ONE HOUR SUMMER HITHERTO IN TROMSØ, BUT MAYBE SOon
If one reckons, as we do, that real summer weather are temperatures above
20*C, we have until now have had exactly one hour of summer weather: last
Sunday when the temperature in the late afternoon climber to 20.2*C for one
hour. Since then we have been back at the usual northeasterly chilly winds,
although today the weather was quite nice by our standards: little wind,
lots of sun, and a temperature of 15-16*C. On the surroundings hills there
are now only smallish patches of snow left, and even the higher hills are
largely snow free.
Today I drive back to Rakfjord, the wetland area I reported from several
times before, some 35 km NW of here, on the island of Kvaløya. Hard rocks,
acid marshes, poorish vegetation. Instead of the rich fields full of
cranebills and cow Parsley the road verges here show the much more modest
umbels of Caraway Carum carvi, with here and there patchesw of clear blue
Forget-me-nots Myosotis. The wetter parts of the marsh show a lot of
flowering Bogbean Menyanthes trifoliata, ¨but even these bright flowers do
not really relieve the monotony of these marshes. These same flowers do much
better around the small tarns where they they form a pink ring, and also
grow far out into the shallower ones. The different cotton-grass Eriophorum
species now also come to the fore; there are at least four different species
here, a rather meagre one on the heath, a coarse one with several 'cotton
balls' in the marshes, and a wonderful fluffy white one, E. finmarchicum, in
many ditches. The ditches also hold a lot of pink flowering Butterwort
(Today I also found Sundew, not all that common locally), many orchids
Dactylorchis, and here and there the miniature flowers of the Scottish
Asphodel Tofieldia pusilla. on rocky outcrops the white bells of the
Cowberry Vaccinium vitis-idea are prominent, and promise many good berries
later this summer.
But this is a bird list, so I should write about the birds rather than the
flowers. The problem here is that the birds this time a year get much less
conspicuous. All the ducks hide with their broods in the now much taller
vegetation, the song birds don't sing anymore, and even the Greylag Geese
seem to have gone into hiding; also the phalaropes don't show themselves at
all. Common Gulls and Arctic Skuas still protest whereever I walk, the
Black-throated Loon floats on its tarn, and Whimbrels , Redshanks and a
single Golden Plover are clearly anxious for thie invisible young. And there
are any number of scolding Meadow Pipits, and a few Wheatears and wagtails,
and as a great surprise a female Ring Ouzel, the first one I have ever seen
just here.
On the way back I suddenly hear snatches of the wonderful song of a
Bluethroat, one of my favourte birds, and one I had strangely missed all
year, A nice surprise.
These last days the weather forecast has been promising summer weather
finally to arrive 'in a few days'. But today they are already less positive
again, so maybe it won't happen now either. There is always a bright side to
every mishap, though: we have had many fewer biting and bloodsucking insects
as yet this summer!
Wim Vader,
Tromsø Museum
9037 Tromsø,
Norway
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