Floral and faunal differences between Berlin and the UK

[lethargic_man]

Here in Berlin I'm living 600 miles as the crow flies from my last residence (London), more as the Eurostar runs, and it's interesting to observe how similar the flora and fauna are to in the UK, and where the differences are. In fact, I've only spotted a few differences in total.

I spotted my first on my first visit in 2005: There are lots of starlings here; they do not seem to have been crowded out of their urban niche by pigeons the way they have in the UK.

The two most obvious differences are crows and squirrels. I'm used to the all-black carrion crow, but the crows here are hooded crows, with grey bodies but black head and wings. It turns out (from Wikipedia, of course) that Berlin is right at the westernmost edge of the range of the hooded crow, but you also get them in the far northwest of Scotland and in Ireland.

As for squirrels, it is well known how American grey squirrels have displaced the native red squirrels of the UK from most of their range. Despite living forty-two of my first forty-three years there, I have only ever seen a red squirrel in the UK once. aviva_m, observing the behaviour of both myself and her also British ex, once remarked that you can tell the Brits in Berlin by the way when they see a (red) squirrel, they get all excited and run after it with a camera. (Red squirrels being considerably shier creatures than grey squirrels, it took quite a few years before this behaviour wore off for me.)

The first time I went for a bike ride out of Berlin into the Brandenburg countryside, aviva_m warned me, "Be careful; there are wolves in Brandenburg!" But despite much cycling around the countryside since, I have yet to see a single wolf, or indeed raccoon (Berlin is one of two areas in Germany where escaped populations of captive raccoons have gone feral).

I might also mention mistletoe, which is very common here, but which I don't think I have ever (knowingly) seen in the UK.

Lastly, the bumblebees and honeybees here might be different species; they look slightly different to how I remember in the UK. Indeed, whilst in the UK the majority of bees one sees are bumblebees and the minority honey (?) bees, here it seems to be the other way around.

Comments

[iddewes]

We don’t have the hooded crows here - saw a lot of them in Moscow though. We have the raccoons in Hessen and I have seen one. We also have wild boar here.

[lethargic_man]

The only place I've encountered wild boar to date is Barcelona, where the security guard wouldn't let us out of shul on Friday night because he'd seen a boar on the CCTV!

As I said, Berlin is right at the western edge of the range for hooded crows. What this means from a Germany-wide perspective is that all the crows in Rafi's children's books are carrion crows and don't look like the ones he sees outside the window.

[(Anonymous)]

Boars? Go and visit Grünewald, there are scores of them, tending to be met in largish groups and are a bit of a scourge (making quite a mess of both the woodland floor -- where they're supposed to be -- and breaking into gardens on the boundaries of the woods -- where they are not ....) Woodpeckers and nightinggales seem to be a lot more common here. And I've noticed species of smaller birds which are rare in the UK. I'm suprised you don't know hoodie crows from the NE. Am trying to remember if they were present in Durham or not. Suprised you haven't mentioned storks.

[lethargic_man]

I have been cycling through the Grunewald (no umlaut) many many times, either as a destination in its own right, or en route to points further west (via Heerstraße), and have never seen trace of a boar yet.

Good point about the woodpeckers; I'd only ever heard one once or twice before I came here.

Definitely no hooded crows in Newcastle.

I haven't noticed any storks, which I now associate with Romania, where they were extremely common.

[iddewes]

We have only seen the boars back when I used to start work at 2am and Dirk would drive me to work, that’s also when we saw the raccoon.
And we certainly have storks here too.

[lethargic_man]

Saw this and thought of this thread:

[ewt]

There's definitely mistletoe in London, I saw some the other day on Wanstead Flats. I remember not seeing it as much here as in Gloucestershire, but it certainly exists.

[lethargic_man]

I'm sure it does, but not enough to have drawn my attention.