, P-P-E is a type of grassland. So the Pontic Caspian step extends from Eastern Europe to Central Asia, and it's basically a mixture of temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands. But these days, of course, it is dominated by lots of agriculture. The word Pontic in geography, history, or biology,

that is almost always a reference to the Black Sea basin. Pontic refers to the Black Sea. And remember I mentioned the flyway earlier. Well, there's an even more specific narrower flyway known as the Via Pontica, which is the Black Sea flyway. It's the second largest migratory route in Europe. It runs along the western edge of the Black Sea, and this is a critical flyway for many, many thousands of birds,

migrating between Europe and their wintering grounds, many of which are in Africa. So the major thing about the Black Sea comes. coast here is that this is where the Danube River empties into the Black Sea. The Danube is Europe's second longest river at about 1,700 miles long, or 2,800 kilometers, and it begins in Germany's black forest and flows all the way to Black Sea in Romania. And where the river meets the Black Sea, you have the Danube River Delta. And that is why I was there. That is why any respectable birder that goes to Romania should go to the Delta because it is amazing.

So what happens is the river splits into three main branches about 55 miles before reaching the Black Sea coast or 90 kilometers. And between these three main branches, you have all these other network or this network of all these other channels, and that is the Danube River Delta. It's this vast wetland complex. Adding up all of the the channels in the Delta, they add up to something like 2,175 miles or 3,500 kilometers. The main habitat is reed swamp, but there are also these big lakes, there are sand dunes, forests, and grasslands, all in a big patchwork in the delta. One of the unique aspects is these things called plowers.

I think that's how you pronounce it, P-L-A-U-R, plower. And this is a floating island that's made of a bunch of. bunch of dead reeds that have accumulated. And a plower can be up to 3.3 to 5.5 feet or so thick, or maybe 1 to 1.6 meters. And these islands drift around pushed by the wind and water currents, and they create a unique habitat for birds and other wildlife. And then there are some pretty extensive areas of sand dunes, and those are dominated by the actual forest that's in the Delta. In the lower areas, the most common trees are willows and poplars, so that would be in the riparian zone that's more affected by flooding.

And then in the uplands, you have oaks, elms, and ashes dominating. So, as I said, this is a place you must go if you're a birder in Romania, and it's actually considered one of the top 100 birding spots in the world, at least according to the book I have that is basically titled that. And in that book, it says that this is basically the best birding spot. spot in Europe, which is a bold statement. There are over 175 species found in the Delta, including massive numbers of species like pygmy cormorant, great white pelican, black-crowned knight heron, squaco heron, glossy ibis, and whiskered turn. So what I did was I hired a local

guide to go out in the delta for a day and a half or so. And we had a small boat and it was awesome. And thankfully, he had a spare pair of binoculars so that instead of using my completely broken binoculars, I had some, you know, kind of low range binoculars that, you know, worked just fine. Did the job, allowed me to see a lot of things that I otherwise would have had a hard time seeing. So we ended up seeing over about five hours, about 70 species of birds, which ain't too bad for a day of birding in the Palearctic anyway, right, in that biogeographic realm. I mean, if we were in the neotropics, then 70 species in five hours would be pretty standard, perhaps. But yeah, not bad for a northern tempered region. Some of the highlights for me

were special birds like the Dalmatian Pelican, Pallus' Gulles, Gulles, and black woodpecker. I finally got a black woodpecker after not seeing it at other places. So I've been dipped before on the black woodpecker, but finally got to see one, which was great. So we're zipping around through these channels in this small boat, going from narrow channels lined with willows and things, and then opening up into these broad lakes. It was actually quite cold the day we were out there, kind of windy and cloudy and a little bit drizzly, but still we had a blast. one of the highlights was I was looking at the in the distance and I saw this kind of cloud of pink a flock of birds and I was like what is that because I really didn't have flamingos on my radar wasn't really one of the the birds typically mentioned for the delta but sure enough that's what

it was it was a large flock of greater flamingos and when I showed the guide he kind of flipped out and you know he's out here most days of the year birding and and when I saw how excited he was about the flamingos, I knew we had something special. So in fact, he dropped whatever other idea he had about what we were going to do, and he started motoring really quickly towards the flamingos, the direction that they were flying. They disappeared behind some trees, and so he tried to figure out where he thought they might have landed. And so we're zooming around through this maze of channels trying to find the flamingos. And we never did, unfortunately, we saw them again in the distance flying, but we never did get a close look at them. But I have learned in my travels,

around the world working with local guides that you want to watch the local guides reaction. If the local guide is getting really excited about something, then that is probably something that's really special that you're witnessing. Because these people, they see a lot of these same birds and these same things over and over again because they're local guides. So they just go out, they take people out and see the same things over and over. But when they see something special that kind of lights them up, then that's really cool. So yeah, it was truly a great day, a really spectacular day in the Danube River Delta, and I can say, yeah, I mean, it was, for my experiences, birding in Europe, it was definitely the most birdie experience I had,

and it was super great. And what's really cool is when we come back, when I go back to lead the tour there in a couple years, the plan is to actually charter a floating hotel, to have this, you know, basically a barge that's literally a floating hotel with a bunch of rooms where we can spend multiple days in the Delta with our guides exploring the channels and checking out all the birds. So I'm really looking forward to doing that. One last thing to say about my experience in the Delta, it was just kind of this weird experience, I guess you could say. We were up on a hill above the Delta, kind of outside the Delta, looking over the landscape,

getting this panoramic view of the wetlands, which was really cool. But looking north, beyond the delta in Romania, we were looking across the border into Ukraine. And you couldn't see much detail, but what we could see were these plumes of smoke rising in a couple places. And so my understanding is that that was the evidence of the war between Ukraine and Russia. We were seeing something burning from the damage from the war. So that was just really, really bizarre and really sad to see. And, you know, it's a strange thing to have an experience like that. I had a similar experience being in southern China a while back,

hearing bombs go off in Myanmar from the war that's going on there. So here I am, just birding and having a grand old time, living my life like everything's normal, and not too far away are people in the middle of a horrible war. And so, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of thoughts and stuff, feelings we could have and discussion we could have about that sort of thing. But yeah, I'll leave it there for now. But yeah, just really, really strange and sad. So I had the Danube River Delta. That was the major birding experience, but there was much more to see in Romania. And what I did

then was I headed west. And this is all just in a little rental car that I had. That was just by myself. So I drove west and ended up crossing the Carpathian Mountains. So this is a little rental carpentia. So this is the dominant mountain range in Romania. There's different sort of subsections to the Carpathians, but looking at the map of Romania, to me, in that country, the mountains form kind of a backwards sea or horseshoe shape. And so to the east of that horseshoe, you have Bucharest and Dubruja, the Black Sea, kind of the lower elevation areas. And within the horseshoe to the west is Transylvania.

It's this kind of upland area. So, to get to Transylvania, I was passing the Carpathian Mountains, which were really beautiful, lots of snow-covered peaks when I was there. This ecoregion is the Carpathian montane conifer forest, and in the foothills below about 2100 feet or 640 meters, there's mostly a broad-leaf deciduous forest with lots of English oak and other oak species. And then between 2,100 and 4,700 feet, or 640 to about 1,400 meters,

you get up into a forest with European beach, silver fir, and species like Norway spruce, European larch, so conifers like that, as well as some birches and poplars, sycamores. Just really beautiful forest. Kind of fairy tale forest, right?

Like for those of us in Western culture that have grown up with all the Grims fairy tales and all these things. Romania preserves in some places pretty old forest, pretty ancient forest relative to the rest of Europe. And so this is kind of giving you a glimpse into that primeval forest that is evoked by fairy tales, Disney movies and whatnot. So it passed up over the mountain passes

and got to see the beautiful mountains and then dropped down a bit into Transylvania. And Transylvania is, it comes, that name comes from medieval Latin, and it translates to beyond the forest. So you come down out of the mountains onto this sort of plateau of Transylvania. And the major city there is Brochov. So I spent a couple nights there, a really nice city in the kind of central old part of town, which is basically medieval. A lot of the architecture, a lot of the buildings date back to the medieval period. Or, or it's, at least from three to 400 years ago, which is really amazing. It's just really beautiful.

There's a medieval wall around the edge of the city. There's a ruined castle on a hill that I was just looking at right out of the window of where I was staying. Besides birds, one of the things that you can do in Romania as an ecotourist is to go look at bears. What kind of bears? Well, Ursus Arctos, the brown bear. This is a subspecies of the same species in North America. which we know as the grizzly or the brown bear from Alaska, Codiak bear, those are all ursus arctos. Romania has the largest brown bear population in Europe if you exclude Russia. So that's pretty remarkable.

So seeing bears is an exciting thing to do in Romania. And the bears live primarily up in the mountains away from the valleys, even though historically in their natural state, like brown bears elsewhere, they probably roamed around in the low elevation areas as well, but they've been kind of pushed up into the highlands because of negative interactions with humans. So these days they live in dense, steep terrain in the Carpathian forests. And what they've done in Romania is in many places

they set up these bear watching hides, which are basically little wooden cabins you can go and sit inside and safely watch the bears from a distance. And that's what I did. I got a tour and I went with a small group of people. They drove us out to this hide. We hiked a little ways through the forest to get there. And yeah, they provide food for the bears. And it's done under the, it's done with a ranger, a licensed ranger and wildlife biologist. So this is a very regulated thing. And you go and there's this kind of clearing in the forest.

And there it is. Right when we got there, there was a big female brown bear. and it was really cool. I've seen a lot of these bears in Alaska and in Montana, you know, elsewhere in North America, but I'd never seen one in Europe. So that was very cool. She hung around for 10, 15 minutes, then wandered off, and we saw some foxes come in and a few birds like Eurasian Js, but yeah, it was cool. I mean, I imagine some of the people that I was there with had never seen a bear or at least a brown bear in their lives, so it was pretty cool. So when we do our tour in 2028 for my company, we will almost certainly go do some bear watching. And this is an example of ecotourism where, yeah, you know, it's, it has, maybe there's some concerns about the fact that bears are being fed with some regularity.

But it's better that than the bears being hunted and killed or the bears, you know, my understanding is that the rangers do this as a way to keep the bears from wandering down into the villages. or into the cities where the bears might get killed or they might kill people. And so it's kind of keeping them contained within the forest. So I'm sure there's a lot of debate one could have about the ethics of this situation. But as ecotourism goes, it seems like from my assessment that it's being done pretty responsibly. It seems they're trying to do the best they can to preserve the bear population and treat the bears with respect. Now, they try to keep the bears in the forest, but it turns out sometimes they wander down. and I found out personally because the day after I did my bear tour, my bear watching experience,

I was in my little hotel room and I was making some coffee in the morning and my phone started beeping at me really loudly. And I thought, well, that's weird because my phone is on Do Not Disturb. Well, apparently when there is a bear alert that overrides your Do Not Disturb, kind of like getting an Amber alert or something in the U.S. And yeah, I look at my phone and there's this alert. It says, the presence of a bear alert. was reported in Brashov on Kloska Street near 48th or whatever, you know, gave the delocation.

Avoid the area. Stay indoor. That's what it says, stay indoor. Stay away from the animal and do not try to take pictures of it or feed it. Protect your pets slash livestock without putting your life in danger. So, yeah, a bear came wandering into the city of Brashev while I was there. And of course, immediately what I did was I got my phone and I went to that location because it was convenient that they gave me the location, so I went to see the bear to take pictures of it, and I brought some food with me to feed it. I figured it might like some cheese. And just kidding, because, of course, I did not do that. I like to follow the rules for safety. If they say stay away from the bear, then I know. I will stay away from it.

Plus, yeah, brown bears are no joke. You got to be really careful. I mean, they're beautiful, wonderful animals, but that is a large carnivore. So that's bears. Now, the other thing to do in that area besides birding is to go see Brand Castle, B-R-A-N. This is a really picturesque castle situated in a mountain pass between the southern region of Wallachia and then where I was, Transylvania. This castle was built by the Saxons in about the 1300s, and it is a really, you know, probably the most important tourist destination in Romania these days. And it's a cool castle It's got some great history, but it is marketed to people like me as the castle of Dracula. Dracula's castle.

And when you look at it, perched on the side of this hill and this mountain pass above this little medieval-looking village, yeah, it really does evoke the idea of that spooky castle on the hill that we can picture from the Dracula stories. Now, is there any real connection between this castle and Dracula? Me, not so much. just very loosely. So Bram Stoker, who wrote Dracula, he never visited the region, even though he set his story in Transylvania. He did not lay eyes on this castle as far as we know. And he did base his character of Dracula on a historical figure, Vlad, the Impaler, you may have heard of, who lived in the mid-1400s. He was a prince of Wallachia, and he was called the impaler for some of the horrible torturing he did of his enemies, and he was a loose

inspiration for the fictional character of Dracula, Count Dracula. But Vlad the Impalor, as far as we know, probably might have passed by Brand Castle, maybe went in for a cup of tea or something once, but he didn't like live in it. So, you know, there's some, again, very loose connection, but it's just fun. And of course, the gift shopped at the castle has all kinds of stuff related to Vlad the Impaler, to Dracula, bats, vampires, that kind of thing. But not as much as you would think. I was a little surprised, like how, like if it was in America, man, that gift shop would just be nothing but stuffed animals of Dracula, bats, all kinds of kitsy, ridiculous stuff. It was pretty tame by my expectations in that regard.

You know, a little, a little bit of silliness, but definitely not that kitchy. Anyway, Brand Castle, really cool, really neat to see. You know, there's like, you can walk through this, like, secret passageway at one point. You get to see all the rooms and the little fireplaces and the courtyard and everything. It's just really cool. Then I went out into nature in the general area. Very close to Brand Castle, not far away, is the Zarneshd Gorge, or Zarneshd Gorge's. And this is a intersecting group of canyons formed from limestone.

These are in the National Park of Piatra Krauli. I think that's how you say it. Piatra Krauli. That's a little hard to say. But the Zarnest gorges are really cool. I mean, you hike through the gorges and it's got just these massive vertical walls of cliffs that go up to, you know, 600 feet high around you,

200 meters or so. A really spectacular landscape. And, you know, in Eurasia, when there's cliffs like that, what am I looking for? I am looking for the wall creeper. The Wall Creeper, one of the coolest birds ever, one of my favorite birds. You've probably heard me talk about it before. And this was definitely great habitat for the bird, but did I see one?

No, I did not. I mean, they might have been there, but I did not see one. And again, remember that now I'm basically working with no binoculars. So this is all naked eye stuff. What I did end up doing when I was birding without my binoculars was I could bird by ear, right? So for the species that I knew the songs and calls of, that was very helpful. You know, a lot of the usual suspects like common chaff-inch, common chif-chaff, great tit, Eurasian blackbird, European Robin, and so on.

So I could do some birding by ear. I could use Merlin to identify other bird sounds that I was unfamiliar with. And, you know, I use my phone, I use the camera on my phone. Like if there was a bird perched in a tree, I could zoom in with my, my phone, my phone camera to like 10x or more, and get this really pixelated terrible image, but it was enough sometimes to actually identify the bird. So that was definitely better than nothing. So yeah, I had a nice time birding in the gorges, and I actually got a lifer there, which was the northern nutcracker. I had seen the southern nutcracker elsewhere in Eurasia, but this was the

first time seeing the northern nutcracker. And nutcrackers are just really cool birds, so that was exciting. Yeah, and I did some other walks in the temperate broadleaf forests and mixed forests of Transylvania, had a really nice time, and saw lots of interesting little villages in the countryside, and the countryside is quite gorgeous, in Transylvania especially. At this time of year, you know, this was mid-May, super green. I mean, there were these scenes where I was driving across the Transylvanian Plateau one night, and it was getting towards sunset. And so, So in the foreground you have these beautiful green fields, and then in the mid-distance there were these hills with picturesque little villages on them, and in the background where the

Carpathian Mountains rising up incredibly steeply with these snow-covered peaks and beautiful clouds lit up by the setting sun. It was just spectacular. And yeah, the villages in many places feel very old, like they're hundreds of years old. They're quiet places. In many occasions, I saw farmers going down the road in a horse-drawn cart. I watched a farmer one time cutting his crop with a scythe, with a big sickle. You know, like the tool that the Grim Reaper uses,

but he's out there just by hand cutting his crop, doing just the way it was done for hundreds of years or thousands of years. Super labor-intensive, manual labor, just incredible. And in the villages, one of the neat things was, at this time of year, there are in many places, especially on the tops of telephone poles, these massive nests built by white storks. And so I literally have a picture where I'm looking down the street in this village, and there are, you know, receding into the distance,

there are three different white stork nests spaced apart on these telephone poles. And in each nest you could see a pair of birds, you know, these massive storks sitting up there. It's just really incredible. And another thing that's in the Transylvanian countryside are there these fortified monasteries or fortified churches? They look like castles to the untrained eye, but there are churches or monasteries, and they're protected from invaders by having these big walls and things. So those are really cool to see. Yeah, and I feel like I just barely scratched the surface of Transylvania.

There's much more of it in many other sites that I would like to have visited had I had enough time. So I definitely hope to do some more. exploring someday. So let me wrap this up with just some general thoughts and some kind of concluding remarks. I ended up seeing about 100 bird species when I was there. And I'm sure it would have been more if my binoculars had been functioning. You know, that was a little disheartening, so I probably didn't do quite as much birding as I would have done if my binoculars were working well. But I ended up getting 10 lifers, so 10 new species that I had never seen, including, as I mentioned, that black woodpecker, and I've got two new pelican species, so the Dalmatian pelican and the great white pelican,

which means that I have now seen all eight pelican species in the world. So the family Pelicanity has only eight species, which you may remember from the episode I did on that family, and now I can say that I've seen all of them, and my life is complete, more or less. And, you know, I forgot to mention that when I was in the Danube River Delta doing that tour, one of the most amazing things of the day, the most amazing experiences was we came around the corner and there was this channel and it was just full of great white pelicans. Hundreds and hundreds of them all gathered together feeding in the channel. And, you know, I talked about this in the pelican episode that I did, but it was the first time that I actually got to see this species, period, but also got to see them. doing cooperative feeding. So they would, they're motoring along on the surface together in a group and they would basically herd fish towards the shallows and then all dip their heads in the water

at once to feed. So got to see that repeatedly. And yeah, at one point we were just surrounded by these massive pelicans in the sky and the water. It was just incredible. So yeah, some of the other lifers that I got were common red start, collared flycatcher, pygmy cormorant, and Eurasian Scops Owl. And, you know, as I mentioned with the binocular thing, it does underscore the fact that this is pretty much an essential tool for birding. And, you know, I look forward to getting my binoculars repaired. But on the other hand, I did have enjoyable experiences with birds even though I didn't have binoculars. So I went birding without binoculars a number of times and got to see new species and got to enjoy myself. So it's not, you know, absolutely essential, but binoculars are certainly super, super helpful.

That experience just really, if nothing else, makes me more appreciative of binoculars. So I really enjoyed my time in Romania. I think it's a very interesting country. I think it has a lot to offer in terms of natural areas to explore for the naturalist. I feel like I just scratched the surface in that regard. And there are many wonderful cultural things to experience. There's a lot of history there from the Greeks and Romans, dations, the autos, an empire, the Vlad the Impaler, and there are the Romani people, right?

What you might know of as gypsies, but of course that term is these days considered offensive or derogatory. So the Romani people or the Roma, they have a large population in Romania. So you can see many of the women dressed traditionally with these bold floral patterns and these long skirts and aprons and headscarves. So many people are still living. a somewhat traditional lifestyle in Romania. And then you have layered on top of that,

all the things that happened during the communist era. And even though the revolution that overthrew the communist regime, that all happened 37 years ago, there is a real kind of presence of that architecture and that vibe in Bucharest and in the cities. There's a lot of concrete and just kind of things that look a little rough around the edges like that the country is still recovering from that terrible period.

But yeah, I had great interactions with people. I had a really lovely time. And I'm super excited to go back and to take some of you guys and to go and explore the Delta and the mountains and Transylvania. Check out the castles and villages and just have an awesome time. So stay tuned for whenever I announced that. That again is at Wild Latitudes. That's my burning tour company that I co-own with my buddy Steve.

And we'll probably be announcing those 2028 tours towards the end of this year. So sometime this fall is when we would expect to be announcing the Romania tour. And yeah, that's what I've got for this from the field episode. I do want to thank the newest patrons of the podcast, supporters on Patreon.

So welcome to Jason Neals, Linda Orkin, Katie Burke, Elias Tyrell Walker, Nina Ankarski, Mercedes, and Charles Spencer. Sorry if I mispronounced anyone's name there, but thank you so much and welcome. And if you are listening and you're not yet a patron and you're interested in that, then you can check out patreon.com slash science of birds. There's also a support-the-show link in the podcast show notes in your podcast player. My email address is Ivan at Scienceofbirds.com if you want to share something with me.

This again is episode 133. And on the scienceofbirds.com website, you can check out the show notes where I'll put some pictures of the birds I was just talking about for you to check out. That is all for now. Thank you so much for listening and for being a part of the adventure here at Science of Birds. And I'll talk to you next time. Cheers.