Leo's Photoalbum. Page #1
It’s known, the best opportunities happen by chance.
During one of our occasional Sunday "photo hunts" we came across something really unusual.
Most of the time, in the fields around our city, you can observe the usual things, such as herons, litter left on the side of the road, egrets, tires thrown on the ground and hidden by vegetation, lapwings and ... Oh! Hey! Look at that! Even a man who is unloading bottles of wine drunk the night before in a ditch! All so familiar, how nice.
After passing a wide curve and with only a long straight road ahead, we realize that in the middle of the field on our right there are some strange figures, unlike any of the things we talked about a little while ago.
Strange white birds, and very clumsy I must say, with a bald black head and long legs of the same color. Their figure resembles something already seen, something read somewhere years ago... something vaguely fantastic, mythological. We decide to stop at the first space available, we get out of the car and we remain there to admire this multitude of animals. We are prepared, we have everything we need with us, Nikon F90X with an adapter to mount a sigma 150-500mm; in short, not exactly the ideal of comfort and maneuverability. We approach them very calmly, also considering the weight of all the equipment which wouldn’t have allowed feline pounces anyway. Let's say it would be like trying to make a hundred meters race with a washing machine on your shoulders. They are not fast though and this plays in our favor. We must have taken home some useful shots, at least that's what I repeat to myself every time I grab a camera roll! One can never know, at least until the moment of development.
After a few days, we can retrieve and scan the negatives and we can finally admire the results of our hunt. The birds are Sacred Ibis, a species originally from Egypt, which is almost extinct in its native land. Here is the similarity! The god Thot! The Sacred Ibis owes its name to him! Venerated in ancient times, it took the name of Sacred because of its resemblance to the representations of the god of wisdom, magic and the moon.
But what is a bird that looks like an Egyptian god doing here in Veneto? Well, unfortunately the story is not easy to decipher. Some say that some flocks now found in Europe, specifically in France and Italy, come from specimens kept in captivity that managed to escape, towards the second half of the last century. The environmental conditions that these animals found were, contrary to what one might think, extremely favorable to their survival, giving them not only a life perfectly aligned with their characteristics but also a perfect habitat for reproduction. In a short time they overcame their direct competitors such as herons and egrets, being favored by their omnivorous diet... which often includes the eggs of native bird species, carcasses of other animals and also all sorts of human food waste that they finds in abundance in landfills.
In short, precisely for these reasons, the increasingly abundant presence of Ibis in the Po Valley and southern Piedmont is to be read more as a worrying invasion than as a "blessing of a benevolent exotic God". Entire flocks of native specimens have been forced to abandon their breeding sites precisely because of this animal, against which they cannot compete by nature. But behind all this there is always one cause, the hand of man. Either out of the need to govern nature or simply out of recklessness, we risks to compromise the millennia of years of adaptation of some species.
