SUNDAY MORNING WALK (LATE OCTOBER)
This morning I decided to make a leisurely walk across the island of
Tromsoeya, where my hown town of Tromsoe, N-Norway, is situated, The island
has sort of a tear-drop shape, and is surrounded by sounds on both sides.
The island itself is not very high (maybe 100m), but the surrounding hills
both on the mainland and the outlying island of Kvaloeya are 600-1200 m. We
still have ca 7 hrs of daylight, but that decreases by 15 minutes every
day, and the sun will be gone by 20 November.
Today the sun shone as I left home, and the snow was full of thousands of
small diamonds. We have ca 2 feet of snow, mostly quite wet, so that even
the now mostly bare trees have a lot of snow plastered to the branches, and
nature is mostly a black-and-white picture; but what a glorious one!
Most of my route is through suburbia. Tromsoe is a town with mainly wooden
houses, painted in many different, often quite gay, colours, which greatly
improves the outlook of an otherwise quite humdrum town. On my side of the
island most houses have large gardens (and there are no fences between
gardens at all!), with a lot of trees, so conditions should be excellent
for birds.
Still, on the first half of the walk, "over the top of the island", across
the old cemetery, where the gravestones are slowly disappearing in the
snow, and along the little lake Prestvannet,--in summer a beehive of bird
activity, now a vasr expanse of snow (too snowy for the skaters, too flat
for the skiers)--, there were very few birds. Only three species can be
called common: the Great Tit (so eloquently presented recently to us by Ole
Post), the Magpie and the Hooded Crow. Today I saw quite a number of
Bullfinches, my favourite passerine here, mostly in the old fir trees of
gardens and the churchyard, a few Willow Tits, and in one place one of our
scattered small groups of House Sparrows.And that was in fact all in two
hours time!
Watching the Bullfinches for a while, I saw two males doing something I
never had expected these so quiet birds to do, i.e. mob a Magpie. It was a
very civilized sort of mobbing, sounding much more like: "Excuse me, Sir,
would you care to move?" than the : "Hey, you, buzz off!" of the Great
tits, and the still much more emphatic "*¤x*!! ¤#*#!!" of the Willow
tits, but the birds persisted with their "requests" until the magpie moved on.
On the shore and in the water there is always much more bird life, although
I do not think the wintering birds are at full strength as yet. I saw the
last 2 lingering Starlings (here a shore bird, rather than a land bird)
five minutes after I for the first time this winter heard the joyful
yodeling of the Oldsquaws (Long-tailed Ducks).
Along the shore hundreds of Mallards (who stay all winter), further out
groups of now once more resplendent looking Eiders, the drakes often in
full courtship. This made these groups easy to separate from the much more
sedate groups of Common Scoters, even against the sun. On a skerry sat
about a hundred Cormorants, also mainly winter birds in this area.
I`ll list what I saw at the end; as you see it is a very short list, but
normal for this time of the year. I missed the Red-breasted Mergansers that
also winter here, the Ravens that I saw here yesterday, and the
White-tailed Eagle that I saw later today from my living room window, as
well as the Goshawk that I watched near the museum earlier this week. I
also saw no Greenfinches at all; there seem to be much fewer of those
around this autumn than the last two winters.
I have reported from this quite small area for almost two years now, and
fear that I may start to repeat myself boringly. Please stop me , if this
is the case, and I`ll shut up for a while.
Birdlist 25 October, 2 hrs walk on Tromsoeya:
Cormorant Phalacrocorax c. carbo
Mallard Anas platyrhynchos
Common Scoter Melanitta nigra
Oldsquaw Clangula hyemalis
Common Eider Somateria mollissima
Herring gull Larus argentatus
Great Black-b. Gull L. marinus
Magpie Pica pica
Hooded Crow Corvus corone cornix
Starling Sturnus vulgaris
Great Tit Parus major
Willow tit P. montanus
House Sparrow Passer domesticus
Bullfinch Pyrrhula pyrrhula
Wim Vader, Tromsoe Museum
9037 Tromsoe, Norway
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