early winter at 70*N (few birds!)

EARLY WINTER IN TROMSØ, AT 70*N These last years, we have had long autumns here in Tromsø, N. Norway, with the snow not seriously coming in till shortly before Christmas. But 2013 seems to turn out different: a week ago a sudden snow storm dumped some 20 cm of fresh and heavy snow on the island, and since then temperatures have hovered around freezing and it has snowed almost every day, although not a lot (maybe 30-40cm by now). The streets became quite slippery all of a sudden, and those people who had not changed to winter tires in time got double trouble; many slid off the road and in addition the police gave hefty fines to those who had ventured out on summer tires. The red sticks along all roads, that will be there all winter to guide the snow ploughs, have come up, and the local newspapers are full of stories of large trucks and lorries, often with East European drivers, that get stuck on steep inclines and block the roads. And yesterday the police put out the first avalanche warning of the year: Please avoid steep hills! Many people, me too, walk now with “brodder” under our soles, rubber soles with small metal studs that we bind under our shoes. Slippery roads are an almost permanent problem here in winter, where the coastal climate gives us periods with Atlantic air and milder weather in between, and our local dialect has a wide choice of words to describe this situation: ‘holke’ is the general word for icy surfaces, ‘speilholke’ (=mirror holke) denotes the situation when rain has made the holke extra dangerous, while ‘blindholke’ is the most treacherous of all, the situation when the ice is covered by a thin veneer of snow and therefore invisible at first sight. With the climbing of the years I have also become much more reluctant to drive my car on ‘holke’, which means that my world suddenly becomes much smaller in winter. Daylight is also fast diminishing now, although it is still more than a month before the sun completely disappears for two months. And the snow helps a lot by reflecting what light there is. I live in the basement apartment nowadays, having let the main house to my younger daughter and family, and I feed the birds outside my windows with two cylindrical tubes with mainly sunflower seeds. One of my local pair of magpies has learned to cling to these tubes and feed on the seeds, while the other is much more clumsy. But the normal visitors are roving flocks of Greenfinches, with many youngsters, that are not much green at all, a family of Great Tits (the young still easily recognizable with their much narrower ‘neckties’ and paler yellow bellies), a pair of dapper almost black-and-white Willow Tits (often arriving together), and a single Blue Tit. This last is a relative newcomer to Tromsø, first seen in my garden two years ago and for the time being only seen now and then in the winter half year. (The other newcomer to the area, the Jay, I still have not seen here, although it is present many places in the surroundings of Tromsø now, and last week somebody noted as many of ten jays on her feeders on Kvaløya, the large island between us and the open sea.) These species, the prudent Hooded Crows, which mostly visit when I am not in my rooms, I suspect, and a varying number of Feral Pigeons make up the total of my visitors the last month, although just yesterday there was a Great Spotted Woodpecker, remnant of an influx from the east earlier this autumn. The House Sparrows that live a few houses down the road, don’t make it to my garden in winter (They did now and then in September), nor do the large gulls of the shore, Herring and Great Black-backed, ever land here. The ‘house gulls’ of summer, the Common Gulls, have together with all other migrant birds ‘come to their senses and flown south’, as a popular song here expresses it. So the shores of the sound only have hooded crows and large gulls, and further out there are large flocks of Eider Ducks, a few other wintering duck species, and Cormorants. The only wintering shorebird here is the Purple Sandpiper, but I rarely see them on my side of the island (there are often a lot on a jetty in town). In Folkeparken, the remnant birch forest and conifer plantations between my house and Tromsø Museum, it is almost completely quiet these days, and the only birds I see are Magpies and Hooded Crows. Early in the morning I now and then hear the croaks of Northern Ravens, and a Grey Heron or a White-tailed Sea Eagle may flap overhead. As we have had a very inferior crop of Rowanberries (Mountain Ash) this year, all the thrushes have left early, and as yet I have not seen a single Bohemian Waxwings (These, and much smaller numbers of Pine Grosbeaks) are in many winters quite common here. Winter can be very beautiful here at 70*N, but it is not an ideal season to go birding! Wim Vader, Tromsø Museum 9037 Tromsø, Norway wim.vader@uit.no =============================== To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the message: unsubscribe (in the body of the message, with no Subject line) to: birding-aus-request@vicnet.net.au http://birding-aus.org ===============================