Bad Finnish Birdwatcher

Monday, August 13, 2007 - An island -trip

On sunday we headed for Hamnskär. Jukka and me. We started pretty early. When I woke up that is. It took quite a while to get there though. First a bit over an hour's drive and then at least half an hour by Jukka's small boat. The island in question is almost as far out to sea as they get - over 10 kilometers from the mainland. And it's small too. And alone we were, the only humans within a radius of - say three kilometers at least. No boats in sight nearby.

It was a warm but kind of a dark morning. Dark, overcast sky, the sun just giving a few glimpses of itself through the grey clouds. We were hoping for some rain to stop migrating waders, but alas, no rain, despite the promising clouds. There weren't much birds on the island, in addition to the more obvious seabirds, gulls, terns, Great Cormorants. All the birds on the island make up a short list, so here it is: Whinchat, Spotted Flycatcher, a 1st cy Great Spotted Woodpecker, White Wagtails, two Temminck's Stints, Common Sandpipers, two Common Greenshanks, two noisy Hobbys. And was there a Robin somewhere in the bushes, I believe there was. A nice flock of Oystercatchers headed south and so did two Whimbrels, but the migration wasn't very lively, small numbers of terns were on the move but that's about it. Some Razorbills were flying at sea, there's a breeding colony nearby. Black Guillemots were fishing near the island's rocky shores. I went swimming and had one curious juvenile individual about ten meters away looking at me, stretching it's neck, trying to decide what to make of what it was seeing. Perhaps I was the first human it had encountered, or just the first naked one, who knows. It was quite a sight to get to look at a Guillemot from it's own perspective, behind it in the distance, maybe 15 kilometers away in the mainland, the Loviisa nuclear plant.

On the way back, the boat ride was a bit bumpy. When I get that salt water taste in my mouth from the splashes, I always get a feeling of being birding again. And that's not a bad feeling.

Would you take a boat ride with this guy on the open sea? I did, and lived to tell the tale.