A day at the gee gees

In England going to the gee gees means going to the horse races. In the birding world we also have gee gees or GGs aka birds beginning with Great Grey which in Norway means Owl and Shrike.

 

This winter has seen no movements of Great Grey and Hawk Owls into southern Norway with birds seemingly staying in their breeding areas where there are clearly plenty of rodents there and therefore no need to go on a wander to find better feeding areas. From what I understand the rodent situation is so good in GG breeding areas that they are primarily hunting within the forest and at night so even there are not particularly easy to see even if there are (relatively) lots of them.

That one should turn up away from breeding areas and in a relatively small area of woodland is therefore surprising but a drip of pictures on Facebook that then turned into a bubbling brook before morphing into a raging torrent showed that there was a bird in Østfold near Fredrikstad. There was clearly an attempt at secrecy for the birds sake but as my own experiences in Maridalen a few years ago taught me secrecy is not possible as soon as a couple of other people know and especially if the pull of Social Media is too strong to resist (which it wasn’t for me that time).

I had made an attempt to see the bird on Monday when a shopping trip to Sweden with Jr only involved a 10 minute detour to see the bird. A few likely looking older men in camouflage clothing and attempting to hide cameras showed I was in the right spot but an attempt to find out if they had seen the bird was met with answers suggesting they didn’t know what I was talking about until one of them recognised me and realised it would be a bit silly to try to deny the obvious. The bird had been seen earlier but had disappeared and I therefore decided to continue on the shopping trip and try again at dusk on the way home. This did not reveal the bird in rather wet conditions but a check of the weather forecast showed that Wednesday would be a bright, sunny and windless day in another wise dull week so a plan was hatched.

I have made a long given promise that I would show a Maridalen regular a Great Grey Owl if I ever saw one so I asked him if he wanted to join me and unsurprisingly he did not need asking twice. We left Oslo at 0800 with sunrise at 0915 and arrived just after that mysterious and seldom seen golden orb had risen over the horizon. We met another Maridalen regular and after promising to call each other when/if we found the bird went searching for it. After two hours all we had found was a Great Grey Shrike which is a very good bird but not quite as Great as its namesake that we were hoping to see. We kept on searching though and on returning to the road met a togger who told us that even though he hadn’t seen it that it had apparently been seen by others flying in “that direction” (he pointed). So we continued walking in that direction and after adding a few more thousand steps to our tally we saw some green clad men (and a woman) pointing big lenses at something and there it was. The Maridalen regular was there too but hadn’t been kind enough to send us the message he had unprompted earlier promised to send. Apparantly he “hadn’t been allowed”…. I do not know who was policing the viewing but the steady stream of other toggers that were turning up showed that there were clearly different rules for different people.

We were able to view the bird well but it was quite distant and no one tried to get any closer - it was quite refreshing to see such self control. The bird was cleary just enjoying the sun and preening every now and again before it dived down at something and was then mostly hidden from us but was clearly in hunt mode.

So a double Gee Gee day - what a great way to finish the birding year!

Gee

Gees

Great Grey Owl (lappugle)

here obscured by branches as it hunts low down

Great Grey Shrike (varsler)