OSLO BIRDER: Snow!

As forecast and as the birds seem to have been expecting we had some serious snow today: 40cm of wet heavy snow. Now lots of snow in March in Oslo is no big deal in a historical perspective but it looks like the council has really taken to heart the consequences of this Global Warming thingy migigy. All buses were cancelled and the roads were chaos and the reason why? There were not enough snow ploughs because all the tractors have changed over to spring cleaning equipment and nobody thought to tell them to switch back!

The underground trains were still running though so I thought I would check out Frognerpark which would seem to be a likely place for birds to congregate in this type of weather. 140 Black-headed Gulls (hettemåke) were quite a sight including two birds with real pink flushes to their chests. Best birds though were a couple of Grey Wagtails (vintererle) that seemed particularly unimpressed with the weather.

I slogged on down to Bygdøy hoping to find even more geese but only managed to find Greylags (grågås) who were all lying down on top of the snow so could conceivably have been hiding other species in their midst. Surprisingly there were also 13 Lapwings (vipe) with them although 12 flew off at lunchtime presumably thinking they needed to find a place where lunch could be found. A Song Thrush (måltrost) flying over here was my first of the year.

The snow gave some great photo opportunities today with persil white backgrounds without having to resort to tricks in Photoshop.

male Grey Wagtail (vintererle). Its Norwegian name suggests that it is the wagtail you can see in the winter in Norway but that is just nonsense! This is an insect eating summer visitor although it does arrive earlier than White and Yellow wags.