Tundra birds

We saw many tundra birds and many ver and over.  We were in and out of the vans all day long.  Many of the birds we saw in the tundra landscape were birds not necessarily expected.  The photos below represent some of the expected.  

  

Long-tailed Skua (Jaeger) (Stercorarius longicaudus).  We say many times here and elsewhere.  We also saw Arctic Skua (Parasitic) (Stercorarius parasiticus) here and in a variety of other habitats.

Long-tailed Duck (Clangula hyemalis). 

We saw many Long-tailed Ducks, often in larger numbers, and I was hoping to hear them as described by Barry Lopez in his book Arctic Dreams*.  He wrote: " ... the haunting sound of oldsquaw in the ice, ahaalik, ahaalik ... " (page 404).   I remember reading this and going immediately to Merlin to see if this sound was in that app.  It was, and accurately described by Barry Lopez.  We discussed the duck's pejorative name oldsquaw and I was able to offer the eskimo origins for this name that I learned when reading Arctic Dreams.    

Eurasian Teal (Anas crecca)

Above and below:  Willow Ptarmigan (Lagopus lagopus)

Temminck's Stint (Calidris temminckii)

Reindeer way out on the tundra.

Above and eight below:  Rock Ptarmigan (Lagopus muta) for a good look.

Whooper Swans (Cygnus Cygnus).  There were five in this spot.

Whooper Swans were seen daily.  Curiously, even though it is a European bird, we saw only two Mute Swans (C. olor) on the whole trip.  This certainly would not be the case here; crazy to think how many we have now.

*Arctic Dreama, Copyright © 1986 Barry Holstun Lopez.  First Vintage Books Edition, October 2001.

Successful strategy

It was May 28th and we came here, to Inari--Saariselkä Kaunispää in Lapland, for one bird.  It was a bird everyone wanted to see.  We arrived at a large, tundra-like landscape and got out of the vans to begin our search.  It was cold, windy and raining.  We walked around for a while and then I heard one of our guys whistle.  He waved his arms.  "Hey you guys, we're being called."  I didn't know what he found, but I was the closest to the spot he was calling from and I took off.  As I got closer I slowed down.  It was too windy and rainy to shout over.  Suddenly, I saw what it was.  The Eurasian Dotteral (Eudromias morinellus).  Moss had stepped very near the nest and the bird popped up leaving three eggs exposed.  He took a photo of the eggs.  

This is how I first saw the bird.  I can't remember but I think the bird did vocalize.  He - it is a male bird - continued to distract those of us tromping over the tundra.  He was very close.  It had been banded by Finnature and it was the same bird that has been showing up here for at least a couple of years.  

We were all finishing with our photos and starting to leave.

Back on the nest!

I can't remember if it was Nigel or Anttu but one, or both of them, took turns explaining this bird's breeding strategy.  The female bird is somewhat more brightly colored.

The Eurasian Dotterel exhibits a polygynandrous breeding strategy, specifically with serial polyandry.   Female Eurasian Dotterels arrive at breeding grounds and establish mating territories, competing with other females for access to males. Females are polyandrous, mating with multiple males, while males typically incubate the eggs and care for the young. This means the female lays multiple clutches, usually of three eggs, with different males and the male is left to raise the chicks from each clutch.  Our bird was sitting on three eggs.  

There are many on-line site where you can read about the Eurasian Dotteral and its mating strategies.  I'm not a Birds of the World subscriber, but for those who are it's probably a satisfying deep dive.  eBird also has a good write-up with a good range map.  There are many others.  Nigel commented that Eurasian Dotterels have a very long migration.

A scientific paper (1983) by two Norwegian researchers, Breeding Chronology and Mating System of the Eurasian Dotteral (Charadrius morinellus) was published in The Auk, and is available for free from The Digital Commons at the University of South Florida.  The Dotterel's genus was also recently changed from Charadruis to Eudromias. 

The paper above suggests that the female Dotterel may remain in the same area and breed with another male.  However, both Nigel and Anttu suggested that the departed female Dotterels can travel quite far to their next breeding sites.  The male will stay behind to incubate and take care of his offspring.  I am guilty of anthropomorphism, not always but occasionally, when it's something that really appeals to me.  This was one of those things.  One of the trip members was a wildlife biologist who had done a lot of work with birds, although they were not her area of expertise.  We often sat together in the rear seat of the van.  I admitted to my anthropomorphism and commented how content the male Dotterel appeared on his nest.  Contentment is a human emotion.  But, she agreed with me and went further with other examples of how research is opening doors where we are beginning to understand anthropomorphism differently.  Specifically about our Dotterel - incubating his eggs is his whole goal in life.  It is well understood that birds have hard lives.  This bird had flown thousands of miles precisely to do what he was doing on the day we saw him.  They deserve some contentment which, in this case, is being a successful breeder.  I was worried that every birder in Finland would make a visit to see this Dotterel and his nest would fail.  But Anttu disagreed saying this Dotterel had been a successful breeder for the past couple of years.  Finnature will, apparently, monitor this.  Anttu is likely to be a part of this monitoring.  I worried less.

In the 2nd edition of Birds of Europe, the author wrote this about the male Dotterel:  "Nest is a bare scrape.  Male does most of incubation and care of young.  Some males are extremely tame just before eggs hatch" (page142).  

On the list of my five favorite birds I put the Eurasian Dotterel in my number two spot.  My number one bird is still coming up.  But, after looking at my photos again and writing this blog entry, I wish I had made the Dotterel my number one.  What a great bird.

Anyone for gulls and terns

It always seems that whenever I get to gulls and terns I become very serious.  In earlier days and posts I might not have even bothered to include gulls.  But ever since I became the proud owner of The Gull Guide North America  (2024) (it can be purchased for $29.85 from Thriftbooks) by Amar Ayyash and also heard him give his Keynote Address, Man and Gulls at the BWIAB conference this past Mother's Day, I feel differently about gulls.  That's a good thing.  My review, from last October, of Amar's book is here.  The You Tube Man and Gulls link here is Amar's Keynote Address at a different conference (1 hr, 5 mins long). 

Above and two below:  Mew Gull (Larus canus)?  No.  Short-billed Gull (Larus canus)?  Yes.  Common Gull (Larus canus)?  Yes.  Here is the Common Gull (Europe) and Short-billed Gull (North America).  As already discussed, what's in a name?  I'm surprised to write this, but I think it was my favorite gull of the trip, even though this is not what I was expecting going into the trip.  I think it's a very pretty gull.  I included the not great photo above, because I like photos of gulls on unexpected perches.  These are the only Common Gull photos I have and were taken in the same location as the Siberian Tit.  

Above and two below:  Little Gull (Hydrocoloeus minutus)

I thought this would be my favorite gull of the trip and I do like it very much.  We saw hundreds.  I took a lot of photos and tried hard to get good photos.  I selected these randomly.  The dark eye in the dark head conspired against me with so many different birds on this trip.  Of the three here, I think I like the middle photo best - a little gull flying past a nesting Whooper Swan (Cygnus cygnus), of which we also saw many nearly everywhere.

Above and below:  Black-headed Gull (Chroicocephalus ridibundus), even though its head is brown.

You can see the tiny insects on the water's surface that Little and Black-headed gulls were feasting on.  I think of this gull as being like our Ring-billed Gull - it's everywhere, even in parking lots.

Above:  Black-legged Kittiwake (Rissa tridacyla) colony occupying an abandoned - by humans - fishing hut of some sort in Båtsfjord.  They occupied every ledge or other spaces on all sides of this building.  They were a raucous bunch.  

Kittiwake taking a break from the noise and competition.

Great Black-backed Gull (Larus marinus).  We saw it often.

Above and two below:  European Herring Gull (Larus argentatus)

I have always liked terns but find the Sternas difficult to identify.  A couple of years ago I added Cameron Cox's Terns of North America: A Photographic Guide (2023) to my bookshelf (currently 30% off with Princeton).  Earlier this spring I confused a Forster's Tern (Sterna forsteri) for a Common Tern (Sterna hirundo) on this blog and I was, after a few weeks, corrected by the eBird moderator.  Now I think Common Tern and Arctic Tern (Sterna paradisaea) are a more confusing pair.  I think the 2nd edition Birds of Europe doesn't really help my confusion (pages 200-201) although I have considered that these two terns may have slightly different features in northern Europe.  I pulled Cox's book off the shelf to write this entry.  My photos aren't dreadful, but none are particularly good either.   

Two photos above and one below:  Common Term (Sterna hirundo).

The wide, white leading edge on the anterior wing is a key feature for me.  Arctic tern also has this, but it is not so prominent.  Having pointed this out in these photos, I can't find a photo in Cox's book also showing this.  The bill is also darker red than I would expect it to be. 

                 

Above and below:  Arctic Tern (Stern paradisaea).

This bird is from a noisy flock that were wheeling around the rocks in, (location Persfjord(?), in Norway.   I feel very comfortable with this ID because in these final days of the trip, we were only seeing Arctic Terns.  Also, I had the presence of mind to open Merlin and confirmed their vocalizations.

This seems like a very academic post to me.  I am completely unqualified to write a scholarly blog post about gulls and terns.

Siberian Tit

I'm not proceeding chronologically as I had hoped; the Smews are of order by a couple of days.  Coming back to a couple of birds that I don't want to forget and which deserve recognition.  

Grey Wagtail (Motacilla cinerea)

Wagtails are such great birds; I wish we had them in North America. This bird is somewhat difficult to find in Finland and has shown up here for the past couple of years.  While my photo is poor, it is still easy to see that Grey Wagtail is an attractive bird.  The location it has chosen to occupy, an out of season ski resort, led to a discussion on how good the Finns are at ski-jumping.  Legendary athletes like Matti Nykänen and Toni Nieminen are just two.  Matti Nykänen won five Olympic medals, four of them gold in the 1980s.  He had, however, a sad history.  Apparently, he was an alcoholic from the age of 14 and died at a relatively young age.  Finland continues to have a roster of both men and women who are successful ski jumpers.  The next Olympics will be the Winter games!  The Grey Wagtail was at the Ruka Ski Resort, near Kuusamo in Northern Ostrobothnia on May 27th.   

Above and two below:  Siberian Tit (Poecile cinctus)

I took about twenty images of the Siberian Tit from this perch.  They all look basically the same.  I randomly chose the three above.  Siberian Tit also sparked a little discussion for this is the North American named Gray-headed Chickadee.  Some European tits and North American chickadees have very similar appearances.  Others, like (European) Blue and Great tits, are quite different.  North Americans might be forgiven for referring to the Willow, Marsh or Somber tits as chickadees, only in a different country, for the congruence in their appearances.  Indeed, they occupy the same genus - Poecile.  Siberian Tit and Gray-headed Chickadee fall into this category.

Our tour leader, Nigel Redman, from Norfolk, England has enjoyed a lifetime of bird study, birding and bird guiding and in an earlier career was a book publisher with Helms Field Guides and Bloomsbury Publishers - to say the least, extremely knowledgable with an impressive career.  He was adamant that this bird is properly named Siberian Tit.  It is mostly and widely a Siberian breeder and occupies only a tiny range in Alaska.  "Gray-headed Chickadee" he added, with mock derision.  I half expected him to say that Gray was also spelled incorrectly.  This was, to a lesser degree, discussed with divers vs. loons and Common Merganser vs. Gooseander - of course, all in fun. This appealed to me because it is one of the aspects of birds and birding that I enjoy knowing and reading about.

Later a discussion about how the AOS is changing the names of birds that are named with eponyms. (I used the term honorifics - but honorifics is not exactly correct with a dictionary definition that implies or expresses high status, politeness or respect, such as titles like Sir, Madam, Dr., Lord, Lady, etc.).  After attending Amar Ayyash's Keynote Address titled Man and Gull at the BWIAB conference in Ohio just prior to leaving for this trip, I happened to mention that Bonaparte's Gulls nest almost exclusively in trees, preferring black spruce trees, and that one of the names being considered for renaming it might be Spruce gull.   Using the McCown's Longspur to Thick-billed Longspur name change (PDF in link) as an example, Nigel disagreed with the AOS endeavor to rename birds.  He added that he understood what they were trying to do, but that in doing it, all of the history on how the bird was discovered and described would be lost.  As it happens, Nigel also published The Eponym Dictionary of Birds.  I learned a new word - eponym - in this discussion.  I consider the renaming of birds (and also birding organizations) to be examples of the woke chasm that is impacting American politics and dividing the country - e.g. removing statues from public places, removing paintings, removing books from the library, renaming birds - to be a made-up construct used primarily by one political party to create the furor necessary to win elections.  (I think political journalists might place 'woke' the red meat category.  Woke was originally used with a very different meaning.)  In this way, I agree with Nigel, history will be lost.  On the other hand, what does the name Bonaparte's really tell us about a small, graceful and pretty gull.  Nothing.  It seems that carelessness and inattention to detail would play a greater role in losing bird history.  I editorialized to remember this discussion.  None of the extra parts of what I wrote above occurred in the van.

The Siberian Tit was seen in the late afternoon in an area called Kuusamo — Vasarankangas, Northern Ostrobothnia also on May 27th.  By the late afternoon the clouds had disappeared and, weatherwise, it was one of the most enjoyable afternoons of the whole trip.

Afternote:   Now I can't recall why I happened to mention Bonaparte's Gull in the discussion we had in the van.  All discussions seemed to occur in the van.  It is exclusively a North American gull and there are only a few records in Northern Europe.

From Wikipedia.org I copied the following from the Bonaparte's Gull (Chroicocephalus philadelphia) page:  "The species is named after Charles Lucien Bonaparte, a French ornithologist (and nephew to the former French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte) who spent eight years in America, contributing to the understanding of the taxonomy and nomenclature of birds there and elsewhere. Its genus name, Chroicocephalus, is a combination of the Greek words chroikos, an adjective form of chroa meaning "colour", and kephalē meaning "head". This refers to the dark heads that most gulls in this genus show during the breeding season. The specific epithet philadelphia is a Latinized adjective meaning "from Philadelphia", a reference to the location from which the type specimen was collected."[9] Sandrock, James; Prior, Jean C. (2014). The Scientific Nomenclature of Birds of the Upper Midwest. Iowa City, Iowa, US: University of Iowa Press. p. 42. ISBN 978-1-60938-225-4. Retrieved 15 December 2015.

This supports Nigel's assertion, that with the changing of bird names, the bird's history will be lost.  This said, it doesn't need to be lost.  It's easy to see where adding just a sentence leaves the whole history intact.  The Wikipedia page also shows a photo of a Bonaparte's gull nesting in a black spruce tree.  

There are Smews out there

Below, the same photo that appears on my title page.

Smew is probably the bird I wanted to see most on this trip.  So my heart sank when I looked way in the distance through my bins and camera viewfinder. For some reason, I imagined seeing them closer.  Of course, we had excellent looks through the spotting scope. Nevertheless, I did manage photos that will be memorable for me. This is at Inari-Mielikköjärvi lintutorni in Lapland, Finland.

Above and below:  female Smew

Above and next four:  male Smew

Above and two below:  Smew pair

All of the photos are very tightly cropped.  All things considered, I'm pleased with the sighting and with the photos.  The very next day we saw Smews again on a lake much closer and in great light,  As soon as the van parked and the door opened I was dismayed to watch them swim rapidly away.  When they reached the end of the lake they flew.  On my top five list, I put the Smew in the fourth spot.  It feels churlish now, but Smew would have made the top spot with closer looks and better photos.  It's a great bird.