Today I noticed that my camera battery had died, just after I left the house to go observing. This turned out to be a good thing, as I decided to focus on listening again, and to see if I could identify not only every bird that I saw, but also every bird that I heard. I walked by the Spree, where in the past months the waterfowl would be hanging around in their usual spots. But now, thanks to the constant parade of pleasure boats that churn up and down the river as soon as the weather improves, there was hardly a duck or coot to be seen, and no more swans or grebes or moorhens at all. (Many of these seem to have relocated to the pond in the Englischer Garten.)

This was a bit depressing, but made my task a bit easier, as I could focus on the birds along the path. I found I could pick out the various sounds of the sparrow, blue tit, great tit and blackbird fairly well, thanks to much practice and frustration over the past few months. And when I heard a noise that I didn’t recognize, I did my best to find its creator. This led me to discover two birds that I still had never seen: a little male blackcap and a song thrush. I also found a long-tailed tit singing away in an evergreen tree.

I’ll also record here a few more birds that I have seen in the past weeks, but was unable to photograph: three lovely bohemian waxwings, which we spotted from the balcony because they were flying in a funny way, catching bugs; a firecrest, which is tiny and similar to a goldcrest, but with a more patterned head, jumping around in the Tiergarten; a little grebe and a little wren, also in the Tiergarten; and a few treecreepers, which I never noticed before, but now I see them all over the place.