OSLO BIRDER: Snow Bunting

Thursday, 5 March 2020

Snow Bunting

Winter has come back after being absent for over 2 months and welcome it is. We now have snow in Oslo and everything is white instead of being brown and grey. The return of winter will hopefully also mean a better spring for bird migration with some local flooding and wet fields.

I have been following the movements of the tagged Bean Geese and thought that I would go look for them again on their Akershus staging grounds today. The bird that came back on 24 Feb and which I had seen on 26 Feb has since returned to Denmark but at the same time he thought it was too wintery here another two of the tagged birds decided it was too spring like in Denmark and flew north to Akershus! Yesterday the original bird set course for Norway again so I thought I would join them and see how many there were and if I could read any other collars.

When I arrived there was fog which took an hour to lift and then I couldn’t find any geese either on the river or on the fields…. A confiding Snow Bunting was very good value though and Whooper Swans have started to arrive in good numbers although a number arrived from the north suggesting that they too were finding things a bit wintery. Eventually after 3 hours I saw three untagged Beans flying in from the south and they gave the impression of having flown a long way so were perhaps fresh in from Denmark. The map showing where the tagged birds were did not update whilst I was out in the field but I now see they were in an area that was probably not visible to me although I had looked over as much of the field as I could.