The Best Friends Section is all about my Friends out in the Field..
It takes a bit to become friends with a certain species. Watching them, spending time with them and most important, get to know each other, thats whats important for the Best Friends Pictures..

Blue Tits are pretty common where we live. Never the less are these little blue capped birds really pretty common birds.. :P
Their numbers are also a reason they fly into cars quite often.. :/ What happens if one is lucky enough and finds them before they get driven flat by careless drivers, you can read here.. :) ---->  WHAT A HEEEEEEADACHE!!

Interaction between two individuals is really nice to watch and also their young are rather cute..
Their diet during breeding season mainly consists of insects and other invertebrates, in winter and late summer, they love to dine on fresh seeds and flowerbuds.

Predators are mostly cats and of course Sabine Sperber, who recently had a meet and greet with the right side window of our parked car, wich lead to a night in a carton and a x- ray bodypicture to check for hidden injuries.
Check out the story here ---->   HUNTING ACCIDENT

....hehe, what should i say about those little fellas....

They are the coolest, tiniest, most funny and hard to catch birds ever. With catch i mean photograph, what did you thought..? ;)
Male Eurasian Wrens are singing not only beautiful, but also with a high rate of changing their calls and creating variations of their songs..
So one could say they have different dialects and a well developed speech.. :)
And they look AWESOME! :D

Propably the most colourful bird in Austria, the Bee-eater is a fascinating bird.
Flying, for this birds, seems to be effortless and super smooth..
Mostly hunting for Insects that are equipped with defensive weapons, they developed a perfect tactic.
When catched an insect they land on a branch and whack the insect against the branch in order to break the defensive Sting.
Then, massaging the remaining poison out of the insect, the meal is now ready to be served and brought as a gift to the female..  What gentlemen they are.. ;)

It took us about 3 years to finally find our Nightfriends.. :)
Months of research, google maps studies and hiking the field were needed to finally manage to get some photos of these incredible birds of night.. On the pictures are severeal juvenile Long eared Owls calling for their parents to feed them.. :D

To see how their habitat maybe look like click here

European Spermophilus got really rare in Austria... Most parts of the country that counted endless numbers of this little tunnel- loving mammals 20 years ago, have no populations left. 
Things have changed, Agriculture is now dominated by big machinery that tends to leave no place for wildlife.. 
This larger rodents live in big tunnel networks that take shape and grow over decades. This Tunnelnetwork needs to be extended wide enough so that a big area can be easily accessible. 
As a protection from predators, Spermophilus never get far away from the next entry of their tunnels. 

The Northern Lapwings are fairly new in our neighborhood.. We could first watch them in fall of 2016 were we just spotted three individuals.. In 2017, about 30 Lapwings raised their brood in a field nearby a little stream and a swampy sourrounding.. :)
Really happy they managed to resettle here and hopefully grow in numbers! 

Ninaus Musculus is a migrated species from Western Austria, that found its perfect habitat in the eastern part of the World Cultural Heritage Wachau. Mostly you can find this rare beauty well hidden behind camouflage nets and equipped with long lenses behind bushes and laying in fields.. It does happen seldom but sometimes a "mouse", as i like to call her, can be spotted on open fields searching for beautiful colours and shapes.. 

Here i found her on such a rare sight, doing her thing.. After a while i could even watch courting dances and a successful mating with the camera too! :D