The Dalmatian Pelicans of Kerkini

I love wildlife photography, but I really don’t do birds.

Well, maybe there’s one exception… if they are extremely colorful, very big, or come in huge numbers. One day, I saw just one picture of a strange animal with orange around the eyes, and a sort of wild and hairy hairstyle… Shit, it’s a bird. A pelican. I just had to go and photograph one.

A photo like this really got me going

So I did some research. These are Dalmatian pelicans, they are the rarest of the world’s 7 pelican species, and they are BIG ! The second biggest bird species on the planet : 1.2m tall, weight 6-10kg and a wingspread of up to 3.2m. And lucky me, they are not so far away ! About 10% of the mating pairs are found in northeastern Greece, close to the Bulgarian border, on a lake called Kerkini. The name Vasilis  kept showing up in the reviews I read, so I decided we needed him too. A few months later, when everybody else was getting ready for the skiing season, we boarded a plane to Thessaloniki, Greece. 

To photograph birds…

But very cool and very big birds !