A trip to south-west Turkey, March 2024
The opportunity arose for me to join my friend Marc Verbeek on an orchid-hunting trip to Turkey in late March, one I was more than happy to take up when I discovered my friend Hamza Nobes was going to join too. In the end the decision was made for the Belgian and UK teams of two to do the trip independently, so that more stuff could be found, we could update each other as we went to different sites, and - oh yes - I could do some birding, since I had two big targets....more of which later
Turkey was the country I visited on my first ever trip out of the UK, as a young lad back in 1985, when a team of us did a three week birding trip covering the whole of the centre and east of the country. I was enraptured by the landscape, the rich wildlife, and also how different the wildlife was to our own in terms of species. The completely different culture and music really grabbed me, and created a deep-set wanderlust inside me for exploring new places and cultures as intimately as tourism allows.
Having wanted to explore Istanbul for many years, this seemed to be the perfect chance to start the trip there with my wife, Trudy, and then meet up with Hamza and head south for some orchid action. So this is what I did.
This is an orchid blog, so I will spare you the details of Istanbul, but I heartily recommend going there, although I don't recommend flying into the new Istanbul Airport north west of the city!!!
At this time of year, the main orchid interest in south west Turkey is Ophrys, the insect mimics. Not being an advocate of the 600 species concept, my eyes tend to glaze over at the sheer f*ckwittery of the imaginary micro-species that keep getting invented every year, often present at a single locality and all supposedly with a single pollinator.....but anyway, there is so much variety and colour within the genus, I still like to see them, though I won't search out every one.
In addition to the Ophrys March is the main flowering season for the "queen", Orchis punctulata - an eastern, yellow equivalent of our Lady Orchid. I had seen this once before, in Cyprus, back in 2008 or so, but here there were much larger populations, as we were in its core range. The problem, however, is that Turks dig up orchids of this genus to make "Salep" - a kind of ice cream paste. And they dig it up in large numbers to satisfy demand. This actually brings me back to Istanbul.....if you care about orchids, please do not buy the creamy ice cream sold in the stalls where the guys do a little performance when serving it, as this contains salep. There are also drinks, clearly marked on menus, that contain it.
Another target for me was Anacamptis collina, something I had again seen in Cyprus, but that had finished flowering by the time of my visit.
So, rather than chapter and verse, here is a selection of orchid photos from the week, which began at Istanbul Airport and ended at Antalya eight days later..
We ended up seeing a lot of O. punctulata, despite one or two sites lacking them completely due to agricultural development or salep hunters. However, we ended up (well, eagle-eyed Hamza) finding six sites, totalling hundreds of plants, along one long stretch of road near Antalya, and absolute wonder! We also saw plenty of A collina at a site early on in the trip, having failed at others in the over-developed tourist area of Kusadasi.
Other highlights were several Cephalanthera kurdica, a specialist of this region, and something that would usually flower later, plus lots of the wonderfully delicate and beautiful Anacamptis anatolica, a true delight.
Oh yes, and back to those two bird targets I had. One was Brown Fish Owl, extremely rare in our region, and found at a handful of site in Turkey. It is large, and as its name suggests, eats fish, so it lives in rocky gorges, nesting among high boulders. A night trip out with a guide is necessary to see it, but in our case we were unlucky, as despite four hours of searching many places in the gorge, there was a no-show. I was more successful with the other target, White-throated Kingfisher, at the western end of its range in Turkey, I was driving back to the airport along a wide river on my last day, on my way to drop off the hire car, and there were two sat on wires next to the road!!! What a finish!
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