Cute and fluffy, but the "wrong" kind!

Last sunday I recieved an e-mail from Roland Seitre, a french nature photographer, naturalist and vet. He was coming up to Svalbard the same day, and he asked me if I could help him to find interesting wildlife. In particular he wanted to see the Arctic Fox, since that was one of the favourite animals of his daughter, who had joined him for this trip.

I met up with them when I was done at work, and we headed out to look for the wlidlife that is here at the time. Conditions are very slow here at the moment, but I was hoping to find something of interest at least. Roland had managed to get some pictures of the Svalbard Ptarmigan before we met up, but now he wanted to find something else. We drove around and did not find much else than Svalbard Reindeer. so even though the foxes did not show this day, at least we both got to fill our lenses with some rather cute fur-balls. The Svalbard Reindeer has to be my favourite deer (hjortedyr). The short legs, the broad and short head and the general fat appearence just make them wonderful. When you add in a generally dozile behaviour, you have a winner to me! I am posting a few of the photos I took underneath, and I hope that you will see what I mean about this wonderful animal!

Family happiness

Sun, snow and the superb Arctic!

As a little treat for her birthday, I took one of my colleagues for a little snowmobile-trip today. She is up here to work for a month, and had never been on a glacier before, so my task was simple: give her a true Arctic winter experience! The sun was shining from teh purest blue sky, and it was reflected from teh tall, snow-covered mountains surrounding us. Even up here, next door to the North Pole, the sun has now started to give of its warmth through its rays, and I actually became quite warm driving on the snowmobile today. We were out for almost three hours, and she was extatic about the scenery all the time. That is a really good responce when you try to show youre "backyard" from its best side. I did not take too many pictures due to the fact that I did not find the inspiration to photgraph the things I have photographed so many times before. But hoprfully I will find some nice frames to put on my memorycards.



From the glacier, overlooking Fardalen

Janne enjoying the snow-covered landscape

The view from my flat tonight

Sunsets will soon be gone, but this is what it looked like tonight!

Probable "Viking" Gull yesterday and another cr-gull today!

After having looked over the pictures of the mystery gull from yesterday, I have come to the conclusion that this is probably a "Viking" Gull, a hybrid between Herring Gull (Gråmåke) and Glaucous Gull (Polarmåke). It has been difficult to find photos of adult Viking Gulls, and of the ones that I could find none looked too much like mine. I think it is probably a second or third generation hybrid, where the original hybrid has bred with a Herring Gull, and possibly an offspring from this has bred again with another Herring Gull. The bird appeared to me as a typical Herring Gull to begin with, but when I got to see the wingtips better, there was several things that didnt fit the blueprint. The pattern both above kind of resembles that of Thayer's Gull (Eskimomåke), but pale oinkish legs and the body-shape excludes this species which should be more similar to Iceland Gull (Grønlandsmåke). Closeups of the head also show a typical Herring Gull head. Due to this, and the limited amount of black above and below the wing, along with a brownish color on the pattern on teh underwing leads me in the direction of Glaucous-genes. Although this one looks nothing like any of the individuals of this hybrid that I have seen before, or can find online, I feel pretty sure that this is how it has to have arrived into this world. I ahve also gotten this backed up by other birders. Ill paste one of the pictures into this blog as well just to illustrate my points.



Probable Viking Gull, note limited black markings on upper side of wing, and brownish tone to the faint markings on the underwing. Head, body and bill just like Herring Gull.

Today I got to see the third cr-ringed Glaucous Gull of the season. Earlier I have seen one of the ones I ringed last year, nad one that was ringed in another project here in 2007, where I am now in gharge. The one I saw today was one of mine from last year. Black with white JX021 was ringed august 22nd last year at the tip, and was seen two more times last year just where I saw it today. It was already paired up with another gull, so hopefully it will produce small balls of fluff in not too long.

Since I cant get enough of looking at these huge gulls, I keep photographing them whenever I am around them. To see such big birds playing in the air just a few metres away makes me smile, even though I cant really explain why. I wish everybody could experience more than ten white-winged gulls lfying around their head at one time to experience it. Well, enough about that, here are some of todays pictures:



Coming in to land.........



Am I able to walk on the surface?



Oooops!



Well, at least I can float on the surface!



Very feminine Glaucous Gull, it kind of resembled an Iceland Gull in the distance, but its probably just a female Glaucous.

1st of April, but no fooling!

It is so nice that the gulls are back in numbers again, even though the numbers are small still. Today I had 13 Glaucous Gulls (Polarmåke) feeding on bread in front of me, in addition to a subadult Iceland Gull (Grønlandsmåke) and a strange-looking Herring Gull (Gråmåke). I am not sure of the true nature of the species of this "Herring Gull". It felt like a HG when it was flying, but the markings both above and below the wings were very small. The markings on top of the wings consisted of very little black, with large white mirrors, and some long black tongues where I expected to see pure black. The markings on the underwing were very faint, almost pale brown and not covering a large part of the normal area. This led mythoughts into a possible hybrid glaucous x herring. I have seen a few such hybrids before, but none of them have shown a pattern similar to this. While trying to figure out the nature of this bird I came across a few pictures that fitted pretty well, but I still have my doubts about it. These pictures were of Thayer's Gull (Eskimomåke). I feel that this gull may be too large for a Thayers, but I am not the one to come with proper suggestions on this gull. If there is one thing I have learned about gulls, and Herring Gulls in particular, it has to be that gulls vary so much that you can seldom be too certain if youre not an expert. And I am clearly not one! I have allready asked a couple of people about comments regarding this gull, but feel free to comment if you have a good idea of what it is that I have seen.

Pictures of the subadult Iceland Gull:

Pictures of the difficult "Herring Gull":

Pictures of the lovely but brutal Glaucous Gulls:

March 27th 2012

I got a request after my last blog-post ofputting on some bird photos again, and here they are! These are far from my best photos ever, and it might not be the most spectacular species. But it is a species I like very much, and I have met this specific bird before! I am trying to see how the Glaucous Gulls (Polarmåke) react to being fed with bread up here, with the catching of gulls later in teh season in mind. And when a gull flew past me I threw out some pieces of bread, and within minutes I had three adult Glaucous Gulls feeding in front of me. The bird I catured with my camera is one of teh birds I ringed last year! It is now called JX017, and is the female from the pair that chased all other gulls away from my trap last year. It si the first gull-ring that has been read on Svalbard this year, but there will be many more when the birds just finally turn up in numbers.

JX017 landing for a meal of bread!

More fur than feathers!

As the winter now have turned bright and sunny once again, I wont let an opportunity to explore the wilderness go away. Many perople pay lots of money to see what I have got just outside my front door, and during the weekend I have once again gotten the feeling that I must have saved many millions in just living here, instead of needing to travel up here just to see it!

But no matter how wonderful the landscape is now when the sun has come over the mountains, I am still missing the birds. And todays little trip in the car managed to produce three adult Glaucous Gulls (Polarmåke). All of which were distant views. But somewhat more cooperative were the Svalbard Reindeer (Svalbard reinsdyr). These are very dosile and nice animals, and unfortunately some of them were infected by rabies last year. These three individuals on the other hand seemed to be fine, and they were just relaxing in the sun when I came driving by. I walked out of the car just tenmetres away from tehm, and they figured that I was not worth more than just lifting their heads before they went back to sleep. It is the real Svalbard-spirit: " Dont rush it, everything will happen when it is time for it to happen!" I just love these animals!

They are coming back!

Finally, over the last week, I have started to see some Glaucous Gulls (Polarmåke) again. The largest group was of ten birds, but now they can just bring in theire friends so that I can look for more rare gulls in between them. A nice surprise was that I found an adult Iceland Gull (Grønlandsmåke) flying together with a Glaucous. So now Im hoping that the invasion of IG to Western Europe can bring some of these gulls up here. And who knows, maybe there can be a Kumlien's or Thayer's Gull in amongst the birds coming up here?

1st of March

Finally I am back blogging, and my cameras are out of hibernation! Due to some problems with the D300S I had to use the backup-camera, my D200, for these pictures. But hopefully the new camera is working properly again soon.

The sun has finally come above the horizon here at 78 degrees north, and the motives are way too many to decide on one single motive. But I will try to upload new photos here as often as possible, and show you out there what a truly beautiful place I live at. Also in this blog I have put in a photo of two out of the four Svalbard Ptarmigans I came across in the middle of town. To me, they beat gulls, pigeons and blackbirds as in-town-birds any day!



A new year, new birds to see and new birds to ring.

Happy new year to all of you out there!
2011 was a year when I managed to see a lot of nice birds in different places, and when I got to have my hands on many nice birds as well.

Favourite birds of the year have to be the Iceland Gulls (Grønlandsmåke) I have found up here in Longyearbyen. The gentle appearance, and the soft coloration together with the puppy-eyes have made me like this gull very much. Other than this it has been very good to add more passerines to my Svalbard-list, and the final count of the year was 55 species in 2011, and 68 species in total.

Iceland Gull/Grønlandsmåke, presumable male

I also had the pleasure of traveling a bit in the year that is over, and spectacularly colorful birds in the Andaman Islands was a very nice opposite to the mainly black, white, grey and brown birds that I am used to from up here, and I even got to add a few birds to my UK-list.

Asian Fairy Bluebird/Blåalvefugl, male

This years ringing-season did not go as I wanted it to do, but the result is still quite good I think. I got to ring several Glaucous Gulls (Polarmåke) when I managed to crack the code on how to catch them, and the Purple Sandpipers (Fjæreplytt) and Dunlins (Myrsnipe) responded well to our catching-attempts. Even a few Snow buntings (Snøspurv) got nice shining rings on their feet here at 78 degrees north.

Glaucous Gull/Polarmåke, 3cy, the only young GG to get a ring this year.

As a result of the ringing that the group has done up here, we have gathered some very interesting data on the birds, and there are many reports coming back from our flag-tagged birds from their wintering grounds. Through a friend in England I even managed to get the BTO and Birdguides to post a report on our birds, and how they were to be reported back to the head of the team. http://www.birdguides.com/webzine/article.asp?a=3017

I hope that the year to come will be an eventfull one, and if anybody are planning on looking for birds here in Svalbard you are more than welcome to contact me for advice on where to look for the different species that are the specialities up here.