One of the highlights of my two visits to the Dolna Kula Valley was finding a surprisingly cooperative male Eastern Olivaceous Warbler, which spent the entirety of the time I watched it singing unrelentingly from a thicket of small trees. It wasn’t a species I’d planned to devote time to photographing, as I had other target species and didn’t want to waste too long on what is typically a secretive bird. It’s also rather dull-looking in appearance, which would probably put many photographers off, especially when there is a flashy male Eastern Black-eared Wheatear on the rocks just a few meters away.

In the end I spent more time with the warbler than the wheatear, mostly because I recognised what a good opportunity it was to photograph this species. Their characteristic song, filled with scratchy notes of various pitches, is commonly heard across the Eastern Rodopi, but they will often go unseen unless one puts in the time. Even then, views are often brief as they hop around the canopy of trees or bushes. Clearly we came across this individual at the height of the courtship season, the vigour in the bird’s song due to the competing males singing in the area. What made this individual such a good one to photograph was its preference to sing nearly always from exposed branches, rather than from within the cover of vegetation, something I’ve not really noticed in any other males in the region.