Highlight #2 - Pine Grosbeaks, the Best of the Best

So, the time has come to post about my latest Pine Grosbeak encounter(s). On Tuesday I spent 2 fantastic hours with 9 birds eating berries at head height. Over 1000 stills and lots of video are filling up my hard disk but I have now had a chance to go through everything and I am very happy with the results. There was very varying light which gave me lots of opportunities to take different types of photos, the majority of which didn’t work but it was fun experimenting.

Yesterday I found a single young bird feeding on rowan berries in the garden of a Grefsenkollen restaurant. Whilst taking video I discovered that I had accidentaly set my video to 25 fps instead of 50 fps which explains why my recent videos (including Tuesday’s Grosbeaks) have had poor quality especially of moving birds. I fixed that problem though and managed some good video of today’s bird. The single bird was quite noisy at times as though he was trying to find some of his kin whereas the flock of 9 made very little noise whilst feeding which is my usual experience with the species.

Although all my photos of feeding birds are on rowan the flock on Tuesday also frequently flew into some adjacent spruce trees where they fed on buds and shoots.

male Pine Grosbeak (konglebit) 

And from yesterday:

Thursday's young Pine Grosbeak with the Holmenkollen ski jump in the distance (8km away)

Bullfinches (dompap) are also pretty smart birds! A number of birds were giving the "trumpet" call that resembles Two-barred Crossbill (båndkorsnebb) and which probably means they are also migrants from much further east

Cormorants (storskarv) on Maridalsvannet - an attempt at an arty photo