April Migration

It's been a busy month so far with some decent birding highlights.

We started out with a birthday present of a long weekend at Hanko.

Early Spring, with the ice recently left the sea, meant good numbers of Eider on the move, as well as the first Oystercatchers and Ringed Plovers back in.

Highlights from the trip included Rock Pipits (a species I've only seen once before in Finland) and my first Finnish Black Guillemot (a species which is relatively easy to see offshore from Helsinki, but I've never bothered to look for previously). 

The best came in the form of a seawatch male King Eider from Vedagrundet. I've seen a few of these beauties since living here, but this was my first self found bird. 

We also had a couple of Room on the trip, just knocking around the town. Always a scarce migrant on the south coast. 





Rook - 2CY - at the rarity Mecca of LIDL.


The first Caspian Terns, always the first terns to return, have been putting on good shows, especially at my old patch of Laajalahti.






Caspian Tern - The king of Terns.




The first few Redshank, Snipe, Green Sandpiper and Little Ringed Plover also made their return, with a large flock of staging Smew in situ.


Little Ringed Plover


Smew 

The Slavonian Grebes have also returned, putting on a great show at Suomenoja.





Slavonian Grebes - those amazing eyes!


Dancing Slavs. Amazing looking birds.


The garden has been quite productive over the past few weeks, adding birds like Pintail to the garden list, with the star of the show being a male Pallid Harrier!



Smew from the garden. Always a decent bird here and early to boot, usually not appearing until autumn.


Whilst Rough-Legged Buzzard migration has been enjoyable over the past week.


Rough-Legged Buzzard

Here's to more great raptors over the next few weeks.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Finnish Focus On...Taiga And Tundra Bean Geese

Image
Have been meaning to write a post on Tundra and Taiga Bean Goose identification for a while now. Wildfowl are my guilty pleasure. I've always enjoyed looking for them. The escape issue turns a lot of people off them. Grey geese can turn people off further still. Since moving to Finland, being able to spend long hours in the field watching both types of Bean Goose has been a joy, especially considering how rare they are in Ireland.  Tundra Bean Geese are the far commoner species to occur here, making them the easier to photograph and so a good place to start. Tundra Bean Goose Tundra Bean Goose - careful assessment of structure is most important when identifying bean geese. Whilst there are size differences between the smaller Tundra and larger Taiga, this plays out most obviously in their structure and shape. Both species, rear on, can be extremely difficult to pick apart without the structural clues visible. The head and bill structure are crucial in Bean Goose identification. Thi
Read more

Racism and Bigotry in Birding

Image
It's hard to pick up a newspaper these days and not read about something the new moniker "alt-right" are up to. The rise of racism to more mainstream levels is undeniable. Do we, as birders, need to have this discussion though? Do we know it's out there, among us? I'm pretty sure we do. It's tempting to believe the best about yourself, and this extrapolates to ourselves as a group; as birders. It's tempting to believe that the hobby of birding, taking place in nature, with a holistic, interconnected view of nature, would not harbour backwards, ignorant, scumbag neanderthals, that would discriminate on the basis of colour, creed, ethnicity, sex or sexual preference...over the past two years I've learned, sadly, that this temptation would lead you to the wrong conclusion. Birding, like any other microcosm of humanity, has it's share of these regrettable people. When I say over the past two years, I mean, perhaps, I have been just as
Read more

A Field Guide To Birders - 2nd Edition

Image
Long ago, when I had the Cork-Dudeing Blog active, I wrote a field guide to the various types of birders out there.  I felt it was time to republish it, including some new entries for modern times. It was an extremely popular posting back in the day. Here's hoping people find the new version equally enjoyable. 😉 It's meant to be tongue in cheek, so try and take it as such. Whilst these encapsulate definite personality/character trends out there in birding, of course, some people can fit into more than one category. The Super Hero   The Super Hero is a rare bird finder without equal. They know their stuff. Work their arses off. Put themselves in the right locations at the right times of the year and produce the goods, time and again.  Ends their super-human birding day with a cool pint before flying above the earth and smiling for the camera. Up, up and away. The Jedi Master The Jedi Master makes the singular effort to live out in some far flung location, like Obi-Wan Kenobi in
Read more