In the last months , several people have again mailed me, asking how the
environment and climate are in Tromsø, N.Norway, where I live, and from
where I have sent out small pieces on birds and seasons for many years
now. I have therefore decided to send out anew a piece I wrote five years
ago, with excuses to all long-time subscribers. It saves me, maybe, to
replÿ to all individual mails on the subject.
Tromsø still has too littel snow, and far too much ice on all smaller
roads and paths, and temperatures are usually around or just below
freezing, so one really 'proceeds at ones own risk' when venturing
outside. My bird year list has by now climbed to 12 species, still much
lower than in most other years.
Wim Vader
TROMSØ, N. NORWAY, 70*N, FAR NORTH, BUT NOT ARCTIC
Since 1998 I have sent in short reports on the seasons and the bird life
in Tromsø, N.Norway; shortly after starting out, I think I included a
short report on the town and its surroundings, but now many of the
subscribers will be new since then, and several people have asked me
questions about 'my town', so I have decided to furnish some general
information once more.
To begin with, Tromsø is not really 'my town': I did not grow up here. I
moved from my native Holland to Norway (in first instance Bergen) in 1965,
when I married a Bergen marine biologist, Sunniva Lønning, whom I had met
during an excursion to Norway and Sweden of Leiden University students in
1961. We (by that time we had three children) moved to Tromsø in 1973, and
to my present house near Tromsø Museum, on the south end of the island of
Tromsøya, late in 1974 and we have lived there ever since.(Sadly, Sunniva
died in 1985). Also from 1973, I have worked as the Curator of 'everything
except the insects' at Tromsø Museum, the regional museum for N.Norway and
the Norwegian Arctic, that has existed in Tromsø since as early as 1871.
In 1976, the museum was incorporated in the then new University of Tromsø,
and since 1990 I am a full professor of zoology at the university (A
personal professorate, not a teaching appointment). I also no longer have
the responsibility for most of the vertebrate collections; these have been
taken over by colleagues, and I am now 'only' curator of fishes and
marine invertebrates. I am still a Dutch citizen, and since 1992, I also
have a Dutch partner; but Riet continues to live in Holland, so we meet
only during mutual visits or holidays.
The town of Tromsø is the capital of the province of Troms, the middle one
of the three provinces in N.Norway: Nordland, Troms, and Finnmark. When I
arrived in 1973, the town had ca 40 000 inhabitants, and was 'primus inter
pares' among N.Norwegian towns. But Tromsø has grown very quickly, and we
have now passed 60 000 inhabitants, and are clearly the largest center of
population in N.Norway and indeed in all of N.Scandinavia (excepting
Murmansk on the Kola peninsula, with its 500 000 people in a different
league altogether.) Tromsø is not a very old town; although there are
remains of a mediaeval fort on the island, the town recently celebrated
its 200 years as a township. The town has grown because of its situation
along the shipping lead along the Norwegian coast; as I said it lies on an
island, Tromsøya, surrounded by two sounds, that together form the sill of
the Balsfjord, one of the many justly famous Norwegian fjords. Most ships
that steam (or sailed) north along the Norwegian coast, follow a route
that as as much as possible leads through fjords and sounds, as the
climate up here is often stormy and the seas perilous. In addition to its
position as a centre for shipping, Tromsø has also become 'the gateway to
the Arctic': All the ships, and also nowadays all the planes to Svalbard,
start out from Tromsø, and the town is also one of the main fishing ports
in Norway. Take in addition its importance as a school and administrative
centre for all of N.Norway, and it is no wonder that Tromsø is the fastest
growing town in the country. Unfortunately!
Tromsø is not a beautiful town as such: the centre burned down several
times, the last time ca 40 years ago, and rebuilding was often done
quickly and economically rather than with an eye on beauty and
architecture. But the town is very beautifully situated on its
teardrop-shaped quite low island (highest point maybe 150-200m),
surrounded by the ca 1km broad sounds and by the high and usually snowclad
hills of the mainland and of the outlying large island of Kvaløya. The
nearest hills are ca 500m high, but behind them loom higher mountains, up
to 1200m, in a spectacular and thinly-populated area; no wonder that
hill-walking, mountaineering and skiing all are very popular with the
inhabitants. Tromsø also has a reputation as a very lively town, with a
spectacular number of cafes, restaurants and night clubs, much helped in
summer by the two months that the sun never sets; while the two months in
winter that the sun never rises above the horizon are a further good
reason for indoors revelries!!
Although we live at 70*N (and please look at a globus, and you will see
that everywhere else this means ice fields, or at the best bleak tundra),
we do not have an Arctic climate, and as everybody knows this is due to
the Gulf Stream, and the North Atlantic Current, that brings warm water
(all is relative, it gets never warmer than 14*C here, and we all swim
very briefly) up to these coast (and even to Svalbard) and cause our
coasts to be ice free and our climate to be boreal-atlantic rather than
arctic. Winters are long here---it may snow in every month of the
year---, but they are not unduly harsh, and the minimum temp. ever
recorded is in fact not below -20*C, which does occur also in Holland now
and then. Winters may also be very snowy, although, just as everything
connected with the weather up here, conditions are most variable: this
year all snow was gone on 28 April, while 5 years ago we set a new snow
record, with 2.43m snow on the ground, on 29 April and that year the last
snow in my garden melted 22 June!
But we do have plenty of forest here, puny though it may be by the
standards of many other people. Here at the coast the natural vegetation
is birch forest, with Alder, various Willows, Rowan and Aspen, while in
the inland Pines dominate. None of the trees get much higher than maybe
5m, though, and the tree line in the hills here around Tromsø lies at ca
250-300m. Above there heath dominates,with a lot of edible berries, and
with the only 'trees' small creeping willows and the horizontal Dwarf
Birch Betula nana.
The geology of the area is very varied, and there is in fact a large fault
straight across Tromsøya and the surrounding hill-country. To the south of
it, and that includes the southern half of the island, and thus also the
terrain around the museum and my house, the ground is chalk-rich and the
vegetation luxuriant; the hills to the south of Tromsdalen on the
mainland, accessible by cable car to Storsteinen at ca 400m, are very
famous in botanical circles for their rich flora and they also look very
colourful in summer when the fields of white Dryas bloom. While the area
further north has much harder and more acid rocks and consequently a much
poorer vegetation; the marshes at Rakfjord, one of the better birding
areas, lie in this region.
The houses in Tromsø, outside the very centre downtown, are mostly wooden
free standing houses (An own house and own garden is the dream of every
Norwegian), while, characteristic for this area. most people do not fence
in their gardens, so that the different gardens just kind of merge into
each other, which gives a very pleasant effect indeed. The houses, most of
them well-known models from one of the leading house factories, are
moreover painted in all possible colours (and some that hardly seem
possible) and also that helps giving our suburbia a very colourful and
appealing image. (Outside the town, of course, people do fence in their
gardens, as there free-roamin sheep and reindeer otherwise would eat
everything. But on the island we do not have this problem).
The fact that everybody aspires to his own house has also the consequence
that the town spreads like an oil stain over the landscape, as it grows.
When I arrived in 1973, I hardly saw any lights across the sound on the
shores of Kvaløya in the evening, and now that whole area is also built
full with villas, as is the corresponding area on the mainland. Recently,
the town fathers have realized the problem, and now there are several
schemes with larger buildings containing flats, mainly along the sound,
where the areas were mainly small-industrial before (There is no large
industry in Tromsø); one of these schemes also has been built along the
shore down the street from where I live, on the slope maybe 50m above sea
level, with a beautiful view across the sound.
This growth, although very good in many ways, of course has had clear
negative consequences for the nature and birdlife in the area. When I
arrived in Vesterli---where I live now--- in 1974, and walked through the
remnant birch forest patch called Folkeparken--- a bit of a holy cow for
the people of Tromsø, so it has remained largely unscathed for the
building boom---, I regularly saw and heard Willow Grouse, even in my
garden, while Snipe and Redshanks nested on the grassland adjoining the
Folkeparken, and Bluethroats were heard here regularly. Now all that has
gone, and only the Oystercatchers remain; these adaptable birds now nest
on the flat roof of the TV studios and music conservatorium, built where
earlier the grassy meadows were. And in Folkeparken not only the
Bluethroats are gone, but also the Garden Warblers, the Sedge Warblers,
and since two years also the Woodcock that miraculously hung on to its old
haunts in the area is not seen displaying anymore here. All these birds
have of course not disappeared from Tromsø altogether; Willow Grouse
f.ex. often gladdened my heart on the university campus when I lectured
there, and also Bluethroats and Sedge Warblers are common enough in the
marshy areas on the less-densely populated northern half of the island.
But the Temminck's Stints that used to nest near the airport, and that
were disturbed by the road works there a few years ago, were the last ones
on the island, I think We now boast a 4-lane road here, but no longer have
nesting Temminck's Stints. (I have refound a few in their old haunts
m\near the airport in 2009!). There is little doubt, what most people also
here, judge to be the greater good!.
Folkeparken is thus a remnant birch forest on very rich soil, and thus
also with an extremely luxuriant undergrowth. There are conifer
plantations in the 'park', mostly fir, but also some pine and even larch,
and they increase diversity, and attract inland birds on their periodic
invasions to the coast, to a degree that they even now and then stay to
nest the following year(s): we have seen thus with Crossbills, Coal Tits
and Goldcrests, and in recent years (but not in 2003) we also had the
pleasure of singing European Robins in Folkeparken, while also the Wood
Pigeon is seen here regularly. But the mainstay remains the big five of
the birch forests: Fieldfare, Redwing, Willow Warbler, Brambling and
Redpoll.
This brings me to the subject of the dynamics of our avifauna. There have
been an amazing number of changes in our Tromsø bird world since 1973. The
first wave of newcomers, or rather 'my first wave', in the seventies
(House Sparrows, Great Tits and Pied Flycatchers had invaded earlier) were
the Greenfinch (now one of the most numerous birds not only in Tromsø, but
al the way to the Russian border), the Chiffchaff (now also quite common)
and the Blackcap (which has not made it and is now heard only
occasionally). Then, and no doubt by an entirely different mechanism, came
the rise of the Gray Heron, now also a common nesting bird even on the
island, and a integral part of the vistas along the fjord
intertidals)----I vividly remember the first flight I saw here: a perfect
V of nine birds, which to my great surprise were not geese or cormorants ,
but herons. During the last years, as I said the Wood Pigeon and the
European Robin, previously typical inland birds, are gradually spreading
to the coast, while we already possibly see the forerunners of the next
invasion: both the Blue Tit and the Jay (neither of them migrant birds)
are being reported more and more frequently in mid Troms, although both
are still rare birds, certainly here on the island. (In 2009 I had for
the first time Blue Tits in my garden, and this autumn even a Winter
Wren!). And some other birds, such as the Wood Warbler and the Icterine
Warbler are being heard and seen in the inland, and may later on also
extend their area to the coast here.
Finally, I want to stress the fact that the density as well as the
diversity of birds here is much lower than at lower latitudes. In other
words, you will not only see fewer species of birds, but also much fewer
individuals when you come here (Of course our famous seabird cliffs are an
exception to this rule, and it is anyhow more clear for terrestrial birds
than for waterbirds). I have written earlier about the differences between
Riet's little village garden full of birds in Holland, and my much larger
garden, with many trees, where there are no birds at all for long periods
at a time, apart from the 'house magpie family' and the roaming Common
Gulls in summer, and the Greenfinches, Great Tits and Willow Tits on the
feeder in winter. There is nothing particularly wrong with my garden, this
is just the difference between 50 and 70*N.
Wim Vader, Tromsø
Museum
9037 Tromsø,
Norway
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