It was a very strange feeling. I was in Manchester airport without my 17kg camera bag. In fact, I was in Manchester airport without a camera.  We were heading to Venice to meet an American friend and I made the decision to travel light, with only my trusty old Samsung phone to capture this beautiful city.  I can’t remember the last time I travelled anywhere without at least two camera bodies and two or three lenses but, honestly, it was nice to be a tourist, wandering the city unencumbered by heavy gear.  My phone was never far away because, if you are a tourist in Venice, it is practically impossible to find your way through the narrow alleyways and across multiple canals without some assistance from Google maps or, in my case, Maps.me.  So the phone was always handy to take a snap or two when a gondola came by.

To be fair, I didn’t see a lot of wildlife in Venice.  No stag or hen parties even.  Much too sophisticated for such bawdy celebrations, and whoever saw a hen party travelling in single file, an absolute necessity in many a Venice street.

The trip from Marco Polo airport on the water-bus presented a few gulls, a cormorant and a couple of little egrets. A few feral pigeons wander the streets of Venice in that arrogant, pigeon fashion. These lucky ones have escaped the recent cull which, I am told, was engineered to reduce the damage the birds cause to the city’s fine buildings with their droppings. But, it turns out that escaping the cull does not necessarily mean a carefree existence for the survivors.  Dodging tourists only requires a sideways glance and a quick side-step, but where there are wild birds, avian predators are not far away. This herring gull, ever the opportunist, is aiming to finish every scrap of one such pigeon which was probably dispatched by the same bird.  

On a day trip to Murano, the island home of fine Italian glassware, I found a friendly little egret, doing its best to look attractive, preening its feathers on a nearby post.  Out came the phone and there it was, in the bag.  Otherwise – nothing.  

I’m not going to make a habit of travelling with only my phone but I can see the attraction.  My next trip will require the full arsenal of equipment but, hopefully, it will be worth the effort.  There’ll be some interesting new (better quality) images to share from a land which, apart from the presence of lots of water, is as different from Venice as chalk is to cheese. It is one of the richest in the world for flora and fauna and overflowing with photographic potential.

I’ll tell you all about it when I get back…