The red sandstone cathedral of Mainz towers over the city. Photo: Wikimedia
Many of the cultural and artistic sites that make Germany a dream destination for travelers are also outstanding areas for birds. White Storks and Eurasian Kestrels nest on churches and monasteries, and gardens and forests surrounding the palaces and hunting lodges of long-dead monarchs provide nesting grounds for passerines and Germany’s famous wealth of woodpeckers. Serins sing from the rooftops of Mainz, Dippers hunt Freiburg’s urban streams, and Hooded Crows patrol the streets of Berlin. There’s wilder country here, too: Bavaria’s high mountains can produce Alpine Chough and Snowfinch in some of the most spectacular scenery Europe has to offer, while the marshes and moors of the Pomeranian plain and Baltic coast have breeding Common Crane and Red Kite.
Our leisurely Grand Tour of Germany is intended for travelers whose interests extend to nature, art, and history. Participants can choose to sit out any of the scheduled activities to pursue their own interests or simply to relax. Like our other Birds and Art tours, this adventure combines comfortable accommodations, late mornings, a relaxed pace, and supreme flexibility as we seek to provide a “whole landscape” experience for birders and non-birding companions alike.
This tour can be taken in conjunction with our tour Italy: Birds and Art in Tuscany.
A map of our tour route can be viewed on line.
Day 1: The tour begins this morning at Frankfurt’s international airport, where Black Kite, Eurasian Kestrel, and Common Swift typically greet arriving travelers. We’ll drive half an hour to Mainz, where we’ll deliver our bags to our hotel and have lunch before visiting this bustling modern city’s 1,000-year-old red sandstone cathedral. House Martin, Black-billed Magpie (a different species from that familiar in western North America), Black Redstart, Serin, and Greenfinch are among the common urban birds we’ll expect here and on the grounds of the nearby Gutenberg Museum. Night in Mainz.
Day 2: We’ll have breakfast in our hotel, then set out on the two-hour drive to Freiburg, attractively nestled on the western edge of the Black Forest and one of southern Germany’s most beautiful cities. Small guttered streams carry fresh water through the streets, and White-throated Dipper and Gray Wagtail can often be seen on the larger of these pleasantly babbling Bächle. We’ll pay a visit to the stunning Gothic cathedral, often considered Germany’s finest; Alpine Swifts occasionally join their smaller Common cousins above the delicate tracery of the 350-foot spire. After lunch we’ll visit the city’s rich museum in the old Augustinian monastery, whose collections include important medieval tapestries and sculpture. Night in Freiburg.
Day 3: After breakfast we’ll drive into the legendary Black Forest, its dim woodlands and bleak mountaintops the setting for centuries worth of ghost stories and fairy tales. Those same forests and peaks will also give us our first taste of “Alpine” birding, and we’ll drive nearly to the top of the 4,600-foot Belchen (third highest mountain in the Black Forest) in search of Northern Wheatear, Water Pipit, Rock Bunting, and perhaps Citril Finch or Capercaillie. If the day is clear, we’ll be able to see east to the Bavarian Alps and west to the Vosges in France. Night in Freiburg.
Day 4: We’ll leave Freiburg this morning and drive an hour and a half north along the Rhine River to Speyer, whose imperial cathedral (a UNESCO World Heritage site) is the largest surviving Romanesque building in Europe. Before standing open-mouthed before this breathtaking monument of medieval architecture, though, we’ll spend the morning across the river at Waghäusel. A series of settling basins here, once used in processing sugar beets, is now a preserve, and one of the best places in all of Germany to see Purple Heron and Bluethroat; a wide variety of waterbirds breeds here, and the preserve’s relatively urban setting makes it an attractive oasis for passing migrants. We’ll have lunch in Speyer, then undertake a leisurely exploration of the cathedral and the city. Night in Speyer.
Day 5: Half an hour’s drive from Speyer is Heidelberg, on the steep banks of the Neckar River just above its junction with the Rhine. Famous above all for its university (founded in 1386), Heidelberg is one of Germany’s must-see tourist destinations. The massive castle—ruined and rebuilt again and again over the centuries—is one of the most famous in Europe, and we’ll view it from the gently wooded Philosopher’s Walk before lunch in town. After lunch we’ll drive two hours from Heidelberg to Cologne, the 2,000-year-old metropolis of the lower Rhine. Night in Cologne.
Day 6: Cologne is Germany’s fourth-largest city. Founded by the Romans in 38 BC, Cologne was a free imperial city during the Middle Ages, a status it lost only when the lands of the Holy Roman Empire were confiscated by Napoleon. The city continued to grow in size and significance through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—only to be destroyed almost completely in 1945. Most of Cologne’s important Romanesque monuments have now been rebuilt, and they join the cathedral—damaged but not destroyed by Allied bombing—as some of the most important medieval architecture north of the Alps. The cathedral, the largest Gothic church in northern Europe, was begun in 1248 and “finished” 650 years later; behind its famous façade are such artistic treasures as the golden reliquary of the Three Kings, the 10th-century Crucifix of Gero, and a rich collection of paintings by Stephan Lochner and other medieval and Renaissance artists. We’ll spend the morning in this impressive structure, then have lunch in Cologne; the afternoon is free for shopping and unstructured sightseeing, with the Wallraff-Richartz Museum high on the list of recommendations before we re-assemble for dinner. Night in Cologne.
Day 7: After breakfast we’ll head west towards the Belgian border, where the ancient volcanoes of the Eifel rise above the Rhine and Mosel Rivers. We’ll make a few stops here in search of woodland birds, then have lunch in Aachen, the capital of Charlemagne’s empire. After lunch we’ll visit the architecturally eclectic cathedral, where over the centuries more than 40 German monarchs were crowned and where Charlemagne himself is buried. If time permits, we’ll enjoy a glass of crisp Mosel wine in an outdoor café before driving the 45 minutes back to Cologne. Night in Cologne.
Day 8: We’ll leave Cologne this morning after breakfast for Leipzig. It’s about four hours from the Rhine to the “little Paris” of Saxony, but we’ll plan on making a day of it, with a number of stops along the way for birding, for lunch, and for sightseeing in towns such as Eisenach, birthplace of Johann Sebastian Bach and childhood home of Martin Luther. Night in Leipzig.
Day 9: After breakfast and some additional sightseeing in Leipzig, we’ll drive through the beautiful Harz Mountains to Quedlinburg and Halberstadt, two of north Germany’s most attractive medieval towns. Quedlinburg, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, preserves more than 1,000 half-timbered houses dating from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The cathedral treasury houses precious books and artifacts from the early and high Middle Ages—in one of the twentieth century’s most notorious art thefts, several of the most valuable objects spent the 40 years following the end of World War II hidden in Texas. The slender Gothic spires of Halberstadt’s fourteenth-century cathedral rise from the gentle hills and pastures of western Saxony; across the square is the squat Romanesque Liebfrauenkirche. In the nineteenth century, the ornithologist Ferdinand Heine assembled one of Europe’s largest bird collections here. Night in Magdeburg.
Day 10: We’ll visit Magdeburg’s Gothic cathedral—the first constructed on German soil—and then make the hour-and-a-half drive to the Havelländische Luch. This area of agricultural land and moor is well-known for its breeding shorebirds, among them Eurasian Curlew, Black-tailed Godwit, and Ruff. One or two pairs of Common Crane are often present, and we’ll also look for rare passerines, possibly including Barred Warbler or Ortolan Bunting.
In the late afternoon we’ll meet a representative of the local bird observatory, who will accompany us to the observation towers overlooking the display grounds of Germany’s last remaining significant population of Great Bustards. The birds are likely to be distant, but even so it is an unforgettable experience to watch the huge males as they court prospective mates. The towers are also an excellent place from which to see some of the area’s breeding raptors, which include Red Kite, Hobby, and Little Owl; Red-footed Falcon is a regular but very scarce spring migrant here.
Night near Brandenburg.
Day 11: We’ll enjoy a leisurely breakfast before completing our drive to Berlin, the capital of united Germany. We’ll head straight for the Museum Island in former East Berlin, where we’ll choose from an embarrassment of riches including the Pergamon Museum with its Babylonian gates, the New Museum and the bust of Nefertiti, the Bode Museum’s Byzantine icons, the Old National Gallery with its Impressionist masters, and the Old Museum and its collection of Greek and Roman objects. After lunch, we’ll visit the Checkpoint Charlie Museum for a sense of life in divided Berlin. Night in Berlin.
Day 12: After breakfast we’ll leave the hustle and bustle of Berlin for the idyllic coast of the Baltic Sea, barely two and a half hours north of the city. Forested hillsides and lakes gradually give way to reedbeds and tidal flats, where the birdlife includes both nesting seabirds and migrant shorebirds on their way to Scandinavia. If we’re very fortunate, we might run into a Marsh Sandpiper, a Thrush Nightingale, or even an Aquatic Warbler. Night in Anklam.
Day 13: We’ll spend the day birding moors, marshes, and seacoast. The valley of the Peene River is one of the last reasonably natural riparian areas in Germany and one of Central Europe’s largest remaining moors. Among the breeders here are White-tailed Eagle, Whiskered and occasionally White-winged Terns, and Scarlet Rosefinch. In the afternoon we’ll find time for a visit to Anklam’s thirteenth-century St. Mary’s Church and its Gothic frescoes. Night in Anklam.
Day 14: After breakfast we’ll leave for Dresden, the “Saxon Venice.” Twenty years of intensive restoration has made Dresden Germany’s showplace of Baroque art and architecture, and the city brims with important museums, among them the Old Masters Gallery with works by Rubens, Rembrandt, Raphael, and Titian. Night in Dresden.
Day 15: We’ll leave this morning for Munich, the capital of Bavaria. Arriving mid-morning, we’ll visit the Theatinerkirche—the finest example of Italian Baroque in Germany—and the crypt of the Michaelskirche with the lead coffins of the Bavarian kings, including “Mad” Ludwig. After joining the throngs beneath the glockenspiel on the city’s main square, we’ll have lunch at the Viktualienmarkt, then walk through the English Garden or visit one or the other of the museums in the massive Royal Residenz. We’re unlikely to run up a long list of birds today—and just as unlikely to notice. Night in Munich.
Day 16: We’ll leave Munich after breakfast to drive up the slope of the Alps to Mittenwald, a classic Alpine village famed for its instrument makers. We’ll take time to wander the streets of town and admire the folk paintings adorning the house fronts, then take a short cable car ride up the mountainside to look for Alpine Accentor, Alpine Chough, and Snowfinch; even Wallcreeper is possible here, though not, of course, to be expected. We’ll enjoy a warm drink in the summit restaurant, then return to Munich for a final festive dinner together. Night in Munich.
Day 17: The tour ends this morning at Munich’s international airport.
Updated: 01 December 2009
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Notes
Maximum group size 12 with two leaders.