Mari Madness

Another day in the Dale with three different trips. First a short birding trip in the morning which was not as successful as it could have been due to far too many people within my 1.5 meter Corona Free personal space and a lack of battery in the bazooka which meant that a rather nice encounter with the Smew went digitally to waste. I did have the superzoom with me and took some video of the bird. A few flocks of Pink-footed Geese and a single Common Buzzard went north but I expected more viz mig as there was quite a healthy southerly wind blowing.

The second trip was with family and Beast and was disappointingly bird free despite my attempts to cover as much GG habitat as possible.

The third trip was with Mrs OB and the Beast after sunset and resulted in my first Woodcock of the year (a roding bird), calling Tawny Owl (probably the third territory I have found so far this year) and I heard a flock of Pink-feet heading north.

I was more successful on the virtual birding front. I noticed that the tagged Taiga Beans had already headed north to their next staging site in Hedmark (record early I think) and asked a local birder Per Olav Skaaret to check them out. He only managed to see 21 Beans and was unable to check for collars as they spooked on his arrival. If this was all the birds present then it would have included all 4 of the GPS collars that have visited Norway this spring (2 in Sweden) as all of these called in from the Hedmark location today – interesting that all of the collared birds travelled in such a small subgroup. The virtual excitement though came when Per Olav sent me a picture and asked me to confirm his suspicions that he had found a Bewick’s Swan! Indeed he had and this species is on course to becoming a national rarity as the global population is in decline and records in Norway now average only a handful a year. This is a species I have looked for this spring (as I do every spring) amongst Whooper Swan flocks and it would be fairly likely that this bird had passed along the Glomma River valley in Akershus which I have been checking.