Poland wildlife and similar wild life where you live.

HA..i am happy to report that this evening i actually saw a badger for the first time in Poland... One of the things i brought back from the UK in my fully loaded Jeep was a new mountain bike , so tonight i went for my first ride on it... I rode ten miles along a tarmac cycle track that is near my home , it used to be a rail line , and runs through lovely countryside to the town of Polczyn zdroj...

These cycle tracks are great for spotting wildlife , seems a cycle makes less noise than a person walking , so you can get pretty near to animals before they leg it....

On my ten mile cycle i saw four rabbits , a deer , a large eagle that scared the hell out of me when it launched itself off a branch just over my head , and as dusk fell i came up behind a badger cantering along the track ahead of me , when i got close he turned off into the long grass , but i did get pretty close....

So if you want to see the wildlife , leave the car at home , and get on yer bike.... I feel strangely healthy too for some reason...?

When i was a kid in Ireland i used to catch pinkeens (spelling?), Little fish, they were kind of pink and very small.
Just a fond memory.

Here are some small fish in Poland that look kind of link pinkeens (except the colour). What are they? Are they baby fish?.

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Perhaps the ones you caught as a kid were sticklebacks , they are a bit pinkish.....I think the ones in your pictures are minows , but i am not much of an expert on fish . other than the kind you eat with chips on Scarborough seafront...

Those photos are SO beautiful!! Where are those places? Can you give more details to the location? I live in Berlin and I want to go!!

Which photos?.
The last four there, were taken yesterday in Myslenice and Pcim, just south of Krakow on the way to Zakopane.
The rest of the photos are taken from all over Poland.

I just saw a

weasels are cute - a friend of mine once found a little weasel and took it home - his mom would feed it with milk - I think they have released it afterwards but I can't really remember - and yes they are very slim - guess they can dig into mouse holes with little trouble

Weasels , stoats , and Minks all look pretty similar , don,t know how you tell the difference , other than minks are usually black....i think..?

Tose fish are probably minnows (Phoxinus phoxinus) - strzebla in Polish.
//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_minnow

They are to be found in most moutanious streams togedher with trout and grayling. They are also living in cold streams of northern lakealands (in those where trout can be found).

They are small fish all their life long and trout feed on them.

Regards

£ukasz

weasels are very slim and significantly smaller than stoats and minks

It was easy, I saw the guy and googled it and he looked exactly like the photo from Wiki I posted :)


Yes, maybe, many people here fish for trout.
Thanks for the info


Yes, I have seen a white mink in a cage in Ireland, very beautiful and very angry because of the cage.

In the English language a "weasel" is something negative to call someone.
I have no idea why but it means a sneaky person who lies an cheats.

I love hunting and fishing .... but im against hunting of certain animals ...

Which ones and why?.

I was brought up in a hunting family. By the age of 6 i knew what the insides of most animals looked like, i also had a basic understanding exactly where my meat came from, how it was looked after ect. I DO think that makes a big impact on what i buy today. I was always taught by a local game keeper that you only hunt for animals you can be certain of will not make it through the harsh Scottish winters or will have a bad effect on the local environment. And even then it should only be down to the gamekeeper to decide how to run his land and livestock. In Scotland we have a big deer problem, which can be controlled by many means, but selective hunting is probably the best form. A stalker is not allowed to shot anything in site, he must only choose what the gamekeeper see's fit. This is what hunting should be about. But unfortunately it isnt always the case :/

Why should some animals be killed because you don't like them and others not because you do like them? Why kill animals? What did they do to you? They want to live like everyone else.

If you want to hunt animals so badly, go hunt some woodticks and mosquitos. Nobody would miss them. :)

Okay this is a beetle I saw today.
I want to get better at taking shots of wildlife.
Anyone know anything about this beetle or similar beetles?.

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Its quite similar to a dung beetle , but not quite round enough........Any beetle experts here....?

"Beetles, under the class known as Coleoptera, are believed to make up at least quarter of the animal kingdom. Beetles are the largest group of animals, representing one fifth of all known living organisms and one fourth of all animals. Almost half of all living beetles are known as weevils under the family known as Curculionidae. It is believed that the number of species of beetles range from approximately 250,000 to 350,000."

From here: hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/KeithSingh.shtml
I think an expert might have trouble too.

I wonder if the pumas are still roaming the forests. Were they eventually tracked down?

I read somewhere that it was a large cat. I am serious. I don't know how reliable that was, but it was in one of the major Polish newspapers.

no way a dung beetle - must a member of Cerambycidae or Carabidae

Longhorn beetle (wiki)


Maybe not.


Ground beetle


Could very well be, it had wings but did not use them. It was black and on the ground not near much water and no huge amounts of big dung around.


en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beetle

So getting it down from 350,000 different species to only 2,700 is pretty good.
I had no idea beetles rule the world, what a human I am.

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Beetle in Polish is Żuk.

Oh don,t get me going on that one....... first time i saw a Zuk truck i was sure the first letter of its name was an F.....even when i looked closer , it still looked like an F......so from that moment on this vehicle was known as a fuk truck......

Tettigoniidae or better known as crickets (wiki) to you and me.



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tettigoniidae
:)

Cricket in Polish is swierszcz.

Grasshopper directly translates to "field horse" konik polny :)

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or field pony, konik means a little horse

I think it's either "zhuk-olen" (deer-beetle - Rus), Lucanus cervus or "chlebny zhuk" (bread beetle - Rus) Anisoplia austriaca. Were there any grains close to the place?

Not really no, it was in the middle of a forest in the Chełm mountain in Myslenice, south of Krakow.
There wasn't a field around for kilometres.

I have heard a report that some animal took two rabbits from a farm near Branice on Polish-Czech border in Opole region recently - I am not sure it has been observed though

Has there been a final word on this topic?

ii have recently read that there had been three pumas and that they have been secretly shot - there were fugitives from illegal Czech breeder's

I finally got a photo of a deer, she was good enough to pose for me.
I see quite a lot of deer here but this is the first time I have managed to take a photo.
Can anyone tell me what type of deer it is?

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