Finland and Norway - Summer 2007

Martí Rodríguez (rodri.mrf AT gmail.com)

Martí Rodríguez is 19 years old and lives in Vic, in the northeast of Spain. You can find more of his work and his birding in his blog. “This July I was on a birding trip around Finland and Norway with two friends, Guille Rodríguez and Dani L.Velasco. We were looking for all the specialities, and we found most of them! In three weeks we managed to see more than 200 species including Lanceolated, Booted and Arctic Warblers, Bluetail, Gyr Falcon, Steller’s and Spectacled Eiders, Surf Scoter, Ural and Pigmy Owls, Brünnich’s Guillemot… Maybe we will write a little trip report soon. Birding with other people is not the best time to sketch birds, but I always managed to find some time to draw and they were patient enough to let me sketch some good birds! Here there are some of the best sketches of the trip”:   Our trip began in Helsinki from where we then travelled north and were birding for a week. But it was in Varanger, Norway, when I started sketching more birds. There we had some Gyr Falcons near the road, like the young birds sketched here.   One day we decided to go to Hornoya island. It was really good going there, as it is something we will never see in Spain! I spent almost two hours sketching Puffins, Razorbills and Guillemots breeding in the cliffs, and also the Brünnich’s Guillemots shown above.   After Varanger we drove south and stopped in Oulu for two days. There had been a Steller’s Eider for some days, and while looking for some waders we eventually found it. It was quite a bit closer than the ones we saw in Varanger, so it was a good chance to take pics and sketch it.   I also sketched some commoner birds, such as these Arctic Terns. It was always interesting to see Arctic and Common Terns together and compare young and adult birds of the two species, as I only see Common Terns on the Mediterranean Coast!   Above there’s a collage of some of the gulls I sketched in several places; from top to bottom: two Kittiwakes near Vardo, a Common Gull in Kuusamo, and a Baltic Gull and three large gulls flying in Tampere’s dump.   And finally, a family of Great Spotted Woodpeckers. I know it isn’t a bird you are usually looking for in Finland, but a family of them feeding down to three meters on a feeder was a good opportunity to sketch them!