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Conference Birding - Spring interrupted in Helsinki 6-10 April 2019 (1 Viewer)

MKinHK

Mike Kilburn
Hong Kong
Another airport conference brought me to Helsinki at what should have been a prime time for spring migration, but a brief resurgence of winter had put everything on hold. Having never birded in Northern Europe I was excited to visit and then somewhat disappointed to learn that most of the specialities of the region are hard to find or entirely absent near Helsinki.

As usual I was keen to make the best of whatever time was available and early on Wednesday morning I caught the excellent Helsinki bus to Viikki, a wetland reserve thirty minutes NW from the main train station. Viikki is one of the many inlets into and around Helsinki, which is covered by extensive reedbeds, several islets, including one that holds a Grey Heron nesting colony and some stands of marshy birch forest.

Even before getting to the reserve proper I was distracted by my first common European birds – Wood Pigeon, Great Tit, Blue Tit, House Sparrow, a very tame European Blackbird and a wonderful Fieldfare – an impressively large thrush with a brown wings, grey head and tail and black-spotted flanks and breast. Best of the lot were a pair of Goosanders fishing in the turmoil of foamy water where a river flowed into the sea. I’ve never seen Goosander this close-to, so watching them initially from 30 metres and eventually within ten metres as they bobbed and dived was just terrific.

Other bits and pieces included Common and Herring Gulls and few Mallards on the edge of the water, but much more interesting was a meadow right by the car park that was carpeted with over 100 Redwings and 20-odd Fieldfares and a flock of 60 or so Siskins which dropped in and out of a flowering alder. All common birds for European birders, but definitely not for me as a Hong Kong based birder.

A chilly walk out through the reedbeds was beautiful, but did not deliver much until a European Robin popped up, a Hooded Crow was sat on a wooden viewing platform, and a pair of Northern Lapwings were displaying over a newly cut reedbed. Every so often a bitingly cold whisper of north wind would scythe through – not strong, but bladed with razor-sharp icicles that made my ears burn with cold. A viewing platform on the edge of an island with an old monastery and lots of wooden summer houses was even colder, but did give me views over the water, revealing the first of several Goldeneyes, a couple of distant pairs of Mute Swans, several Great Cormorants, an even more distant Greylag Goose – identifiable by its solidly orange bill, a few Tufted Ducks and a very chilly-looking Pied Wagtail.

Cheers
Mike
 

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Thanks Jeff - Blackbirds are super abundant in Europe, but they are distinctively different from the larger and less melodious Chinese Blackbird that we get in Hong Kong, so I was well pleased with this shot!

back to Helsinki . . .

With time running out, and stopping only for a delightfully friendly Red Squirrel, and an extraordinarily moustached gas tank, I zipped back through the reedbeds and walked north along the edge until I unexpectedly found a bunch of feeders – and less surprisingly a range of passerines in attendance. These included some House Sparrows, Blue Tit and Great Tit, but more interesting were a fine male Reed Bunting and best of all five wonderful Mealy Redpolls, kindly identified from my photos by Redpoll aficionado, Chris van Rijswijk.

Having seen a pale rump on the obviously male bird in the flock I wondered about Arctic Redpoll, but since these were effectively the first birds I’d seen I was happy to bow to Chris’s far superior experience - see his excellent illustrated article on redpoll identification here: as I haven’t seen one since barely registering a distant speck on a snag in my first ever bird race – in Dorset in 1985!

The next morning I did wake up early enough to get going but when I looked out the window three larger birds flying towards me turned out to be an immature Herring Gull and a Hooded Crow seeing off a long-tailed, broad-winged Northern Goshawk! Amazingly this is my second Goshawk in a capital city in four months – after seeing one over the Imperial Palace in Tokyo in early January. Its always nice to have indolence rewarded!

Cheers
Mike
 

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A second visit to Viikki the next morning delivered an outrageous tart’s tick. It turns out that despite spending my first ten years birding in the UK I had never seen a genuinely wild Barnacle Goose. I owe my tick to my ignorance of the different calls of Blue Tit. A singing bird had me crossing the road where I got off the bus and as I found the Blue Tit I found a small group of fourteen Barnacle Geese feeding peaceably among the emergent vegetation on the ice-lined riverbank. Backlit by the rising sun their eddies produced beautiful monochrome patterns on the water, making this the defining moment of the trip.

This visit was otherwise rather quiet – and blessedly warmer with some bright sunshine and no sign of the – with no sign of the Redpolls, or the flocks of Fieldfares, Redwings and Siskins, nor much else from the reedbeds, although I did see both Fieldfare and Redwing singing from tall trees and clearly holding territory. A long-eared European Hare added a second mammal to the brilliant Red Squirrel of the day before.

On my last morning Mikko, my counterpart at Helsinki airport, very kindly arranged for his son to take me to Porkkala, an unexpectedly beautiful forested headland surrounded by shallow waters and small islets to the southwest of Helsinki, which is renowned as a migration watchpoint. Thankfully the cold weather held off, but not enough that migrants had started arriving in significant numbers. We did nonetheless see dozens of Common Eiders and Long-tailed Ducks and several Goldeneye in pristine breeding plumage wherever we looked over the sea, and as we left the end of the peninsula I picked up a flock of thirty-odd Common Cranes circling above the next stretch of land to the west. Passerine migrants were represented by a solitary alba White Wagtail. Despite the rather limited return this place has obvious potential – according to eBird it had King Eider two weeks before my visit and real knife twister - two Steller’s Eiders last Sunday!

Despite the relatively lower numbers I was pleased to find a trio of Taiga Bean Geese and two pairs of Common Cranes close to the road, and the same area also produced a single Roe Deer as we drove in and half-a-dozen larger White-tailed Deer as we headed back to the airport for my flight home to Hong Kong.

Cheers
Mike
 

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Good stuff Mike and thanks for the education - I had no idea there was an introduced population of White-tailed Deer in Finland and your report prompted me to do a little reading-up on them.
 
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