SUMMER TO AUTUMN IN TROMSØ, N. NORWAY
This week the schools started up again—both my Tromsø granddaughters now go to primary school–, at Tromsø Museum the colleagues come back from holidays or fieldwork, and the evenings start to get dark again, after two months of midnight sun. The meadows are still green, mostly freshly mown, with the white plastic ‘tractor eggs’ with the hay still lying scattered around in the fields. But the marshes look mostly yellow and brown by now, with as yet not too much autumn-red, and many of the birches are yellowing. In the road verges the enormous ‘Tromsø palms’ (a Heracleum) are also yellowing fast and stick out like a sore thumb. Few flowers left by now, mostly stalwarts like Yarrow (now often dominant), Sneezewort, buttercups and clovers. The Fireweed (or Rosebay Chamaenerion), so dominant many places earlier, has by now lost most of its flowers, but it still smoulders, as the many fruits-pods are also conspicuously dark red, and the plants grow in dense patches. We have, in contradistinction to most of S. Norway and much of W. Europe, had a quite good summer here north; not very warm usually, but a lot of cool sunny northerly weather, with little rain. As a consequence there have been few mushrooms as yet, but today i found two spp of Coprinus, and some small brownish jobs have come up in numbers on our lawn.
I still feed with sunflower seeds in my feeding tubes, probably more for my own pleasure than because the birds need it. And there are lots and lots of Greenfinches on the feeders almost all day, with up to 15 Bramblings (already moulted) and a few Chaffinches (still in summer finery) on the lawn below. In the fields there are small flocks of Meadow Pipits everywhere, but it looks like the wagtails have already gone, as have the martins and the arctic terns.
This is a good time for watching shorebirds on their southwards migration, and local reports notice that this has been a good breeding year for the small shorebirds, most probably because this has been as lemming year, so the owls, raptors and skuas have let the nestlings more or less alone. But I have not been very good in finding the shorebirds; yesterday the water was too high, and I did not find any place where the birds stay during flood—much of the shore is not easy of access. Today I went back on a rising tide, but again I found surprisingly few birds; at Tisnes the cause may have been the young White-tailed Sea Eagle that throned on a large rock in the intertidal. Luckily this year I have discovered a small shallow bight on a little side road near Kvaløysletta, which I had overlooked for almost 40 years, and there there were some birds today, on the rising tide. The majority were in fact Starlings: a tight flock of some 60 birds scoured the intertidal and I suspect fed mostly on ‘my’ amphipods. But there were also a few real shorebirds; a bunch of Ruffs and Reeves, 4 Sanderling—an uncommon sight here, especially as they were still in partial summerdress–, a smattering of Little Stints, and a few Dunlins and Curlew Sandpipers. (And of course the always present gulls (3 spp), Oystercatchers and Hooded Crows, as well as a few sentinel Grey Herons)-
At the airport I heard the wonderful calls of a flock of Curlews (one of the few shorebirds to winter here, albeit in very small numbes), and I also saw two Greenshanks and a Golden Plover. And at the Tisnes wetlands yesterday a noisy flock of some 25 Greylag Geese arrived and alighted, probably local breeders. Here, as every year, a lot of Autumn Gentians Gentianella amarella had just started to flower; strangely enough here abut half are white, the rest the normal bluish purple. But this time I sought in vain for the small yellowish-green Moonwort Bostrychia ferns, that I have found here every late summer until now. The fields are changing, being grazed by horses this year; or my eyesight may start to let me down—I did find the also minute Selaginella plants, though.
We had Indian summer this last week, with much sun, coffee outside at the museum, and temperatures up to almost 20*C. Now we are back at 10-12*, the normal temperatures for this time of year. We need a bit of rain, for the mushrooms and the autumn colours. It will come!!
Wim Vader, Tromsø Museum
9037 Tromsø, Norway
wim.vader@uit.no
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