From Vienna, I headed into Slovakia for a day's birding near Bratislava with a local guide.
Our first stop was a park on the outskirts of the city where a male Red-breasted Flycatcher was busy proclaiming his territory. After that, we made a beeline for my target species, which my guide reckoned we had a 100% chance of seeing! Sure enough, we soon stopped at a line of electricty pylons to the north-west of the city and fixed our sights on a nestbox containing two fully-grown Saker Falcon chicks. Despite hanging around for over an hour, neither adult came in but the chicks eventually woke up and were eagerly exercising their wings as they stood precariously on the edge of the platform, providing excellent views and showing off their distinct, cream-coloured tail band. Satisfied with my first lifer since the Oriental Turtle Dove back in January, we moved on to some nearby fish ponds which contained numerous Red-crested Pochards before exploring the beautiful Morava floodplain along the Austrian border. By this time, strong wind and light rain was making things difficult and we thus had to make do with heard-only River and Savi's Warblers but we still managed to see Red-backed Shrike, Collared Flycatcher and a Nightingale. A male Lesser Spotted Woodpecker rounded off the afternoon, my seventh woodpecker in two days having spotted a Green from the car a little earlier, before the rain stopped play and I headed back into Austria, glimpsing some Bee-Eaters from the train just after it crossed the border.
