Winter is coming

This last week has been the autumn school half term holiday and we spent some of it in Beitostølen. It was nice crisp autumnal weather but on Thursday the forecast changed and we decided to leave a day early which turned out to be a very wise decision as we could see from webcam pictures that winter came in force on Friday morning.

Bird wise it was predictably quiet but there were still hundreds of thrushes feeding on berries and Siberian Jays were as usual cooperative.

Back in Oslo Bearded Tits have arrived at Fornebu and will hopefully stay the winter again. I have had a couple of trips with the thermal imager but so far have only encountered Woodcock.

webcam picture of Beitostølen on Friday morning. Note the car on the back of a recovery truck which presumably had not changed to winter tyres (which was our problem and reason we decided to leave a day early) and needed to be driven down the mountain

view on Wednesday

Thursday

Siberian Jay (lavskrike)

they look great when they glide from one tree to another but my attempts of capturing this digitially are still a work in progress project

Willow Tit (granmeis)

4 of 6 Scaup (bergand) on a mountain lake

spot them?

we came across quite a few domesticated Reindeer. This one is shedding the velvet from its antlers

2 males

this is not yet a year old but already has its first antlers

male Bearded Tit (skjeggmeis) at Fornebu

5 birds in this photo of a minimum of 11 I saw

on the fjord this young Common Tern (makrellterne) was a late bird

and this Purple Sandpiper (fjæreplytt) early

quite a few auks have turned up with a number dying including this Guillemot (lomvi)

and this Razorbill (alke)

there are fish in the fjord though although this Red-breasted Merganser had eyes too big for its bill

a mushroom picking trip in the forest with Mrs OB and The Beast was brightened up with this male Three-toed Woodpecker

drumming

my first thermal imaging Woodcock (rugde) of the autumn