The ingenuity of beavers, and an inconvenience

After a few hours sleep we left at 5.30 in pursuit of wolves. The weather had changed and we watched the sun rise in clear skies and below zero temperatures. It was a quiet morning, we caught up with the bison herd again, roe and red deer, and the highlight for me, a black stork. Only Ken and I had seen the white stork nest on previous dawn outing so with all 5 of us present we stopped, this time it was occupied. An iron crib structure had been placed on the top of the telegraph post to encourage the storks to nest.
Back for breakfast after which most of us went out to look for adders who enjoy/ need warm sunshine. Mark pronounced it “udders” and I thought he meant otters. Either way none appeared. It was still quite chilly, too chilly for adders.
It was good to have some down time in the afternoon and I managed a 60 minute deep sleep which felt wonderful. Lunch/tea was at 3.30 and included a delicious trifle with chia seeds reminding us of the frogspawn we’d seen the previous day.
We left for a long night safari well before sunset walking to an elaborate beaver ponds, eleven in total. We were mesmerised, too early to see the beavers, we will do that tomorrow evening. Our guides had a permit to take us to the border with Ukraine where there was an excellent chance of seeing some of the larger mammals in the last hour of daylight. Parking the van at the end of a rough forest track we had hot drinks watching a herd of Ukrainian bison. After yesterday’s heavy rain it wasn’t unsurprising that the van got stuck. It took about 20 minutes of the chaps collecting stuff that would give the wheels some purchase and a great deal of pushing before we eventually got back on to a decent road. (There is now something wrong with van and Mark is driving it it this afternoon, Friday, to the nearest town to get it fixed. Notwithstanding the inconvenience for others, I’m so hoping a quick fix doesn’t happen and I can stay in this incredible place indefinitely.)
After the excitement of the Ukrainian bison we were on high lynx alert. The night gave us a lone wolf, a wild boar – my first, an otter, several red foxes, a lot of bear scat and two hazel grouse.