Wild Snowdrops, Crocus, And Bees In Our Forest

Greetings, Travellers In The Wild!

Have you ever been to our forest? If you had, I shall have to find you and at the very least erase some of your memories since it must be kept secret at all cost. Of course, it's up to me to publish something the whole world could see and then seek out each and every one of the audience and use the Deneuralizer (from the Men in Black franchise) on them.

That was an awkward intro, wasn't it?

So, let us first walk together through the woods near my father's place of birth. Woods the name of which sounds close to ketchup and that's all you need to know (for a short while only, at that) about them.

My father says our family owns some portion of those, something the size of a stadium, more or less. I have no idea where that plot would be. I only know, regretfully, that it is not the secret dell of wild snowdrops that has been the destination of most of our late winter visits.

We might not own that particular piece of land but at least we own the secret, right?

Tell a few people about it and then more people will be swarming over the place, dig most of the rare flora out and bring it to their gardens until its source is in decline and eventually...lost. That already happened to the Mountain that is the Vitosha National Park right above Bulgaria's capital city of Sofia.

And this...

...is a small forest that you could walk across in an hour or so. It's about thirty kilometres from the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria, near the major port town of Burgas.

Otherwise, it's a secret forest, remember?
(Not for long. I'm currently fine tuning the Deneuralizer. But you won't remember that either. No problem.)

So, if you were to walk through that forest, you would have to duck and zig-zag your way around branches, thorns, bushes, etc. It's quite chaotic in there. Not very thick but chaotic. Chaothick, you could say.

Here I shall omit some idiotic human behavior (or perhaps just greed and short-sightedness) and go directly to the traces that the other kind of swines leave behind.

A wild hog laid here.

Not to worry, though. We had a big camera in my hands and everybody knows that even dangerous wild animals are shy of cameras and are quick to turn their butts on you if you point a big lens at them.

All photos I took on that occasion were made with a Canon EOS 30D DSLR camera thirteen to fifteen years old and equipped with a 70-200 4 L Canon USM (Ultra Sonic Motor) zoom lens.

Destination reached in less than twenty minutes.

The wild snowdrops were again in bloom and covering the eastern slope next to the bank of a small and dry riverbed. It's where the afternoon sun would shine at in the afternoons.

Funny but understandable enough, the slope on the other side, the one that looks east, is devoid of such flora.