Way too much action!

Quite a lot has happened since Sunday with two absolute highlights that involved so much boot filling that I have over 1700 pictures and loads of video to go through. This blog post will therefore only show a couple of pictures of these highlights whilst I find the time to work through the gigabytes of hopefully award winning 😉 images on my hard drive.

The last two days have, of course, been about yet more searching for the taiga specialities and the weather has been perfect for it: overnight frosts, no wind and sunny skies.

Yesterday I slogged around in the forest and was rewarded with a minimum of three male Two-barred Crossbills as well as Parrot and Common Crossbills and 5 Pine Grosbeaks including a male which showed well if only briefly. The absolute highlight of yesterday though was prolonged and point-blank views of a male Hazel Grouse. I was able to sit down and have it feeding and singing around me seemingly unaffected by my presence. It was the sort of privileged experience that the bird gods only rarely bless people with 😊

Today, I was out with Anders and we hoped to repeat yesterdays success. This was not to be but Stig Mr.Grosbeak Kalvatn sent me a message that he had had a flock of 16! Grosbeaks feeding by his house when he walked the dog this morning. Anders and I cut short our forest endeavors with just Common Crossbill to reports and headed for Stigs hood. After a bit of searching we found them in exactly the same berry tree (similar to Rowan but some other species) and then filled our boots for a whole two hours. We “only” had 9 birds but these included 2 red males who initially were not photogenic although eventually showed well. The lighting was difficult but has I hope resulted in some interesting pictures and we were able to watch the birds at around 5 meters range. Pine Grosbeaks are now turning up in record numbers in southern Norway and with there still being lots of berries in suburban Oslo I am sure that the winter will offer many more experiences like this although I will have to limit the number of photos I take next time.

First a couple of pictures of each of the highlights (hopefully better to come):

male Hazel Grouse (jerpe)

male Pine Grosbeak (konglebit)

And now, the also rans..

male Two-barred Crossbill (båndkorsnebb)

female and male Parrot Crossbill (furukorsnebb)

two females looking suitably large billed although this species can sport a large bill

male Parrot

female Parrot

male and female Parrot with a juvenile crossbill. It would be an obvious assumption that this bird is also a Parrot

but here we see it close up and that bill is not THAT large. It is my understanding that a young crossbills bill should be fully grown by this age (the bird is not a recent fledgling) which would suggest this is a Common Crossbill accompanying adult Parrots. But there were plenty of Common Crossbills in the same area and it is my experience that these two species don't mix so I am unsure.. 

and here are a couple of Common Crossbills (grankorsnebb) which were only 150m away from the Parrots 

male Common Crossbill

Waxwings (sidensvans) - note the very different wing markings. The bird on the right with broad white borders to the flight feathers plus a lot of the red waxy growths is an adult male whilst the bird on the left is an adult female.

Nutcracker (nøttekråke)

this was my best picture of yesterday's male Pine Grosbeak and normally I would have been very happy with that sort of view