I have been away, as the title of this post suggests, scanning a lot of breath-taking scenery and eating a lot of food. This was Lyn and my first holiday abroad for many years, but I don't think it is relevant to this blog to go on about it at length.
Where the wildlife was concerned it has to be said that cruising on a Cunard liner is not ideal, while our on shore activity was limited to pottering around a few ports. In other words I didn't see many birds.
In Norway itself, it was interesting to find that Common Gull was by far the commonest gull species at all the ports, House Sparrows are abundant, and with minimum effort I also saw a couple of Tree Sparrows. At our furthest north location, Arctic Terns were nesting on the roofs. Another common gull was the intermedius race of Lesser Black-backed Gull.
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| Arctic Tern |
The larger corvids were all Hooded Crows, while the Jackdaw I saw at Stavanger was presumably of the race monedula, known as Nordic Jackdaw. Not that you could tell. The Alba Wagtails were White Wagtail of course.
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| Hooded Crow |
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| A very subtle Nordic Jackdaw |
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| Lesser Black-backed Gull - race intermedius |
The trip up across the North Sea produced only Gannets, Guillemots, and Fulmars. The return journey in calmer conditions allowed me to see far more of the above plus a Manx Shearwater, an Arctic Skua, and a pair of summer-plumaged Red-throated Divers. Sadly all were too distant to be worth a photograph.
A stunningly beautiful country though.
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