Hel Hath No Birdies

A very busy weekend put down, Saturday being entirely taken up with Lyra's naming day.  A whole day of eating and drinking and peopling meant we were desperate for the outdoors and fresh air. With harrier season in full swing, we made a family outing to Saltfjarden where we knew birds were in situ. Not long after we arrived in the car park, a gorgeous juv Montagu's began quartering over the far marsh. This was quickly followed up by a juv Pallid Harrier doing a close couple of fly-bys. Photos were up to my usual high standards of course. Abysmal But what a stunner You just gotta love the Pallids There were at least two individuals around the Saltfjarden fields, with a further 1-2 seen around the wider, Porkkala area. This is my favorite time of year, when the young harriers come through in numbers. Word from up North is that these have had a good breeding year, at least in Finland. Remains to be seen whether that is also the case further east, but I have a feeling we will see v...

Dear Eric, Over the past couple of months I have had a couple of lively discussions with you, over my referring to Ireland as "Potatoland". You don't like it.  OK. Good. You shouldn't and are not supposed to.  I use the term to confront, head on, a horrible aspect of our country, it's attitude and it's failures, particularly in reference to it's birding culture, but it applies in a general context too. Your response, recently attempting to conflate my use of this term, as anything close to approaching the kind of racism I highlighted in a recent blog post was, in my humble opinion, somewhat beneath you, however, your frequent response of "we're not all like that", that things are changing, is in many ways, more disturbing to me. Because we are "all like that". We turn a blind eye. If it were an olympic event we would take gold home by the truckload.  I know of no way to prove this to you on the societal level, on the institutional l...

The Finnish word, Aro, meaning Steppe, is a common prefix in bird names here. Many species are named for the habitats they originate from. So it is with Caspian Gull, Aroharmaalokki, or "Steppe Grey Gull" when translated literally, though the context would be to call it Steppe Herring Gull, Finnish names often being derived contextually from the "base" common species. Caspian Gull is a decent rarity here. Commoner than Ireland, of course, but seemingly rarer than in Britain. Observer and habitat factors likely play into this status in a big way, with dumps being the most frequent sites to produce the species (or any gull species for that matter), and mostly the domain of the few gullers there are here. Finland, lacking in beaches and estuaries, means finding a Caspian whilst routinely partaking in a bit of coastal birding is a non-starter. Second to dumps, jamming a Caspian in a recently ploughed field is your only hope. This was how I found my first here...