All Balkans, August 2-14

Dear All,

I’ll be traveling around the Balkans for 12 days this summer, from 2 pm on August 2 until 1 pm on August 14, starting and finishing in Athens, Greece. Would anybody be interested in joining me?

The plan is as follows: Athens – two days on Crete (without a car) to look for Crete shrew and Kolombatovic’s big-eared bat – Athens (you can join me here on August 5 if you don’t want to go to Crete) – Meteora – Ohrid Lake (a great place for endemic voles) – Tara NP  in Serbia (lots of shady ravines, excellent for weasels and shrews) – Jon’s Dinaromys site – Split (backup Dinaromys site) – Plitvicke Lakes in Croatia – Slovenia (caving and Alps fauna such as marmots and ibex) – Hortobagy NP in Hungary (blind mole-rats, steppe polecat and other steppe stuff, plus the most countable specimens of Bos taurus anywhere) – nw Romania (endemic mole-rat and birch mouse, plus some bat caves) – Brasov area in Romania (for Carpathian taxa such as giant chamois) – Cape Kaliakra in Bulgaria (marbled polecat, Romanian hamster etc.) – a site in Nesebr for mouselike dormouse – Athens.

With some luck it should be possible to get all ten endemics and many other interesting species. I’m planning to sleep in the car the whole time; note also that there’s a lot of driving involved (about 62 hrs in 10 days, not counting night drives in nature reserves). If we get some extra time, we’ll also check out a European mink site in Dunai Delta and a lynx site in Bulgaria.