Walrus!

 A quick post from Oslo before our summer holiday continues to the mountains.

Yet again this will be a post devoid of birds although I have visited Maridalen where I could see that the water levels have risen a lot although there is still some mud and the hope of a Dunlin lives on 😊 I saw a couple of fully grown juvenile Little Ringed Plovers but only a single Lapwing suggesting that the rest of the breeding population has already started its autumn migration.

Last summer I spent time looking for hairstreak butterflies in my local neighbourhood in Oslo and a quick check on Sunday revealed a White-letter Hairstreak in a new elm tree and also my best pictures so far although it wasn’t difficult to beat last years efforts.

Yesterday we visited a marina in town where a walrus has taken up residence! This animal, a young female, has been touring the North Sea for a while and her movements are being plotted on this map. She may well be trying to return to cold northern waters now although Oslo is a dead end and it will be interesting to see if she manages to reorientate and go south again and around the southern tip of Norway (another walrus in the Baltic Sea at the moment show what will happen if she heads south and then east…)

"Freya" the walrus is apparently a young female and only has small tusks

she came very close to boats

I am having some PC problems and cannot edit videos at the moment so these 3 films are unedited files but give a good feeling of how exciting it was to watch the walrus. You hear my sound track and that of those around me. At the end of the third video I zoom out to show where it was.

White-letter Hairstreak (almestjertvinge)