The last week as a Tromsø citizen.

My last week as a citizen of Tromsø I spent travelling around in Troms looking at birds and doing fieldwork for the project TOV-E, a terrestrial bird-population surveilance project. The county of Troms has got lots of nice bird-localities, but not many are using them nearly as much as they deserve. Friday the 12th of june I went to do fieldwork on the island Senja, and on the way there I saw a male garganey and two male and a female gadwall on the way south from Tromsø, these birds are rare up here in the north so I was very pleased with my sightings.

When we finally arrived at the location of the fieldwork we put up the tent, and I put Lisa, my girlfriend, in the tent and headed of to count birds. This was her first ever overnight out in the wild in a tent, so I was quite interested in how it would go. And when I arrived back at the tent seven hours later she complained about the absence of comfort sleeping on the ground in a sleepingbag, and the scary sheep that surrounded the tent during the night (they had bells on! -note from Lisa). But i'm kind of proud of her for having spent her first ever night in a tent outside a camping-site.

On the way back home I saw an osprey when driving through Finnsnes, and this is the first sighting I have had of this species in Troms.

Throughout the week I got to see around 90 species of birds around in the county. In addition to the species already metioned I can add some of the ones that I find interesting: one adult male smew, several pairs and singing males of slavonian grebes, two pairs of ring ouzels, male wood warbler, three male mistle thrush, and 15 male lapland longspur, all on possible breeding grounds.

Lapland longspur male in Gapherus, Nordreisa

Ring ouzel male at Oksen, Lyngen.

Slavonian grebe in the last rays of sunlight.

The beginning of my blog

Hei!

Many people are wondering of what I really do all the time up here in the North, and in this blog I will try to show at least some of the things I do up here. For others that do not know where I am from, I am from a little town in the south of Norway called Mandal. Except for the five first years of my life, when I lived in a little village in northern Troms called Burfjord, together with my parents and oldest sister, I grew up in Mandal and lived there until I moved to Tromsø when I was 20 years old. Now I have spendt five years up here, and have now finished my education and have got the degree of Master of Science in Northern Populations and Ecosystems. And throughout all of the five years of studying my fellow students have had the habit of calling me a bird-geek. And my ending of the studies was just a confirmation of their nick on me, when the last thing I did was to present and defend my masters thesis: "Food resources of an overwintering population pf Purple Sandpipers (Calidris maritima) in Sørkjosleira Naturereserve, Northern Norway."

Now that I have got my degree I feel like I have done my things in Tromsø, and was pleased when my girlfriend asked me to move up to Svalbard with her. So, as I am writing this, I have got only two days left as a citicen of Tromsø. But I have learned a lot here, and I have got to know a lot of different people. So from now on I will try to keep this blog updated on the different trips I have in field looking at birds and other things. It will be nice to get up to Longyearbyen and try out a new place on Earth.