Europe 2008

After a four years hiatus, we returned to Switzerland and Austria, visiting old and new haunts and good friends. One of our favorite areas is the southern Swiss Lake Lugano and its many towns tucked into the southern Alps. The picture above was taken from a friend's balcony overlooking the famous Paradiso green and Lake Lugano. Many tour boats and water taxis ply the lake, offering scenic views of the city of Lugano and its abrupt surrounding mountains, and servicing local traffic among the many other lake-edge towns in both Italy and Switzerland.
One of the many differences from four years ago was the abundance of lake birds, including this egret, osprey, another black fish eagle, seagulls, and terns. Apparently the city of Lugano has begun "restoring" the lake edge to a primitive state by submerging bundled saplings that act as once-natural lake debris that in turn offers shelter for small fry. The program has been so successful that fish-eating birds have swarmed in for the bounty.
As we watched, this egret calmly waited for one of the black fish eagles to catch a fish, then bullied the eagle into dropping its catch, which the egret then quickly recovered and swallowed whole.