After the fiery summer of ’25 a new camp location had to be found. Clearly, my father couldn’t risk his camp to become a collateral victim of what increasingly looked like a village war of attrition between the fishermen of Stanevo and ‘alien’ intruders. The bone of contention were the fishing resources around Km 727. Putting on fire enemy sensitive assets seemed to be the main weapon of the conflict. To date, a total of 80 acres of industrial vineyard had been destroyed, tog

Close to two months have passed since the last forest fire near Stanevo, in which a remaining part of the industrial vineyard burned down. Here is what happened after: A friend from Stanevo village visited my father in early September and brought the following news: fire has swept away the intruders’ shack in late May, the remains were left lying about and no one came for a time. The intruders did come over a weekend, did some fishing and disappeared not to be seen since. Fig

Forty days have passed since my last post and it was ever so difficult to write this one. Forty mourning days of attempts to dress...

The Honda  outboard was my present for my father’s 78th birthday. Last summer saw its first Danube use and it was locally proclaimed the...

Decades-old trial-and-error had honed down the camp to the following shape. There was the big army tent, serving as dining-room, kitchen,...

Our Golden Jackals and their neighbours have always been the focal point of these field notes. They live in the green belt behind the...

The boat my father uses now is a HonWave inflatable dinghy, 3.5 m long. Since our first Danube days, many boats came and went at our Km...

My father’s all terrain vehicle (ATV), lovingly called ‘The Mechanical Donkey’, proved to be indispensable for the seasonal Danube...

Preparing a field-season is a matter of repairing equipment. If possible, also of acquiring some new items. In this new series I will...

What the cameras had recorded during the night of arrival was the main intrigue in the morning of Day 2. But even before the material was...

Living side-by-side with a jackal family comes at a cost. The obvious reason is that jackals do not like humans living close to their...

There are many ways in which human affairs affect animal life – as all life on the Planet. We know about long-term events like the...

The flooding of 8-9 June made people of the nearby villages worried about my father. His camp was the only one by the river. It could...

The foraging evolutionary direction taken by jackals has made them human neighbours. This in turn demanded from them adaptation to...

Chorus howling which was the topic of the previous blog, belongs to what my father calls ‘long-range vocalization.’ This is when jackals...

It is their voices that turn humans against jackals – not what they actually do. We have been repeatedly asking people of Stanevo and...

Of the three families along the bank, the nearest is the one my father calls Topolite. As described in the previous blog, the family’s...

In the eyes of the members of Boldy’s family – and principally of the three senior adults – anyone using the bait-site besides them was a...

Among all the various visitors appearing on the stage of the bait-site, a badger certainly stood out. This badger, named Gosho by my...

Of the neighbours who were occasionally met at the bait-site, or on the connecting path (the Eastern Staircase), we have so far mentioned...