The moon, the mountains and I. 24 hours alone

"We live as we dream: alone..." Joseph Conrad

August is holiday time for many. The usually quiet mountain village where I live gets crowded. Woods and meadows serve as dining rooms for hundreds of people (and the garbage left behind often echoes their lively voices for a long time...) Even the highest mountain peaks become a common destination for the adventurous citizens on vacation. But this doesn't necessarily mean that I dislike this month or its crowds. It can be fun, just that it spoils a bit the holiness of many places I love and makes really hard to find that special intimacy with nature I am so often looking for.

"If the sun lights up people holidays", I thought, "then the moon can show me the way through the wilderness!" I had luck: the turbulent summer weather gave me a lucky break in correspondence of the last full moon. So, once again, heavy backpack on my shoulders, I was hitting the slope leading to the top of Majella massif with the plan of exploring its vast altitude plateau at night. Alone.

I started at 12AM and met the last people at 5PM: then the mountain was all for me. I walked on and on. Explored ridges and crossed saddles. Looked down to the deepest valleys and up to the fast-moving clouds.

At sunset, I had the purest and simplest light. When night came, I was tired but exhilarated, so I kept on. I dropped my backpack in a little cave and took only a bunch of nuts, my camera and tripod with me. Wind came in full force and didn't leave until the morning. At 11PM I was still shooting the landscape, holding fast my camera to not let the wind toss it to the ground. The moonlight gave the round, barren mountains a touch of indefiniteness. Dark shadows and silvery colors. Deep contrasts and vague horizons.

It was midnight when I went back to the cave, crawled into my sleeping bag and dropped dead. At sunrise, I enjoyed the most perfect stillness. The moon, still high, was now competing with the first sunrays. All around me just blocks of blue, pink and gold.

At 6.47AM, I spotted the first two hikers and then I realized how much exhausted, dehydrated and hungry I was...

Wild, wild Bayerischer Wald!

On a special assignment of the Bayerischer Wald National Park administration, me and other eight nature photographers had four days to roam and take pictures in the wildest corners of the National Park (far away from the "Tier Freigelände"...), to celebrate its 40th birthday. On the last morning there I was blessed with this encounter: a fabulous female Ural Owl bringing food to the chicks. The Bayerischer Wald NP (together with the neighbouring Sumava NP) is much more than just its animal enclosures: it is wilderness coming back into the center of Europe! Happy birthday BW!

Pit stop with black grouses. Or, "how to detect a vanishing species".

"We stand now where two roads diverge. (...) The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road -- the one less traveled by -- offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth." Rachel Carson

Black grouses have been one of my photographic nemesis during the whole time I was working in Slovakia. They are not particularly difficult (once one knows a good spot and obey the rules of the game - set up your hide at night, get there when still dark, etc.), but bad luck always played a role on all the attempts I made in Tichà and so I never got a single, decent picture...

Therefore, while I was planning a trip to the Bavarian forest in Germany on mid-May, invited by the National Park to photograph the Park's wildest corners (and not the animal enclosures...), I decided to try my luck with this species one more time and stop somewhere in the Alps for just one morning attempt. My friends and great nature photographers Luciano Gaudenzio (www.naturalight.it) and Gabriele Bano kindly invited me to a grouse lek (area where the males display) in Friuli, the region where they live and work. The area sounded very promising, with stories of more than 40 (!) displaying males back in the 80's. This, and maybe all the kilometres driven the day before, made difficult to catching some sleep in the already short night. We would get up at 2.45 AM and walk to the hide in the darkness. A thin layer of fresh snow on the barren ground, stars in the sky: the best premises. Already before sunrise the first male came in front of the hide. After this one, other four reached the lek. Only the calls, a loud "chooissshhhh" and the repeated, fluid "rooo...proooo", revealed their presence in the fading darkness. Once outlined their figures, I tried some pictures with crazy shutter speeds of 2-3 seconds, just to see what they would look like. The sun came out, or, better, the day came out, as a sudden layer of clouds had obscured the clear sky. The resulting hours were nice, but the light was dim and quite boring for any good picture. Nevertheless, I won my nemesis and got some pictures of a black grouse! At 7Am the birds left and for me was time to pack all my stuff and quickly make my way to Germany. It had been a nice "pit stop", especially by enjoying the great company of Luciano and Gabriele Bano, the breathtaking mountain landscape and the colors of this unique bird: I was happy.

But, hey, wait a minute. Five males? Where were all the grouses gone? As said, people once witnessed dozens of birds here, so what was going on? We asked some locals that morning and figured out that the previous hunting season surely took a large toll on this population. Could that be the cause of such a rapid decline? Even in other European countries, where I had the chance to observe this species, people spoke of sudden decreases in numbers. In Tichà, for example, nowadays only few single males come to the alpine meadows in May. What is going on? Is overhunting the one to blame? Could it be that this once-common mountain bird is suffering from a vast, unknown menace? Climate change?? Will the Black grouse be a next vanishing species? What can be done to save it?

Way too often I am experiencing or hearing stories similar to this also about other species. It is a weird time to be a wildlife photographer and a though one to be a conservationist. There are few answers for many questions. But one thing is for sure, we cannot take the diversity of Nature for granted anymore. It is time to do something and act firmly, before spring would become silent even in the most remote corners of Europe!