Wednesday 16 July 2014

Centaurea alpina & Latin names

Centaurea alpina
After the hard botanical twitching in the Alps, today I went to see a "rarity" on the Slovenian Karst near Sežana. The above plant is an Alpine Knapweed Centaurea alpina, which is very rare and found only on two locations in Slovenia. The other location is Mt.Čaven on the southern edge of Trnovski gozd. Overall there are no more than 20 wild specimens in the whole of Slovenia!

Today I've also been to Škocjanski zatok for my weekly bird monitoring. July has been quite calm with most interesting birds being mainly the breeding species like Little Tern Sternula albifrons (1-2 pairs), Little Bittern Ixobrychus minutus, Black-winged Stilts, Common Terns and so on. Today I noticed some signs of movement with increasing wader numbers (all the common species), a juvenile Purple Heron Ardea purpurea, a few Pochards, Teals, a Med Gull and a Hoopoe Upupa epops feeding on the path (also present last week). A Fan-tailed Warbler Cisticola juncidis calling over the lagoon was also of note (one last week as well).

As you may have noticed, in this post I started to use Latin names in the text as well. In the future I'll use them just for the most interesting species (those in bold) to highlight their importance and I'll do so in an international scientific language. I think is a good and more complete way of reporting sightings. And of course is more helpful for the readers who don't know English bird names. The public of this blog is quite varied and I think this will be a welcome addition.
As for the names of plants I'll use the Latin names only, as usual, because I don't know all of the names in English. Moreover there are some species here in this corner of the world that don't have English names (yet).
So: from now on the highlights (species in bold) will have Latin names as well.
In the future (or in some occasions) I may extent this rule to all the bird names... I don't know yet, it's a test. I hope I won't get bored in the process of adding... ;)