BIRDING ICELAND - Harlequin Ducks & more niceness along the Northeast Iceland birding trail

Harlequin Ducks in Laxa river, Northeast Iceland, october 2014

Northeast Iceland - nature destination development

Biotope recently visited Iceland, invited by the people behind the Northeast Iceland Birding Trail. Naturally we were quite excited about getting this request. Iceland is well known in the birding world as one of the best places in the world to expereience birds like the stunning Harlequin Duck and the Iconic Gyrfalcon. 

Hornøya bird cliff - site development scheme / mulighetsstudie

Hornøya is perhaps the finest nature attraction in Varanger. The birdlife of Hornøya bird cliff have become famous among birders and nature photographers around the globe. In Vardø locals have a long tradition of gathering eggs on Reinøya and Hornøya, however this has not been practiced in recent years. Now locals are also increasingly becoming aware of Hornøya Island's unique position as a nature attraction. Many companies in Vardo benefit from Hornøya today through nature based tourism. With facilitation like the new bird hide / wind shelter on Hornøya, this attraction has become a destination for the city's kindergartens and schools too. 

Birding Varanger in winter & early spring

The following article outlines the Varanger winter birding experience. During the past few years I have received many emails from birders and bird photographers with questions about winter birding in Varanger. Now I have have collected my responses in this following article, with some advice about birds, sites, accommodation and more for a winter or early spring visit to Varanger (That is Varanger-Fjord / Peninsula + Pasvik in South Varanger)

Varanger Golden Oriole, etc. - Birding by the people

Birding in Varanger is on the rise - and the locals are the new bird finders! Rare bird finding have so far been the domain of visiting birders. However with the recent years focus on birds and the unique birdlife of Varanger, locals have become very much more aware of our avian friends. 

Golden Oriole (Pirol, Oriolus oriolus) Komagvær May 2012, photo: Roland Strige

Pallid Harrier (steppehauk, Circus macrourus) Vardø May 2012, photo: Erling Slettvold.

I keep getting phone calls, sms´ and mails with questions about birds and requests to help with species identification of birds observed and photographed in Varanger by locals. Often it is common birds, or odd-looking birds. It is fairly straight forward, and mostly the hard-to-id-birds are for example moulting Long-tailed Ducks. But sometimes it is something extraordinary. Recently, just within a few days, I recieved a picture of a Golden Oriole (pirol) and a Pallid Harrier. The Oriole was photographed by Roland Strige in Vardo (photo below). He found this rarity dead on the porch of his cabin in Komagvær. Why it lay dead on the terrace of his is not known (probably crashed into a window), but one thing is certain - it is far from where it is supposed to be. The Pallid Harrier was seen flying by and luckily the sharp observer Erling Slettvold from Vardo managed to take this photo of a beautiful adult male. An excellent documentation of this eastern vagrant. As with the Oriole this species is only seen a few times in Finnmark. A few days later me and Elin headed out towards Hamningberg, outer Varanger fjord. Here we had a European Bee-eater flying by. What a bird! An explosion of colours in the otherwise earth-coloured arctic tundra landscape. Such an exotic trio of rare birds of course made it to the regional newspaper Finnmarken.

It is during the summer season most rare birds are found. This is when birders from around the world visit this region. The logic is simple: the more birders, the more exiting birds are found. Last year two new species for Norway was found in Varanger: an Asian White-winged Scoter (Knoppsjøorre, Melanitta fusca stejnegeri) from Siberia were found in Persfjorden and the rare Glaucous-winged Gull (gråvingemåke Larus Glaucescens) was discovered in Kiberg. Both are extremely rare, even in a European context. Now we are well underway for this season with the observations of both Golden Oriole, Bee-eater and Pallid Harrier. We have now been working with local development projects and birding in Varanger since 2009, and the great thing is that the birdfinders are now the people of Varanger. 

Birding to the people 

We recently completed a destination development study, outlining the possibilities in birding. Varanger is a birding destination in the making. Visiting birders have a very positive effect in Varanger, not just economically speaking, but the fact that people from around the world travel to Varanger to study birds is a huge compliment to the regions birdlife. Locally this undoubtedly raises the local awareness and appriciation of the regions birdlife. People in Varanger have a birdlife and nature to be proud of, and now it seems the locals are turning in to quite the bird finders!

Page 1 of 123

p 25/123 - local bird projects: ringing, nesting boxes, bird guiding, etc

The destination development study is a documentation of the past three years pro nature / pro bird work we have engaged with in Varanger. In fact - it is more about people then birds. 

Below is the last page of the regional newspaper Finnmarken: the last page allways features photos sent to the paper by its readers. Increasingly bird photos feature this page with allmost daily one or more bird photos. And when the Pallid Harriers and Golden Orioles are found and identified by locals its is no doubt Varanger is a birding destination!

Local birders visiting Ekkerøy, 08.06.2012

We are doing quite a bit of bird guiding in Varanger. Below with teacher Tord Skardal and his students from Vestre Jakobselv birding Ekkerøy, Varanger fjord.

Who knows - maybe one of these guys will find the next Golden Oriole or some other rare bird.

The summer season is just beginning in Varanger, and it is not given that visiting birders will be the only finders of rarities this year...

A 2011 highlight: Galucous-winged Gull. What will the 2012 Varanger highlight be?
More photos in previous article: Varanger harbour life - northern and eastern gulls

stay tuned.. 

Tormod A. / Biotope

Redrawing Ørland - pro nature destination development

We just spent one week in Ørland, central Norway. In close collaboration with the good people at Ørland Kulturhus (cultural centre) we are now making a new destination development scheme for Ørland. This includes designing a new Ramsar center / exhibition, to be completed this summer. The past week we have had lots of great meetings with people involved in this project, we have spent much time making time-lapse movies in the tidal landscape, and collecting content for the coming exhibition. 

We very early realized that we had to redraw the map for Ørland. Maps define our perception of a place, and something was very obviously missing from the ordinary Ørland map: the vast tidal landscapes. Below is the new Ørland map - with tidal landscape included + depths in the sea. This makes a much more meaningfull map for everyone with an interest in nature. The map is still a work in progress, so more info to come. But no doubt that both the birder, the fisherman, the diver and the kayak paddler will find this a more relevant map, compared to the ordinary plain-blue-sea-map. The vast tidal landscapes is the basis for Ørland wetlands status as a Ramsar area.

Ørland map by Biotope

The Lapwing is a character bird on Ørland. The drawings above (soon to feature on T-shirts) are made on a workshop arranged by Thomas Hjeltnes / the Cultural center: 5th graders version on this beautifull bird. We propose a new name: Varied Lapwing. Exellent drawings - anyone who has ever carefully studied a Lapwing will understand the variation. It is a study in the play of colour and light.

A key part of our engagement in Ørland is to include local resources - and they are plentifull. We have had many meetings with very resourcefull people and this will inform the coming exhibition to a great extent. The exhibition will not only feature much information on the nature, birds and wildlife of this great place, but also the people who use these areas for a variety of purposes: the local birders, the divers club, fishermen, kayakers, hunters all share an interest in the wise use and sound development of Ørlands nature. We will make more then an exhibition: it will be a meeting place. 

Tune in to the Biotope website to follow the progress! For now we present a few photos from our week in Ørland:

 

Workshops