The national park of Northern Pindos

About 1 month ago, together with a classmate I attended the second Greek summerschool "Introduction to Conservation Biology", organized by the Society for Conservation Biology. It took place in the National Park of Northern Pindos, a protected area of almost 2000 square kilometers in Greece. During the fieldsessions I was able to photograph some of the impressive flora and fauna of the region:


Rana graeca, first time for me to observe this species


Algyroides nigropunctatus


Hierophis gemonensis


Spiranthes spiralis

And two more pictures of the beautiful landscape:

Common viper

There are only 3 snake species that can be found in Belgium. Among them, the common viper (Vipera berus) is the only poisonous one. In Flanders, it's very rare and restricted to the province of Antwerp. Together with Gert, Stephanie and Danny I went to search it yesterday. Because Danny is living near the place where they occur, he knows a lot of good places, which made it fairly easy to find one of these beautiful animals:

Rana dalmatina

Another species that I photographed in the Brenne. On the first sight, it highly resembles Rana temporaria, but one of the easiest characteristics to distinguish between the two species, is the length of the hind legs. In Rana dalmatina these are much longer. With its longer legs, it can also jump much further...

morning dew

Waking up early is sometimes hard, but always worth it! At least when the night has been cold and the sunrise isn't hidden after a cloudy sky. On these mornings, insects and plants are covered by dew: completely covered by tiny droplets of water.
Beside the esthetic value of dew, another advantage is that water-covered wings are too heavy to fly. So insects are obligated to let the droplets evaporate, before they can start their daily activities...

Here are some early morning pictures of butterflies in the Brenne:


Melanargia galathea


Pyronia tithonus


Pyronia tithonus in backlight

Pelodytes punctatus

Last week, I was trying to get nice pictures of some snake species in central France, together with Danny and Jonas. The funny thing is, that I came home without any snake picture. They didn't want to collaborate... Luckely, our camping seemed to be a frog "hotspot", especially around the showerblock. The Parsley Frog (Pelodytes punctatus) was an abundant species overthere, coming out at the rainy nights.



I even found a specimen, that just caught a worm:

Horror Toad

I'm just back from a few days in the province of Antwerp, Belgium. Lots of rain, but luckely, amphibians don't mind that so much as we do. One of the Common Toads (Bufo bufo) I found there, was infected with the larvae of Lucilia bufonivora. This is a fly species that lays its eggs in the nasal cavity from frogs (mainly Bufo bufo) and the larvae eat away first the nose and then the eyes and the brains, until the toad dies. This results in a slow death for the toad and looks like real horror:

exhibition

In cafe the Ratz, there's at the moment a little exhibition with one of my pictures.
Cafe the Ratz is located in the centre of Ghent (Belgium) and the adress is "Schouwburgstraat 14 - 9000 Gent". The exhibition will continue untill the end of July and the cafe is closed on Sunday.




For those who are interested, this is the picture, a Higland cow in the nature reserve "de Westhoek":