Summer holidays 2025 - the start of the end

The final part of the summer holiday is beginning and for the first time since 2022 I will be back spending time at the cabin outside of Bodø, north of the Arctic Circle. Jr and I drove up starting from Oslo at 08:55 yesterday and we covered 1281km in 23 hours and 50 minutes with less than an hour of that used for sleep but including 5 stops for birding/butterflying and dog airing. When you drive north through the night in the middle of the summer it never gets dark and that helps keep tiredness as bay although once we got to the cabin we felt it.

Apart from the stops the drive up was extremely bird and animal free with the total of big/interesting species observed (excluding Cranes which are getting almost too common) being 2 Common Buzzard, 3 Kestrel, 1 Marsh Harrier, 1 Raven, 1 Fox, 1 Hare and 4 Moose. This is an appalling total!!

The stops were for Apollo butterfly which was a quick success, Pallid Harrier which was a dip although a male Hen Harrier did show, Ørin in Trøndelag for waders which was also a dip, Saltfjellet on the Arctic Circle where Red-necked Phalaropes and Ruff were good but no raptors or Long-tailed Skuas and finally 35 minutes from the cabin Klungsettvika where they were alarmingly few sea ducks but hopefully my stop was too fleeting and further visits will deliver more.

At the cabin a pair of Common Gulls has nested on the roof and two large young are still there with the parents guarding them - it will be a noisy stay!

Apollo butterfly - a beautiful beast of an insect

A bit more distant

There were also a couple of Hummingbird Hawk Moths (dvergsvermer)

Saltfjellet looking south

My first ever Lesser Teatblade orchid (småtveblad) which were tiny

Red-necked Phalaropes (svømmesnipe)

The view from the cabin and I have already seen Common Porpoise (nise) and Arctic Skua (tyvjo)

I heard the Porpoises (nise) before I saw them

Thursday videos

Here are the videos from Thursday.

We arrived at the Great Grey Owl nest at 20:00 and it took a while before we saw the young and they gradually became more visible, active and noisy but it wasn’t until 21:14 that dad arrived with food. This is in contrast to six days previously when we witnessed three food deliveries in under an hour from 18:58 onwards. The young are coming along well so I don’t think there is a question of lack of food but maybe different weather plays a role. Thursday was a sunny day whereas six days previously had been overcast and therefore darker earlier on (I also noted that Woodcocks were first active later much earlier last week).

The mother really does seem to be good at her job and still shelters the young between her wings and she probably has not left the nest in close to two months. When the food delivery finally came we could not see what had happened but the female was definitely not feeding the young by tearing off strips of meat so I thought that maybe she had swallowed the vole herself which then had me questioning her motherly instincts. The video however shows that one of the young (the middle one?) took the vole from her and swallowed it whole! Things have definitely moved on from six days previous when she was feeding them tiny morsals of flesh individually.

I have two videos from the nest. The first is just the food delivery sequence where I also captured the male flying in on my phone and the second and much longer video has various snippet of action from the whole period we watched them.

 

Here is footage of the hunting GG we spotted along the road. Initially perched on a wire by a house he then made an unsuccessful plunge for a rodent before moving to fence posts. You can also see how he changes his posture in response to a Hooded Crow flying over.

 

Here are a pair of Red-necked Phalaropes

And finally, Norway’s only registered singing Ortolan Bunting in 2025. The nest I found in 2023 may end up being the last breeding of this species in the country as last year just two unpaired males were recorded and I did not see anything on Thursday to suggest that this male who has now been back over 2 weeks had a mate.

Holiday driving

Yesterday was a bank holiday in Norway and Jr and I used it to take a looooong drive. She takes her driving test on Monday and is keen to get in driving practice and I have places I want to bird but no longer find the long drives much fun. It is therefore a win win if I get chaffeured and Jr gets the practice she wants. We were out 13 hours and clocked up just shy of 600km. The destination was a first trip to the mountains for the year. Not Beitostølen / Valdres but Ringebu which I have developed a taste for.

First stop was to check out a Tengmalm’s nest that Per Christian and I had discovered in April. No bird showed and I am really beginning to think it is my trunk scratching technique that is the problem rather than there never being owls in the holes. A very small and rare butterfly was a good compensation though with a few violet copper (fiolett gullvinge) on the road verge. I have previously found a very healthy population a couple of kilometres away and this very normal looking area of open pine forest clearly holds good numbers of what otherwise seems to be a declining species.

After this we headed higher and above the tree line. There was no snow but it was all very brown and the birches on the tree line were yet to come into leaf. The lake and marshes I was headed for were ice free and there were quite a few birds but clearly a number of migrants are not back yet. Although there were fair numbers of Yellow Wagtails and Meadow Pipits I found no Bluethroats, Lapland Buntings or Wheatears which should be numerous. There were also no raptors, owls or grouse so it is clearly not a rodent year in these mountains.

Waders were back though. My target was Red-necked Phalarope and two pairs were probably only just in. Redshank, Wood Sandpipers, Golden Plover were also all on territory and there were 3 or 4 calidris waders in song flights at some distance that gave me a bit of a headache. When I initially heard the «song» I identifed them as Broad-billed Sandpipers but then I started hearing Dunlin and a Dunlin landed close to me. I assumed they were all the same species as they were flying around together and then started thinking I had misheard and they were all Dunlins.

Lucky though I did take some terrible distant photos and there were clearly both species flying together. I now wish I had walked further into the marshes (my feet were already wet anyway) and tried to see them properly.

After this we needed to get some food and headed for Elverum where after a McD we then visited Norway’s only known singing Ortolan and then the GGOs. This time we had to wait over an hour for a feed but it was fun watching mum and the young getting increasingly hungry and impatient. Then driving home we had a roadside GG hunting in someones garden 😊

Today, a post on Facebook reminded me that it was about time I twitched a butterfly. Scarce Heath (heroringvinge) is rare in Norway but occurs on a couple of islands (one of which is connected to the mainland) only 6km from Fornebu. They were easy to find and the habitat - some open ground backing onto gardens - looked very ordinary. This species seems to be extremely sedentary and although it can be well established in one small site seems unable to expand onto other sites just a few hundred metres away.

I’ll post pictures now and will come back with videos which should be good although knowing me I will have failed to press the record button when I thought I had.

a male Red-necked Phalarope (svømmesnipe)

and a female. This is one of the very few species where the female is the more colourful of the sexes

habitat

Dunlin (myrsnipe) and Broad-billed Sandpiper (fjellmyrløper). I regret now not trying to get closer to the area they were displaying over

size difference is just about possible to make out

Norway's only known singing Ortolan Bunting and the same bird I found on 10 May. Nothing suggested he had found a mate

Great Grey Owl (lappugle) watching. I should have some good video

the three young are growing and the two oldest are now grey instead of white. The third and smallest is just visible to the left of the other two behind the branch

one young was hiding under mums wing

and then climbed on top of her

male Violet Copper (fiolett gullvinge)

and the subject of today's twitch a Scarce Heath (heroringvinge)

Broad-billed Sandpipers and friends of the mountain marsh

Time now for the first instalment of my 24 hour birding and butterflying trip to the mountains and forests north of Oslo last week. The spur of the moment trip was spurred by the seemingly easy chance of seeing displaying Broad-billed Sandpipers accompanied by warm, sunny weather. I have seen quite a few BBS on passage and have seen them twice on their breeding grounds including once very closely but I have never seen or heard them displaying and it was almost bucket list desire. They normally breed on quite large and inaccessible bogs but evidence I had been sent to my phone suggested that the birds Per Christian had seen was anything but inaccessible. The location was a marsh at over 1100m and consequently way above the treeline which was not how I have pictured the preferred habitat for this species. The area is known to hold a number of other birds including Red-necked Phalaropes and my plan was to spend the night and experience lots of activity very early in the morning. I arrived in the early evening though and with it never getting truly dark I was able to bird straight away and to be honest hit the jackpot before bedtime.

The BBS did not quite live up to my expectations but I had it in its display flight on a number of occasions including low over my head but I never got to see it properly on the ground. Every time it finished a display flight it would plummet down into the marsh only about 20m from where I stood but then it would just vanish. Only once did I glimpse it on the ground and I think it was living up to its Norwegian name of Mountain Marsh Runner (fjellmyrløper). This video has a bit of its display flight including song.

 

Broad-billed Sandpiper (fjellmyrløper) in display flight

flight shots aren't getting any easier

Red-necked Phalaropes showed a lot better although it took me a long time to see them closely although they then performed very well. Although I think some birds had settled down to nest there was a group of females flying around, calling and seemingly looking for unpaired males.

 

female Red-necked Phalaropes (svømmesnipe)

at sunrise

do you see it?

Lapland Buntings were also present and 4 singing males makes this one of the best localities in southern Norway of a species that is declining fast. A lack of rodents meant that a single Kestrel was the ONLY raptor or owl I saw.

male Lapland Bunting (lappspurv)

male Willow Grouse (lirype) in a place where the white feathers really help it blend in

Wood Sandpiper (grønnstilk)

male Grey-headed (Yellow) Wagtail

even this bird has a hint of a white supercilium

trying to be arty

on a lake on the tree line at 965m a pair of Slavonian Grebes showed well

sunrise 04.01 at 1130m

also 04:01

04:17