Dear colleagues,
I had the opportunity to visit this year the herpetological interesting region of Kars in the northeastern part of Türkiye, close to the armenian border. The main targets were the two occuring species of Montivipera (wagneri and raddei).
We were a team of 3 and we flew from Berlin to the airport of Kars Harakini via Istanbul. We arrived at the airport in the early noon.
On arrival we had some conversational problems with the rental car company (no one speaks english and they were not able to read the printed documents of the online broker...anyway). After we solved this, we headed up to Kagizman which is a comparable larger town south of Kars.
Our hotel was very nice (even if the toilet situation is a bit strange for a west european citizen)...but after 2-3 days we were cool with it
Anyway the city was a bit misty and beautiful by night
The next day we woke up early and drove to two sites west of Kagizman to start our search for Montivipera wagneri
Finding the vipers wasn´t easy but we got a lot of luck (in total we found 15 in 3 days)
We also searched different other places for reptiles, but we didn´t found too much (maybe due to the volatile weather conditions durcing our stay)
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Further east (close to the armenian border) we also searched some sites for Montivipera raddei. These areas were a bit more challanging than the areas visited before.
Even if the time was short (only one week which is definitely to much for an area linke this) we had a lot of fun and will be back next spring.
Many thanks go to Bobby Bok and Clemens Radspieler for tips and fruitful discussions.