Birds in Andenes

Fulmar

Bird photography is a specialist business, calling for big lenses and endless patience. I'm just an opportunist so my pictures look very amateur, despite getting pretty close to some remarkable birds.

My technique (if you can call it that) is to put my 300 mm lens onto my Nikon and set the camera to sports mode. Then I take as many pictures as I can in the hope that just one of them will be sharp. In good light with a sitting duck you can get good results, but a flying bird, from a boat, in the middle of an Arctic gale, with rain and sea spray all over the place is a bit of a challenge.

You can view some of my photos at "Andenes Birds".

I think my Arctic Tern is probably my best shot. He was trying to kill me at the time, as I walked near his nest on the quayside. We saw hundreds of these archetypal migratory birds every day. Soon they will be on their way to the South Atlantic or even the South Pacific. They must experience more daylight in a year than any other animal on this planet, including ourselves.

Terns and puffins carry food to their young and you can actually see the sand-eels in their mouths as they fly. This makes them attractive to klepto-parasites such as Arctic skuas. I also saw a great skua from the ferry once, but the scarcest and most elegant of these piratical birds is the long-tailed skua. They look like terns when they fly, which must enable them to get pretty close to their prey without being spotted.

Apart from fulmars, we only saw one petrel; a tiny Leach's petrel which was following the whales.

Arctic skua.

Divers or loons nest on the freshwater tarns inland and fly to the coast to feed. I saw red throated and black throated divers in flight, but never on the water. However, the local sea-duck population could be watched inside the harbour. Eiders were the most common ducks but we also saw common and velvet scoters, mergansers and goosanders. Whooper swans nested in the lakes near the airport.

The list of land-birds is short but quite special, with sparrows, redwings and fieldfares to be found around the houses and nearby woods.  Wheatears  and twites were everywhere along the beach crest and any open ground while blue-throats and ring-ouzels were seen higher up. I was surprised to find a colony of sand-martins in a stockpile of sand at a builder's yard.

I think Andenes would make an excellent bird observatory in September and October when birds stream down the coast from the high Arctic. A ringing station for passerines at the base of the lighthouse could be manned every morning while visible migration could be monitored from the lighthouse or the ferry. I suspect that geese and swans pass through in good numbers. Waders could be monitored daily by simply walking the beach.

There is an observatory down at Lista, near Stavanger that pulls in spectacular numbers of birds in Autumn, including a lot of Finnish birds on their way to the UK. Andenes could turn up some real surprises as it is so much further north.

Puffins