Thread: Lecture on Polish birds

Yesterday I went to the lecture on Polish birds held by Ambassador of Poland, so here are some of my impressions:
The lecture started later than expected as the laptop used for projection would not work properly... but people kept coming in, so by the time it started all seats were full.
Many of these people seemed to be students from our biology college (there were some very fine reviews of the previous lecture on the mailing list by the students of college in another town).
The ambassador started his lecture by explaining the geography (and climate) of Poland, and then showed us the map with all the national parks. Then he showed pictures made in each particular national park, and he used the Serbian bird names from our new official nomenclature list for captions under pictures, so we would not wonder about the Polish names (at the end he passed some Polish bird guides around to look at, and the names were completely different).
He also included some other animals, such as European bison and beavers (it seems that there are beavers even in centers of Polish cities, wherever there is water).
We had many questions, such as why is a certain area (not in the northernmost part but somewhere else) called a tundra (because it has tundra plants and animals due to climatic abnormalities), which kinds of owls are common and which are rare (snowy owl never bred, but great grey owl does regularly), are there any bird species that recently invaded towns like beavers do (yes, peregrine falcons, and crows (which used to be shy of urban habitats) started to nest in last few years), what do peregrine falcons in city eat (mostly pigeons, magpies and jackdaws), do they attack kestrels (not, they even breed on the same building which is Russian style as is donated by Russian architects), do they attack crows (no because peregrines are downtown and crows are not that urban so they don't come into contact) etc.