Hel Hath No Birdies

Have spent the past few weeks enjoying various influxes of prime species.  SE winds brought a huge influx of Red-Footed Falcons to the Nordics, with some 1,825 juveniles alone (not counting other age groups 😯) having been found. I cashed in several times, first at Laajalahti, where I saw several in a morning, and even found one, before realizing the enormity of the influx, I raced home for a quick one hour watch from my garden, which successfully produced another juvenile! Brilliant result.  Other goodies included Great White Egret and Honey Buzzards.  Great White Egrets I've twitched one or two since, including this bird at nearby Espoonkartano. Red-Footed Falcon I also managed to catch a bit of Pallid Harrier movement, with 2 juvs down in Inkoo giving an excellent performance. Pallid Harrier - Juveniles  A quick weekend trip up to Hämeenkyrö let me visit Tarastenjarvi dump again. No Caspian gulls unfortunately (my first blank year in quite some time) but lots of R...

It's been a long hot Summer, one which recently saw overlapping visits from friends and family. A bit of equipment upgrade, switching to my new Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra has been consuming my birding of late, especially as I have (finally) after years of phonescoping hand-held, switched to using a custom Phoneskope case for my Swarovski ATX.  Professional Time to practice with it has been limited, though taking the aforementioned guests out for a spot of Finnish birding allowed for good testing conditions.  My initial test was handheld with distant Black-Throated Divers at full 70x zoom on the scope. Despite being a new device and software with all the associated quirks, I was amazed at the level of detail the camera could bring out.  Some time later I got to test it with the new adapter on my local Red-Backed Shrike family. Again the level of detail was absolutely superb, and the images required very little editing. The video functions are also excellent. Taking my old fr...