Final birding of 2025

Despite me posting a part 1 of my summary of the year it isn’t over quite yet and I have managed to fit in some birding around festive and family activities. On the 22^nd I guided Emily and Diane from California for a very cold and crisp couple of hours at Huk, Bygdøy. We had a good haul of typical species with Purple Sandpipers headlining.

And today I saw one of the Maridalen Pygmy Owls for the first time in over a month and although I think food is hard for it to find I did see it with rodent in its claws.

We suddenly had a change in the weather just before Christmas with temperatures falling below zero and with no wind ice immediately formed in the bays at Fornebu. We also got the thinnest layer of snow on Christmas Eve so had a white Christmas too.

Maridalsvannet always takes a long time to freeze over but has started freezing over in the bays and there is a chance it will mostly freeze over before the New Year (when in a normal winter it will definitely be frozen) although I suspect it may take a bit longer.

Pygmy Owl (spurveugle) in the Dale

Cormorants (storskarv) at Huk

and Purple Sandpipers (fjæreplytt) same place

Waxwings (sidensvans) are still in the area where I live and a couple joined Fieldfares that were eating wind fallen apples in the garden

Dausjøelva in Maridalen on 27th Dec

and looking over Nesbukta on the 26th with the first ice forming

Winter is coming

This last week has been the autumn school half term holiday and we spent some of it in Beitostølen. It was nice crisp autumnal weather but on Thursday the forecast changed and we decided to leave a day early which turned out to be a very wise decision as we could see from webcam pictures that winter came in force on Friday morning.

Bird wise it was predictably quiet but there were still hundreds of thrushes feeding on berries and Siberian Jays were as usual cooperative.

Back in Oslo Bearded Tits have arrived at Fornebu and will hopefully stay the winter again. I have had a couple of trips with the thermal imager but so far have only encountered Woodcock.

webcam picture of Beitostølen on Friday morning. Note the car on the back of a recovery truck which presumably had not changed to winter tyres (which was our problem and reason we decided to leave a day early) and needed to be driven down the mountain

view on Wednesday

Thursday

Siberian Jay (lavskrike)

they look great when they glide from one tree to another but my attempts of capturing this digitially are still a work in progress project

Willow Tit (granmeis)

4 of 6 Scaup (bergand) on a mountain lake

spot them?

we came across quite a few domesticated Reindeer. This one is shedding the velvet from its antlers

2 males

this is not yet a year old but already has its first antlers

male Bearded Tit (skjeggmeis) at Fornebu

5 birds in this photo of a minimum of 11 I saw

on the fjord this young Common Tern (makrellterne) was a late bird

and this Purple Sandpiper (fjæreplytt) early

quite a few auks have turned up with a number dying including this Guillemot (lomvi)

and this Razorbill (alke)

there are fish in the fjord though although this Red-breasted Merganser had eyes too big for its bill

a mushroom picking trip in the forest with Mrs OB and The Beast was brightened up with this male Three-toed Woodpecker

drumming

my first thermal imaging Woodcock (rugde) of the autumn

The ice melts

By this afternoon over two thirds of the ice on Maridalsvannet had disappeared and with there suddenly being more open water there was a noticeable increase in waterfowl. A massive 19 Black-throated Divers were making a lot of noise, Tufted had increased to 17, Teal to over 30 and 4 each of Red-breasted Merganser and Wigeon were definitely new in. There were over 300 Common Gulls but only a couple of Black-headed amongst them and no Mediterranean or Ring-billed that I could find. Hopefully the farmer will plough some fields soon which should bring more gulls as well as other birds. Yet again there was no movement of raptors except for a White-tailed Eagle that drifted west.

I also had a trip to Svellet which is starting to looking wonderful with water levels falling 10-20cm every day and nice mud banks showing again. 14 Greenshank and a Whimbrel were all there was to see but in the coming 2 weeks we will hopefully be in for a wader feast.

panorama view of Maridalsvannet looking south from Nestangen

migrants ducks on Maridalsvannet: Tufted (toppand) and Teal (krikkand)

White-tailed Eagler (havørn) a 2/3cy

Red-breasted Mergansers (siland)

Swallows (låvesvale)

crayfish seem to be a favourite of Black-throated Diver (storlom)

Common Gulls (fiskemåke) on the ice