The Arctic Birder: May 3rd

tirsdag 3. mai 2011

May 3rd

Oh what an evening this turned out to be! The day started out grey and rainy, and the poor weather continued during the day. But when I decided to head out to do some birdwatching it had changed from rain to light snow. When I started to drive towards Hotellneset and Vestpynten I was hoping that the mild weather had brought with it some migrants or other interesting birds. While driving through the puddles and the holes in the road I was dreaming of beauties as Ross' Gull (Rosenmåke) and Spectacled Eider (Brilleærfugl). But dont worry, none of them appeared! I was also hoping to maybe see the Golden Plover (Heilo) that I saw briefly some days ago, and this one did show up! A beautiful adult male of the race 'altifrons', "Northern" Golden Plover. I first took a few record shots of it through the window on the passenger side, but was crossing my fingers that it would stay in the area when I returned with the driver-side towards the bird for better pictures. Going back I stopped briefly for a record shot of a pair of King Eiders (Praktærfugl) that were sleeping on the sea, and started scanning for the plover. When I had given up on finding it in this location, I became aware of a movement twenty meters from the car. There it was! I drove fifteen meters along the road, and it stayed where it was! During the next fifteen minutes I took probably 200 pictures of the bird when it fed about ten to fifteen meters from the car. I was very happy when I drove towards town, and it was just on pure habit that I stopped to check an apparent Glaucous Gull (Polarmåle) for color ring, and I had to look twice to make sure that my impression was correct. This had to be a Iceland Gull (Grønlandsmåke)! Or.....? The bird flew off when I had just gotten a couple of record shots of it, and the pictures seemed to head towards Iceland, but it had to be a big male if it was. I looked towards where the bird flew, and I managed to see where it sat down, and there was another gull sat next to it that made me even more certain of the species. I reversed the car very slowly so that I could get alongside the two, and incredibly enough....they stayed! I shifted between photographing both of them, and checked the pictures. This was something I had wanted to see since last summer! I was sitting twenty meters from a pair of Iceland Gulls! They were calling to each other, and were obviously a couple. With any luck I will find them in a few months on nest with eggs or chicks. My new camera really got to test itself now! Snow in the air, snow on the ground, poor light and very light-colored birds. I can highly recomend the Nikon D300s after this day! At an ISO-value of 1250 it took good pictures! I hope that you who read this will enjoy the pictures almost as much as I enjoyed taking them.