Little things

One thing being in the Czech Republic gives me is a tendency to observe more closely those little things, that usually I pass by. There I was walking around the square in Telc, a place bustling with tourists, when I observed these little eruptions between the cobblestones. They were everywhere.

Czech cobbles are bedded in sand and the gap between them had made a perfect place for solitary miner bees to excavate their nests. In burrows, under the tourists' feet, the bees had built egg chanbers, furnished them with a sack of pollen, and laid their eggs. Now the new bees were hatching unobserved by all but me and launching into the air to feast on the flowers that decorated the square. 

Black Stork at the Swimming Pond

On the walk down to the train station I pass the swimming pond. The pond is now frozen over and soon the ice will be thick enough to skate on. But on hot summer days it is full of locals enjoying the cool waters. This is not a swimming pool as we Brits know it. It is fed by water from the local brook and is a place for nature as well as humans. In the spring and autumn the water is sometimes disturbed by carp rising to the surface and returning to the depths or by flies breaking the surface as they take their first flights. Occasionally a heron patrols the shallows and for a while an enterprising fisherman had a boat moored at its side.

I remember how there used to swimming ponds in England like this one. There was a ruined one a few minutes walk from my Cotswold town, where the more adventurous kids used to swim even though it was silting up. The rest of us would cycle to Stanway, where there was still an open-air swimming pond, with wooden changing cubicles and mown grass on the water. These attractions have all gone, no doubt considered unsafe and unhealthy.

A year or so ago I was walking past the pond when I was amazed to see a black stork wading in the water. Whilst white storks are a common sight in villages and fields throughout the country, the black stork is an altogether rarer sight. The black stork is a shy bird, avoiding humans and restricted primarily to the forests and lakes. I suppose I should not have been as surprised as I was, after all my village borders the Boletice forest, which for many years was a restricted area. But still I had never seen a black stork at the pond or indeed anywhere else before, and I have not seen one since.

Salamander, salamander

Okay, I know it's a rubbish photo, but given how secretive the fire salamander is I was delighted to see it and manage to fire off a photo before it disappeared.

Just under four weeks ago (it feels much longer, given all the things I have been up to in the meantime) I was in Czech Paradise (Cesky Raj) researching a geological tour. I woke early and, although it had been raining heavily in the night and was still mizzling, I decided to walk the Riegerova trail. The trail is a nature trail with an emphasis on geology, but the most exciting sight was not the very impressive and varied rocks but a small golden and black amphibian.

I had nearly finished the trail and was walking down a track in the direction of a restaurant by the road, when I saw something gold and black some yards in front of me. I have never seen a salamander in the wild before, although they are to be found in Czech forests, and at first I didn't realise what it was. It seemed too brightly coloured to be an animal so at first sight I thought it a bit of rubbish left by some careless walker. When I drew closer and as the salamander made a dash for the verdant verge I scrambled to get my camera out of my rucksack.

It is amazing that such a brightly coloured animal can still be so secretive. Apparently it rarely comes out of its hiding places during the daytime and only then when it is raining. It likes to hide in rotten tree trunks, which may account for the legends about it living in fire as it would appear in people's fires when the log it was hiding in started to burn. The salamander has therefore a special place in alchemy and myth.

It very soon disappeared and I had to be content with this blurry picture. But I went on my way rejoicing at my luck at seeing it at all. I thought as I walked about how I would have shared this experience with my Czech friend, had she been alive. But then I thought that maybe she had been there all along, after all hadn't her online name been Salamander?