The Scottish Taiga Bean Geese moved south to their
traditional Norwegian (Glomma) staging grounds already on 17 August this year
and I paid an unsuccessful visit to look for them on 21 August but another
attempt yesterday was far more successful. The birds were in the field I was
hoping to find them using (a field they have used many times before which fits with
them being birds of habit) and they were readily viewable from a road. A count
of 101 was pretty good but I counted only 5 family groups totalling 9 young but
this low level of productivity also is typical of this population. I identified
3 tagged birds including the sole bird in this group still sending a GPS
signal. This flock will be here for probably another month before heading for
Scotland either directly or perhaps via Denmark.
After this I visited a very flooded Årnestangen
where the nice weather had got a few raptors in the air. Best of all was a
juvenile Honey Buzzard flying together with dad and frequently interacting with
passing Buzzard and Sparrowhawk. Dad was passing for junior and the whole thing
looked like flying practice with supervision.
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| the goose field and my viewing position which is marked in red on the map |
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| and part of the flock |
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| notice 2 birds right on the tree line (which is also shown by the GPS plots) |
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| the GPS collar of 05 and the inscribed neck collar of V8 |
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| GPS 27 whose collar stopped transmitting this summer |
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| a family group |
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| a ringed bird that has lost its collar |
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| and another bird with a (larger) leg ring but no collar |
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| juvenile Honey Buzzard (vepsevåk) |
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| with dad |
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| dad with a Sparrowhawk (spurveugle) |
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| and junior with the same Sparrowhawk |
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| a 1st winter female Bluethroat (blåstrupe) |
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| and a first winter male which actually has a blue throat |
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| a very distant Great White Egret (egretthegre) on the flooded fields at Årnestangen |
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