Your one stop shop for Europe
Do you know who calls the shots in the European Union? This week it was: Kenneth and Susann and a group of 16-year-olds!
Kenneth and Susann arrived at the end of their journey, the Danube Delta in Romania. This area of marshes, lakes, channels, streamlets and floating reed islands is spread over 4,500 km2 and two countries and hosts an incredible diversity of plants and animals, many of which are extremely rare elsewhere in the EU. Joined by the very knowledgeable Daniel Petrescu for a boat ride in this UNESCO biosphere reserve, Kenneth and Susann spotted king fishers, pelicans, grey herons, white-tailed eagles, black cormorants and many others… The Delta hosts over 300 different kinds of birds.
It also hosts the flagship fish of the Danube, the sturgeon, which lives part of its life in the slightly salty waters of the Black Sea and then travels upriver to lay its famous eggs – a.k.a. caviar – in the stream where it first hatched. Also known as the Dinosaur of the Danube, sturgeons have inhabited the Earth from the time of the dinosaurs with hardly any changes, so they really are living fossils. Until the 19thcentury, these giant fish – growing up to 100 years old and 4.5 metres long – could be seen as far upriver as Germany.
