Piney has arrived

I have now lived in Norway for 23 and a half years. It took me 10 years to see my first Pine Grosbeak and that was on the breeding grounds in Pasvik, Finnmark but I followed that up with my first Oslo bird the next year on 29 Oct 2012 with my first Oslo bird. That winter there were lots in Maridalen although as it was not a berry year they were always feeding in the top of the highest spruce trees.

Late autumn in 2016 there were a few birds in Oslo and then autumn 2019 there was a proper invasion which was surprisingly followed up only two years later by another invasion. Piney has long vied with Hawkey as my favourite bird but I realise now that maybe I have seen enough of them…

Finding them is cool but twitching them as I did today has lost most of its charm.

I had been suitably motivated by finding the first birds of the autumn on Wednesday that I went on a long walk in the forest yesterday. I was sure I would find many flocks of Grosbeaks as well as plenty of owls (ever the optimist..) but had only a single Black Grouse for my efforts. Today though Grosbeaks were being seen everywhere around Oslo and I joined others at the restaurant at Grefsenkollen where a small flock was splitting its time equally between eating rowan seeds and then flying into spruce trees and eating buds. Maybe they see that there are so many rowan berries and realise that they have food sorted for the next 6 months and think it might start to get boring so want to spice up their diet a bit.

It was nice to see them though 😊 and especially adult males.

 

In Maridalen I failed to find any Grozzas but a flock of 35 Waxwings were nice. They were initially ignoring the rowan berries and eating aphids and flycatching but in the afternoon were wolfing down the red berries. A flock of 9 Common Scoter sleeping on the lake were my first of the autumn and raises my hopes of a Long-tailed Duck dropping in.

adult male Pine Grosbeak (konglebit) in a sea of rowan berries

an adult female or a 1cy bird

look at all the liquid oozing out of the berry

they also fed on spruce buds

Waxwings (sidensvans)

spot the Common Scoters (svartand)

a beast of a Goshawk (hønsehauk) that looked like it could eat me

I am by NO means a plane spotter but I was intrigued when I saw these 4 vapour trails. A check of Flightradar24 showed apparently no planes in the area so they had to be military

the Norwegian airforce only flies F35 and F16 so as they are clearly not the former I guess they are F16s unless they are from a foreign military. They were flying NNE at a great height and I heard nothing from them