Rail Takes Off

Back in Blighty after another work trip to Kosice in Slovakia. This time I flew with Austrian Airlines from Heathrow to Kosice via Vienna. Never been to Austria before, but I have now spent a total of 1 hour in Vienna airport and it was a dreadful experience. Pardon my xenophobia, but what is the point of Austria - it's like Germany but without any of the functional precision. Eventually got home at around 1am on Saturday morning (without baggage - that's still stuck somewhere in Vienna airport) after a delayed flight, a botched transfer and having to come back via Brussles. Kosice Airport meanwhile was marvellous; I landed on a snow-covered runway on Wednesday without any problem (yet here we can't operate if there is a hint of white stuff), and left on Friday during a snow flurry after the 'wing-man' had liberally doused the plane with anti-freeze.

A Czech Airlines plane gets the antifreeze treatment before our plane arrived.

Snow - pah, shovel it out the way and get on with the flights.

Yesterday was therefore a partial wash-out - I was knackered and in any case the weather was crappy until late in the day. Today was better, and I managed to nip over to Watermead CP North around lunch-time with the main aim to year-tick Water Rail. They are usually knocking about the feeding station and today was no exception as I scored as soon as I sat down in the hide.

Water Rail

I grabbed a brief bit of video as it strutted around in very typical Water Rail style, and just as I did so it did a very atypical Water Rail thing ....

Have you ever seen a Water Rail use it's wings to get off the ground? I haven't, and it took me a moment to work out what it had done.

One of the other typical bird feeder attendants