The Austrian Alps as a Grown Up

My parents always loved Austria and I spent many childhood holidays there, now giving me a great nostalgic affection for the place. The romantic film The Sound of Music, released in 1965, with Julie Andrews singing in glorious Alpine meadows covered in flowers, probably played its part too.

Many gasthofs, serving gluhwein, apfelstrudel and other Alpine fare, are nestled in amongst the Austrian meadows and at the top of ski lifts

Those long ago holidays with my parents and siblings had been all about walking or skiing, but these days Dave and I want our holidays to include a hefty dose of nature spotting. Last week I returned to the Austrian Alps on a Naturetrek group holiday based in Ehrwald on the Austrian/German border.

The three small Austrian villages of Ehrwald, Biberwier and Lermoos sit in a grassy arena surrounded by high rocky peaks. In the winter this is a skiing area but many of the lifts do still run in the summer, allowing access up onto the high slopes for those of us wanting to admire the scenery and skip through the flower meadows without the snow.

The three villages of Ehrwald, Biberwier and Lermoos in their grassy hollow. In the centre is the marshy Moos, cut through with streams and a haven for wildlife

While the rest of the group flew into Innsbruck or Munich, we started our journey the day before and caught the Eurostar to Paris and then a train across to Munich, spending the night there with the tartan army – thousands of Scottish football fans – who were in Munich ahead of the Scotland versus Germany match, the first game of Euro 24.

A kilted Scotsman looking at traditional Bavarian wear in Munich

The next day we met up with other members of the Naturetrek group at Munich airport and travelled south-west by minibus, crossing over into Austria and arriving at Ehrwald, very close to the border.

We had a fabulous week there, staying in a really nice hotel and with a group of lovely and interesting people. After dinner on the first night we went to see a beaver lodge, right by the sports pitch in Ehrwald:

The beaver lodge is alongside the sports pitch car park

The beavers knew we were close by but this didn’t overly put them off:

We visited on a second evening later in the week and again had some amazing views:

I don’t think I’ll ever again get such good sightings of wild beavers

The squirrels in Austria are black, being a melanistic morph of the Eurasian red squirrel rather than a different species:

I include this second photo as well because I love those fluffy ears

It’s always exciting to see chamois. We did stumble upon three close up when we were on one of our walks but I didn’t get a photo. Other than that, we had to content ourselves with very distant views:

There are eight chamois in this photo amongst the snow patches, but they were a very long way away

I cannot talk about the mammals we saw without mentioning the cacophony created by the cows grazing the flower meadows, each with a bell clanging a slightly different note and the sound immediately transported me back to those holidays of my youth. This cow was demonstrating how to clean your nostrils out with your tongue

We also saw some birds. I had never before seen a black woodpecker:

These are big birds – 45 to 55cm long. In comparison, the great spotted woodpecker that we get in the UK is 20 to 24cm long

Spotted flycatchers were nesting amongst a pile of logs

This is a male red-backed shrike. These birds are carnivorous, eating insects, small birds, rodents, frogs and reptiles. They are famous for impaling the corpses of their prey onto thorns or barbed wire to store them

A male black redstart taking food to his nest, built into the eaves of one of the gasthofs in the mountains

A female black redstart taken from our balcony at the hotel

We saw lots of white wagtails over the course of the week. These are a different subspecies to the pied wagtails that we get in the UK, having grey rather than black shoulders and an uninterrupted white line going down the side of the bird from head to belly

Alpine choughs were hanging around the cable car station at the top of Zugspitze, the highest mountain in Germany, which is also one of the mountains that surround Ehrwald

This is another new bird for me – a rose finch, singing his little heart out. These birds are photographer friendly because they position themselves in prominent positions to do their singing

There were a lot of butterflies flitting around the flower meadows and luckily both of our two nature guides were good at butterflies. Here we have heath fritillary, grizzled skipper, alpine blue and chequered skipper:

But the best butterfly spot was a little group of swallowtails that we saw on the last day:

I am forever on the look out for invertebrates, and some that I saw were pretty wacky:

A pine sawyer beetle, *Monochamus sutor*. This large longhorn beetle mainly lays its eggs on Norway spruce that has fallen and is lying on the ground. Its larvae, which reach a surprising 45mm long, live on the wood for two winters before emerging as an adult

The golden-bloomed grey longhorn beetle, *Agapanthia villosoviridescens*, with its lovely black and white striped antennae. This beetle lives in meadows, laying its eggs in the stems of thistles. Apparently it is fairly common in the south and east of England but I’ve never seen one before

These beautiful green iridescent beetles, *Cryptocephalus sericius*, are not found in England. They live in meadows, the adults feeding on the pollen of yellow flowers and the larva eating leaves

We saw several different species of dragonfly and damselfly but this four-spotted chaser was the only one I managed to get a decent photo of

*Otiorhynchus gemmatus* is a black weevil with white spots that inhabits the mountains of most of Europe – not our mountains in the UK though

This red-and-black froghopper is apparently common in England although it has passed me by. The adults suck the juices out of grasses, although its own juices are unfortunately being sucked out by a spider here

The Alpine meadows were filled with such a diversity of plants, the like of which we just don’t see in the UK:

Orchids were everywhere. The top plant spot were the several clumps of lady’s slipper orchids growing by a stream:

These diminutive snowbells were also very memorable. They grow at high altitudes, coming into flower just as they are uncovered by the melting snow, before other, more vigorous plants can get going and shade them out:

On the best-weather-day of the week, we took a cable car up to a height of nearly 3,000m to the top of Zugspitze, the highest mountain in Germany.

These people working on the satellite dishes suspended out over a drop of thousands of feet made me go a bit weak at the knees

The ragtag assortment of buildings at the top of Zugspitze. There is a German side reached by one cable car and an Austrian side reached by another, but you can access both areas at the top without there being any border control! Alpine choughs were hanging around the cafes up at the top, hoping to be fed

There is an interesting museum up there which includes this viewing window

Back down in the valley, the three villages have churches with onion domes:

Some of our group of nature lovers walking in the marshy Moos between the villages..

…and looking for newts in an upland reservoir. In the winter, the water in this lake is used to make artificial snow to spray onto the slopes if required.

We had a really good week and saw so much stuff, most of which we either wouldn’t have noticed or wouldn’t have been able to identify if it wasn’t for our two excellent Naturetrek guides. We were sorry to leave the lovely Hotel Alpen Residence, although it fed us far too much food.

As we made our way back home by train, we again had some spare time in Munich. We decided to visit Dachau concentration camp, just outside the city and now a hard-hitting museum and memorial site. There is no attempt there to gloss over or trivialise anything, in the hope that the horrors that happened will never be forgotten or repeated.

This photo was taken after the camp was liberated in 1945. The infirmary is on the right where the huts are interconnected and this is where the Nazis carried out scientific research on their captives

I’m not going to say anything more about Dachau other than that it was a deeply, deeply disturbing experience and my mind is still processing what I learnt. That afternoon in Munich is one that I will always remember.