TomKal foto

Kerem, at the very beginning of our meeting I said that I would not leave Turkey without pictures of the Krüper's nuthatch. I had two reasons to say so. The first and most significant one was the fact that this is the bird which is visible in the logo of Kerem’s company. So to have it in my gallery is extremely important for me. The other issue, which isn’t less important than the first one, is the fact that this bird can be encountered only in this part of the world. We went to a beautiful park, in which there were old pine trees. A little while of searching and the first photos are taken. Unfortunately the Krüper's nuthatch is more skittish than the Eurasian nuthatch, although with time it seemed to become more and more trusting, which enabled me to take new photos from a smaller and smaller distance. The bird makes completely different sounds from those made by our nuthatch. As much as I like photographing our nuthatches, this one made exactly the same moves, specific to nuthatches. An interesting thing to know is the fact that the nuthatch stores food. Someone had left some crisps in the park and the nuthatch flew near the package again and again, taking one crisp  after another and flying to a tree, where it tucked the crisps between the bark and the tree trunk. Standing at a few-meter distance I managed to take a lot of photographs. The bird behaved much different than it did an hour earlier, where  we photographed the birds from quite a huge distance. The Krüper's nuthatch is a little smaller than our nuthatch, and quite interestingly the Eurasian nuthatch was present among Krüper's nuthatches, and what is more, I also managed to photograph the rock nuthatch from not a big distance. Incredible, the only place in the world where three different species of the nuthatch occur, and if we broaden a bit the range of occurrence of these birds to the east, we can talk of four species, as there is also the Persian nuthatch which, similarly to the rock nuthatch, lives in the mountains, but is bigger than it. Well, a gallery of the Krüper's nuthatch was to be created and here it is…