About me

Welcome to my private website

In this place, I would like to write a few sentences about myself, to give you a clue how such a great passion as birdwatching and bird photography look behind the scene.

I was born in 1977 in Wroclaw (south-western part of Poland), where I have been living since then. My adventure with ornithology started at the beginning of 1991. Being barely 14 year old, I received a book of K. A. Dobrowolski - Ptaki Europy (Birds of Europe), richly illustrated and the only one in those days which described in details the avifauna of Poland. Sine my early childhood, I had already contact with almost tame birds (i.e. Long-eared Owls), which were living in the backyard of my family home in the western part of Opole voivodship. I got interested more deeply in what I saw and in that, which bird species lived in my neighborhood. A real milestone in my crawling interest was a purchase of Ptaki Slaska (Birds of Silesia) - a mine of knowledge about the rich diversity of avifauna of the Silesia Region. I explored systematically new places and I focused my attention on wetlands of the future Stobrawski Landscape Park (in the north-eastern part of Opole voivodship). which was to be established in a few years time.

Starting from mid 1992, I have been conducting regular bird observations and counts on the Mietkowski Reservoir (over 450 visits) and irrigation fields in Wroclaw. That was where I made my first steps in bird photography. This kind of art, demanding a lot of efforts and patience, I started practicing with a Russian Zenit TTL camera with 250 millimeter lens and a 2x conventer (I was using this equipment from 2001 to 2004), and in 2004 I became an owner of a legendary compact digital camera Nikon CoolPix 4500. For a short time I was also using Fuji Finepix E900 camera. Currently my main tool (apart from a spotting scope of course) is Nikon CoolPix P5000. All those three cameras in connection with a spotting scope give good results and I present them on my website. This technique, called digiscoping, gained a lot of enthusiasts - also in Poland, and its biggest advantage is that it also allows to take pictures of birds from a longer distance. For some time, one of my interest became also passenger airplanes. The most fascinating for me are those, which fly at full height, which means 11-12 kilometers. The diversity of airlines and types of planes stimulates my imagination, and their identification is a big challenge. The chapter ‘Airplanes’ will grow steadily, although - what is visible while looking at the pictures - I concentrate my efforts on nature.

Most of the bird pictures presented on this website were taken from so called “march”, which means that they were taken without previous preparations, e.g. without building special hides and without tape-luring. I definitely obey ornithological ethics, which does not allow disturbing breeding birds. In case of non-breeding birds, I stick to the rule that I do not cause unneeded stress to them. I am against all kind of activities which disturb birds.