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For the birds
Jul. 16th, 2009 04:01 pmWhen we told people we were planning a holiday in Iceland, we'd get one of two reactions. Either they'd say "Why?" or they'd already been themselves, and told us we'd love it. Only one person had considered Iceland as a destination and decided against it, and that was T., who is a serious birder: Iceland doesn't have very interesting birds, it seems - which means, I think, that the birds you can see in Iceland can also be seen elsewhere.
No doubt that's true, for the dedicated twitcher, but amateurs like us are finding it amazingly easy to see a variety of birds from closer up than we are accustomed to. Sometimes it's a bit too close up:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
durham_rambler threatens to print up a bumper sticker reading "WE BRAKE FOR OYSTER CATCHERS", we've had to do it so often.
Plenty of other birds seem to enjoy the attention: there was the one (it might have been a redwing, but don't quote me on that) who was perched on the Speaker's Mound waiting for us at Þingvellir, which flew along ahead of us for several hundred yards, waiting for us to catch up when we lagged behind. Or any number of - well, it seems they aren't curlews at all, they're whimbrels ("woken by whimbrels" says my notebook), but they are very similar. There were the pair in Vik which sat on adjacent lamp posts shouting at each other; and the golden plover at the foot of the pass to Brundavik, which posed on a stone just above the path, and whistled to make sure the papparazzi were doing their job.
The arctic terns and the great skuas are more relaxed than I'm used to. I think of them as birds who try to drive away anyone who comes within a hundred yards of their nests, but either we've caught them at a different point in the season, or their nests are more secure, but either way we've been able to watch them going about their business without being molested. This evening for the first time we were swooped on by a rattling gang of arctic terns - we backed off hastily.
We even visited a viewpoint at Hafnarhólmi, in the north east, where a couple of garden chairs were positioned so that you could sit in the last of the evening sun and watch the puffins coming and going at the top of the cliff, and the gulls and their chicks down below: seedurham_rambler's picture for evidence that, in defiance of all the laws of nature, these were cute gulls.
Further than that I can't identify them; there were helpful notice boards, but they were too full of pictures of puffins being adorable to find space for a simple tutorial in gulls 101 (though given which gulls feature in other information sources, I'd guess at kittiwakes). Do you detect a note of bitterness here? Well, picture me as someone whose favourite cult band have just had a chart success: Iceland is puffin crazy, and they appear everywhere, from tea towels to knitted bonnets. Every supermarket (well, every one that I've been in) has a basket of fluffy puffins. I remain besotted, but a little defensive too.
At least I haven't yet been offered the opportunity to eat one; though the restaurant where we could have had lunch but didn't was offering guillemot.
No doubt that's true, for the dedicated twitcher, but amateurs like us are finding it amazingly easy to see a variety of birds from closer up than we are accustomed to. Sometimes it's a bit too close up:
durham_rambler threatens to print up a bumper sticker reading "WE BRAKE FOR OYSTER CATCHERS", we've had to do it so often. Plenty of other birds seem to enjoy the attention: there was the one (it might have been a redwing, but don't quote me on that) who was perched on the Speaker's Mound waiting for us at Þingvellir, which flew along ahead of us for several hundred yards, waiting for us to catch up when we lagged behind. Or any number of - well, it seems they aren't curlews at all, they're whimbrels ("woken by whimbrels" says my notebook), but they are very similar. There were the pair in Vik which sat on adjacent lamp posts shouting at each other; and the golden plover at the foot of the pass to Brundavik, which posed on a stone just above the path, and whistled to make sure the papparazzi were doing their job.
The arctic terns and the great skuas are more relaxed than I'm used to. I think of them as birds who try to drive away anyone who comes within a hundred yards of their nests, but either we've caught them at a different point in the season, or their nests are more secure, but either way we've been able to watch them going about their business without being molested. This evening for the first time we were swooped on by a rattling gang of arctic terns - we backed off hastily.
We even visited a viewpoint at Hafnarhólmi, in the north east, where a couple of garden chairs were positioned so that you could sit in the last of the evening sun and watch the puffins coming and going at the top of the cliff, and the gulls and their chicks down below: see
durham_rambler's picture for evidence that, in defiance of all the laws of nature, these were cute gulls.Further than that I can't identify them; there were helpful notice boards, but they were too full of pictures of puffins being adorable to find space for a simple tutorial in gulls 101 (though given which gulls feature in other information sources, I'd guess at kittiwakes). Do you detect a note of bitterness here? Well, picture me as someone whose favourite cult band have just had a chart success: Iceland is puffin crazy, and they appear everywhere, from tea towels to knitted bonnets. Every supermarket (well, every one that I've been in) has a basket of fluffy puffins. I remain besotted, but a little defensive too.
At least I haven't yet been offered the opportunity to eat one; though the restaurant where we could have had lunch but didn't was offering guillemot.
