2025 The Birding Year That Was part 1

2025 hasn’t felt like a particularly exciting year and I can easily list off the fairly common species I haven’t seen such as Fulmar (how is that even possible?!?), Yellow-browed or Grasshopper Warbler, any white winged gulls, Great Northern or White-billed Divers. However, I have clearly had a fairly good year because my total of 245 species in Norway is slightly better than my average for the last 15 years.

I didn’t engage in much twitching but finding my own Long-billed Dowitcher and Sandwich Tern were new species for me in Norway and twitches (I would prefer to call them detours) resulted in two new gulls – Ring-billed and Yellow-legged. Other good finds were a Turtle Dove and a Red Kite.

I was less confined to Oslo this year and 180 species versus last years record 205 illustrates that perfectly. Akershus was visited more though and 211 species was my first tally over 200 since 2019 and my third best tally ever following 216 in 2018 and 212 in 2017.

I had trips to Hedmark and Oppland and saw the usual forest and mountain species and we stayed at the cabin in Bodø for the first time in a while and while that disappointed on the bird front it did deliver on the butterfly front big time.

An autumn without a visit to Værøy, Røst or Jæren was slightly salvaged with only my second ever visit to Lista.

 

January

2025 started with a few Pine Grosbeaks hanging on from the invasion the previous autumn but my last sighting was on Jan 17 - it is rather amazing how they just seem to vanish. The Hawk Owl in Maridalen hung on until the end of March though and could always brighten up a dull day.

Very good (unprecedented) numbers of sea ducks on the fjord were exploiting an abundant hatch of baby mussels and a few Scaup amongst them were nice. 

Pine Grosbeak (konglebit) at Grefsenkollen

Hawk Owl (haukugle) in Maridalen

Jack Snipe (kvartbekkasin) at Fornebu

Scaup (bergand) on the fjord with a single Tufted Duck (toppand)

February

The most obvious species in February was probably Common Crossbill as this species which had arrived in Oslo’s forests in the previous autumn was no starting to breed as the numerous cones were clearly at just the right stage to be suitable for feeding young. Females were nest making whilst the mates looked on and kept guard and flocks of mostly males visited the roads to lick salt.

Listening to singing owls on cloudless, windless and very cold nights is always a highlight of late winter/early spring but it is not every year the owls even bother singing as they will only turn their thoughts to breeding if there are enough rodents. 2025 thankfully was such a year and a number of visits to Owl Road revealed singing Great Grey, Tawny and Tengmalm’s Owls.

By the end of the month a number of spring migrants had already returned and for the second year running White-fronted Geese chose to stop off at Bygdøy giving exceptional views. The Taiga Beans were also back before the month end registering their second earliest arrival.

a female Crossbill (grankorsnebb) collecting nesting material in Maridalen

and male Crossbills searching for salts on the edge of a road

my first of a number of encounters with Tengmalm's Owl (perleugle), this one on Owl Road

and my first encounter of the year Great Grey Owl (lappugle) also on Owl Road

The Taiga Bean Goose pair V8 and 05 (with the GPS sender). The GPS plots of 05 indicated they bred in Sweden before transmissons abruptly ceased and come the autumn V8 (the male) had three young in tow but 05 was no more

Snow Bunting (snøspurv) in Maridalen - always one of the first and most anticipated spring migrants

a pair of White-fronted Geese (tundragås) with a Greylag at Bygdøy.

March

Woodcock and Lapwing arrived very early to Maridalen and owling trips early in the month added singing Long-eared to the list.

A Stonechat was now an expected early spring find of a species in growth but many sighting of possibly up to three different Bewick’s Swans was a welcome sight of a species in decline in Western Europe and now seen so infrequently in Norway it could be considered a national rarity.

Visits to Owl Road were rewarded with varying levels of success suggesting perhaps a light crash in rodent numbers but we did still hear the odd Tengmalm’s  and had another encounter with a singing GG.

This year’s big movement of Pink-footed Geese occurred on the 20th and I counted over 9000 birds in around 3 hours over Maridalen. Only a couple of decades ago the big day would have been a month later. Crossbill chicks had left the nest by the months end and quite quickly the species was moving off looking for the next area with fresh cones.

The Maridalen Hawk Owl gave some of its best views right before it left when it still seemed to find a good supply of voles and even raised the hope that we could have local breeding (not that we ever saw more than the one bird and there was no singing).

another Tengmalm's encounter

Hawkie and lunch

a GG

Bewick's Swan (dvergsvane) with Whoopers (sangsvane)

and here videos of 4 species of owl singing during the month plus a fifth havng a snack

April

Owls continued to be a theme with a Tengmalm’s nest finally found and a pair visiting it at night but subsequent daytime visits never revealed the nest to be occupied although there is mounting evidence that this has more to do with my poor tree scratching skills than lack of birds. Northern Lights also spiced up owling nights.

A trip to Per Christian’s cabin at the start of the month revealed yet another Tengmalm’s plus a Hawk Owl but no Eagle Owls which we had really hoped to discover. A stop at the marvellous floods at Starene revealed a ton of geese and a White-tailed Eagle hunting them.

The first rarity of the year was a Ring-necked Duck at Nordre Øyeren which had to be twitched as it was an Akershus tick although I have already had one in Oslo.

An Easter visit to Hedmark resulted in finding a Great Grey Owl nest in an old raptors nest which would then become the focus of a number of guiding visits over the next couple of months.

A booming Bittern at Hellesjøvannet had to be heard and for the first time I also saw (glimpsed) the species in Norway. That means that I have now finally seen every species on my modest Norwegian list.

The Long-eared Owls that I had heard singing in March revealed themselves in April and I found two surprisingly low down and visible nests that provided many an interesting encounter in April and May.

A daughter keen to practice her driving and also to go shopping in Sweden (cross border shopping both entails saving lots of money, finding products you can’t buy in Norway and of course buying things that you really could do fine without) gave a very memorable meeting with Red Kites on the Norwegian side of the border where the species seems to be firmly established now and we saw 4 birds.

A Green-winged Teal also had to twitched at Merkja and this presumably returning bird became a long stayer.

Right at the end of the month another twitch gave ridiculously good views of a 1st summer female Red-footed Falcon that had found the supply of worms on a golf course too good to say no to.

Tengmalm's in an old woodpecker hole

northern lights the same night

a sub ad White-tailed Eagle (havørn) with a Pink-footed Goose (kortnebbgås) that it then dropped (and the goose flew off) at Starene

Ring-necked Duck (ringand) with a Tufted

incubating Great Grey Owl (lappugle)

roadside female Capercaille (storfugl) on the same trip

Red Kite (rødglente)

Red-footed Falcon (aftenfalk)

May

May is always the most exciting month of the year around Oslo. May 2025 didn’t feel that great and Svellet was a shadow of its once might self but one good day at Årnestangen and another at Fornebu gave me two new, and self-found, Norwegian ticks so the statistics show it was a good month!

The absolute highlight was initially a frustrating experience when on the 9^th I found a brick red wader sleeping with a small group of Ruff distantly at Årnestangen. It took me an hour to be confident that it was a Dowitcher and then even more time before it called allowing me to call it as a Long-billed (the default of the two species in Norway). Being a new species for Oslo and Akershus it was of course a popular bird with a number of people making the 3km walk before it then flew off but was later refound at Svellet which also allowed Svellet to regain some pride after having disappointed until then.

Frequent trips to Hedmark to see the GG Owls also revealed a singing (and probably another individual) Ortolan. This species has been in a long term decline towards what seems an unavoidable disappearance as a breeding bird in Norway but it still seems mighty odd that the Government announced in December that the species is “extinct” in Norway. With the successful breeding that I discovered in 2023 (and which had been missed by those paid to monitor the species), 2 singing males in 2024 and 2 singing males in 2025 (plus others and not just me suspecting that one of the males had a companion) then it strikes me as being totally wrong to use the word «extinct» and actually shows a complete ignorance of the correct terminology among those who make decisions (but no nature interested person in Norway would be surprised by that). I am not trying to make light of the plight of Ortolan (and pretty much every other migrant species) but a species that still returns to sing and hold territory and which only two years ago was proved to breed cannot be described as extinct.

If Svellet was struggling to attract waders then surely none could be expected at Maridalsvannet but in the second half of the month the water levels fell enough that it became a magnet for the late returning  Temminck’s Stints with a huge count of 19 birds and with small number of other species I actually saw more individual waders at Maridalsvannet than at either Svellet or Årnestangen!

24^th May was a monster day at Fornebu with fjord gazing giving me Sandwich Tern (tick), loads of Red-throated Divers, Kittiwakes and hundreds of Pale-bellied Brent Geese.

I had a visit to the mountains at the end of the month with displaying Red-necked Phalaropes and Broad-billed Sandpipers as my reward but not a singe raptor or owl spoke for the rodent situation.

Oslo & Akershus's first ever Long-billed Dowitcher (langnebbbekkasinsnipe)

One of remnants of Norway's breeding population of Ortolan Buntings

my first ever Norwegian Sandwich Tern (splitterne) was the highlight of a good day on the fjord at Fornebu

Great Grey Owl feeding time

female Red-necked Phalarope (svømmesnipe) in the mountains right at the end of the month

a pair of Garganey (knekkand) that turned up at Østensjøvannet looked like they would nest but vanished as abruptly as they appeared

one of the adults from the two pairs of Long-eared Owls (hornugle) I had been following since April

and one of the broods

June

The beginning of the month saw quite an arrival of Terns at Maridalsvannet with both Common and Arctic exploiting an abundant hatch of aquatic flying insects. Upto 8 Arctic and 4 Common is a new high but the last few years have seen more and more June records of Terns here. And Svellet kind of redeemed itself with a pair of Little Terns.

June is not complete without a visit to Beitostølen and Valdresflya. Worryingly my Great Snipe lek was quiet for the second year running but other species such as Dotterel were on fine fettle.

Breeding Hobbies and Honey Buzzards received attention that would only increase as the summer wore on.

The start of the summer holidays at Hulvik resulted in my second Sandwich Tern of the year (and ever in Norway) plus a self-found Caspian both seen from the patio whilst drinking coffee and nighttime outings revealed good numbers of Nightjars which is species definitely on the increase in Norway.

On the owl front I had a couple more visits to the Great Greys and could see the young out of the nest and in Maridalen a Tawny Owl family was great value.

a distinctive 3cy Arctic Tern (rødnebbterne) that hung around at Maridalsvannet for a few days

singing Lapland Bunting (lappspurv) in the mountains

female Dotterel (boltit)

young Tawny Owls (kattugle) in Maridalen

and one of the young GGO at my nest site

seawatching in style although the view is rather restricted

but Caspian Tern (rovterne) was not just seen but documented!