We started the day outside our hotel in Twann and added Serin to our list.

And had nesting Barn Swallows.

We headed west to the Fanel and Chablais de Cudrefin preserve and found the La Sauge Nature Center there instead (I told you the book was out-of-date). However, this was a terrific spot. We spent most of the morning there. It had woods, ponds, brushy areas and blinds at the ponds. Here are some of the birds we got there.

The Fanel area is adjacent to the Nature Center, but required a long walk. So Barb continued to bird the nature center while I walked down to the Fanel Preserve. My first encounter was a Cormorant rookery.

A little farther down, I spotted some Red-crested Pochards.

Down near the observation tower, a Nightingale flew up from the pathway and landed on a post.

I added Black-crowned Night-Heron and Little Egret to the list and saw some terns way out, but couldn’t identify them. The common corvid the past three days has been Carrion Crow, but they have proved difficult to get close to for photo ops — until today. On the walk back, three of a flock of four crows flew off, but one stayed and didn’t care that I was there!

We headed further west to the Auried at Kleinbosingen — a nature preserve of ponds, fields, marsh and woods. Although we saw Little Grebes at La Sauge, this one here was more cooperative.

It was also a good place to look for raptors. As mentioned in a previous post, pulling ff the roads here is almost impossible, so most of the hawks we have seen have been fly-bys. By the way, Red Kites are everywhere and half-a-dozen or more at times. At this location we saw Red and Black kites and Common Buzzard.

We also had a lot of frogs an toads.

Our triplist stands at only 44, but 33 lifers!

We are spending the next two nights in a hotel near Cugy, which is the village that barb lived in 53 years ago. So we will be exploring that a little bit in addition to our birding.