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)

APOLLO - one of another 2 new butterflies!

Yet another butterfly post but one that I have been wanting to write for a loooong time!

On our drive back from Bodø we stopped at the two butterfly localities that I had tried unsuccesfully on the way up. At the Thor’s Fritillary site it was not raining this time but it was not sunny either and there were no butterflies on the wing (but if you keep on reading you will see that was not to matter..)

At the Apollo butterfly site we clearly had both perfect weather and timing. We arrived at 11:30 with sun occasional cloud and little wind. There were a number of butterflies on the wing and it only took 5 minutes before I found a nectaring Apollo! Unfortunately it flew almost immediately and made its way up the cliff and soon out of sight but what a butterfly!! It was huge and seemed just to float through the air without flapping. I had to wait 20 minutes for another sighting which was brief but then just 5 minutes later (I believe it was the same individual each time) it appeared again and nectared long enough for me to get close and really enjoy it.

My time waiting for the Apollo was hardly dull though as my first ever Norwegian Hummingbird Hawkmoth was buzzing around coming really close at times and testing my photography reflexes to the max.

Now that I am home I have been able to look at some of the photos I took whilst at the cabin on the computer. I was particularly interested in looking at the photos I had managed to take of a fritillary at Sulitjelma (in fact the only fritillary I saw on my two visits there). When I saw it on marshy area amongst birch trees I was immediately struck by the unusual shape of its wings. It perched on a birch tree where I managed some long range photos of the upperwing and I then decided I would use the net I had been lugging around in my rucksack to capture it so I could see the underwing properly. Unfortunately I only managed to scare it off and it flew up through the trees and away. I didn’t think I had any photos showing the underwing and settled on it being a Bog Fritillary (myrperlemorvinge) although really I should have made no ID at all. Looking through my photos on the PC though I see that I did capture enough of the underwing which enables me, in addition to the upperwing pattern, to ID it as a Thor’s Fritillary so I managed to find one myself in a new area! This species is reported very rarely in Norway with a max of 4 observations in a year in the last decade. I clearly have discovered some good butterfly areas in Sulitjelma and it deserves a lot more attention.

So I am now up to 68 butterfly species in Norway 💪😀

Apollo butterfly - a wingspan of up to 9cm makes it larger than many birds!

here it looks to be laying eggs on a rock

and here in moss

hummingbird hawkmoth (dagsvermer) have arrived in large numbers in Norway this year

out of focus but look at the proboscis

I saw it perch only once but behind a stone

Thor's Fritillary (tors perlemorvinge). I have identified it due to the round short wings, the spots inside the forewings edge form a long thin line. From what we can see of the underwing it has a series of pale cells with dark edges and it is the form of these that I believe to be diagnostic. Of course I would like better pictures...

Summer holidays - heading south

Our summer holidays are far from over but part 2 at the cabin in Bodø is over and I am writing this whilst we are driving back south.

The time at the cabin ended with a new, and my 66th Norwegian species of, butterfly when I again visited the alpine habitats around Sulitjelma and found a species I have long wanted to see - Northern Couded Yellow, which is orange on the upperside and impossible to miss as it flutters over the tundra. It was also much more approachable than the Pale Arctic Clouded Yellow which I again found and despite it  quickly disappearing over the mountainside I manged OK pictures of it on the ground hiding in grass.

A quick stop on Saltfjellet as we crossed the Arctic Circle revealed the strange sight of 14 noisy Long-tailed Skuas and 2 Arctic Terns flying around high up seemingly catching flying insects.

Northern Clouded Yellow (mjeltgulvinge)

The undersidenwoth the sun shing through and showing the orsnge colours

The underside

A much better picture of a Pale Arctic Clouded Yellow (polargulvinge)

Golden Plover (heilo)

With the Blåmannsisen glacier in the background

Wigeon (brunnakke) duckling

Wigeon mum

Whooper Swan (samgsvane) family

6 Long-tailed Skuas (fjelljo)

Long-tailed Skua and Arctic Tern (rødnebbterne)

Female Bluethroat (blåstrupe) who clearly had young nearby

False musk orchid (fjellkurle)

habitat of Northern Clouded Yellow

Vanilla scented bog orchid (Fjellhvitkurle)

This balloon was floating over the cabin at 130,000 ft (39.6km) and is the size of a football stadium with an instrument to measure cosmic rays hanging under it. It was launched from Sweden by NASA. more info here  https://sites.wustl.edu/xlcal/home/

Two, yes 2, new butterflies

 I wrote in my last post that to see new butterflies in Norway I would have to make specific trips well that proved, and very quickly, to be wrong😊. Yesterday Mrs OB, the Beast and I (no chance of getting Jr and Jr Jr to accompany us) climbed a mountain. The missus chose where we went and it was in the mountains close to the Swedish border 61km east of the cabin where we would get to see the Blåmannsis glacier close up (we see it on the horizon from the cabin). I had hopes that we would see butterflies especially as it was sunny after a week of rain but I had no specific info on the area and anything I were to find would definitely go into the «stumbled upon» box.

I got a really good feeling when we got out of the car. We were at 650m alltitude (the tree line was about 500m and we were heading for a peak that was 1010m. We would be walking up a southern facing slope and there were flowers everywhere! Just by the car I found a new species of orchid in the form of 5 Coralroot (korslrot), a rather anonymous and small orchid, but an orchid none-the-less.

Butterflies however were not abundant. Dewy Ringlets (fjellringvinge) were the only butterfly I saw initially but then I saw some white butterflies and now it got interesting. Up here there is the chance of northern clouded yellow (mjeltgulvinge) and pale arctic clouded yellow (polargulvinge) but all the butterflies that stopped and allowed study were green-veined whites (rapssommerfugl) which as far as I am concerned shouldn’t be in such alpine habitat. 

As we climbed higher we kept coming across more and more flowers and there were bumblebees and the odd moth but no new butterflies.  Birds were also in very short supply but a Ptarmigan and a Snow Bunting felt like perfect species to encounter. After reaching the top we took a slightly different path back and passed a fantastic flower covered hillside at 900m. A butterfly flew up from the side of the track and thankfully landed close by. An alpine grizzled skipper (polarsmyger)!! Finally one of the special species I had been hoping for. I scanned and scanned the mountainside but only noticed a couple of Dewy Ringlets. I then rejoined my patient family and one last scan revealed a fast flying white butterfly which surely couldn’t be another g-v white. I literally ran after it and saw it landed at about 50m range. I fired off some shots including when it quickly flew off. Crap pictures but enough to show that as I had hoped it was a pale arctic clouded yellow!!! It couldn’t really get much better - 2 rarely recorded species stumbled upon. Next year I will try to give this area a proper grilling but on past form that will mean seeing nothing new😉

Alpine grizzled skipper (polarsmyger)

Pale arctic clouded yellow (polarsmyger)

It did land at 50m range but the pictures were useless

The flower covered mountainside at 900m

The blåmannsis glacier

Close up of the glacier - the white is ice not cloud

The glacier at 60km range

Ptarmigan (fjellrype)

Coral root (koralrot)

Dewy ringlet (fjellringvinge) - the commonest butterfly