Birding starts with an ... owl

I knew something was planned for the evening of Friday, May 23rd, the first official start of the trip but I didn't remember the details. Thankfully, the hotel staff did.  We were meeting our field guides and the rest of the group in the lobby of the hotel at 4:00 pm and would be going out for a special bird.

Nigel Redman with Rockjumper Birding Tours and Antero (Anttu) Topp with Finnature would be our guides for the next 13 days.  It was important to go out for this special bird because there was concern that it would not be present if we waited.  What was the special bird?  We would have to see it.

At a place named Haukipudas, we walked about about a 1/2 mile (about 800m) into the forest and turned into a small, narrow, overgrown path and this is how I was greeted by my very first ever Boreal Owl (Aegolius funereus); in Finland known as the Tengmalm's Owl.  

The reason for the first night's urgency was secondary to concern that the owlets would fledge and we would miss this opportunity.

Kind of grumpy looking but a truly spectacular owl; I have wanted to see a Boreal Owl for a long time and considered that I might not ever see it.  This was a thrill.

We all stood around taking photos and moved around for different angles.  I took about 20 and selected the four here to include in this post.  Eventually we got distracted by other things - for one, a singing (Eurasian) Treecreeper (Certhia familiaris) cousin to our Brown Creeper (C. americana).  We stayed for about twenty minutes, but it was past time to leave this bird alone.  On the final day of the trip, at Nigel's request, we each turned in a list with the top five birds we had seen.  I put this Boreal Owl in my number three spot.  

 Good night!

Evening birding was not yet over.  We drove to an area of heavy industry which is named Oulu-Oritkari on our eBird checklist.  Here massive trucks and other large vehicles were parked.  The vehicles and parking areas were interspersed with those large metal buildings that are common in industrialized areas.  Our next bird is the story of urban area habitat destruction and of a couple of nesting pairs of Terek Sandpipers that hold on in this location.  We all saw good scoped views of a single Terek Sandpiper (Xenus cinereus), upturned bill included, perched on the distant edge of the roof of one of the industrial buildings.  Anttu told the story of the Terek's original attraction to this, now destroyed, breeding habitat that involved a snow melt pond, but even if I remembered the story accurately, it would be too much to tell here.  Additionally, I'm not sure the details of the story matter.  We all know what habitat destruction of many kinds looks like.  The 2009 2nd edition Birds of Europe guide shows a small orange dot to represent that this mostly Siberian shorebird breeder hangs on in Finland (page 154-155).  In 2025 it's still hanging on. 

There was no way our guides could tell us distance in miles. Throughout the trip I found myself mentally converting meters to miles using 400m for 1/4 mile, 800m for 1/2 mile, 1600m for 1 mile, etc.  Over the days I finally became accustomed to meters and conversion was not needed.         

We returned to the hotel for our first dinner as a group and it was excellent.  Arctic char perfectly prepared!  

Milestone:  Fitting that my Finland and Norway trip would help me reach a milestone on my blog.  "Birding starts with an ... owl" was my 600th blog post since I began it in 2008.  Sometimes I look back to the entries of my early years and think about how much it has evolved.  For me learning to write a blog has been an acquired skill.  After my first India trip (2020) and the pandemic halted everything, I wrote that I was shutting it down.  Then something happened and I started it back up again.  If I, or anyone, started a Google blog today, it would not look like this.  This is the most basic of Google blog formats out there.  I have never learned how to transition to one of Googles updated blogging formats. I'm not sure it would matter anyway.  For my purposes, this has served me well over the past, shocking to think of it, 17 years!  I hope readers also enjoy my chosen topics, photos and writing style.  Like the Terek Sandpiper, my blog somehow continues to hang on.