29 June 2014. Stockholm Sweden. Stockholm has been rather gloomy and cool these past few weeks. It’s been too easy to linger indoors but by the middle of this morning, I needed a leg stretch so spent a couple of hours walking around what is now familiar ground.
Stockholm itself is laced with inlets, arms and branches of Lake Malaren and the city has done an enviable job of developing and growing in harmony with nature and its thousands of kilometres of waterfront; finding pleasant wooded places to walk is easy.
It was darkly overcast and spitting with rain when I left but everything brightened up quickly and was verging on warm for a while. I wasn’t particularly looking for birds but just as I came within a hundred metres or so of returning to our apartment I encountered a small group of Jays in an oak tree, they were busying themselves with family politics and paid me little heed. I was on the high level walkway of a bridge looking at them at eye level from just a few metres away. They were, as I said, busy with family matters and hopped and flitted around quite a bit, sometimes in the open but often as not partially hidden. Sensing that for once I had birds within easy camera range I made myself comfortable and waited for my opportunities to happen. Here are two of them.
These were an easy Bird of the Day for me, I have always admired Jays, both the European, (Garrulus glandarius) and our North American species: Blue Jay, Gray Jay, and Stellars Jay all of them opinionated and handsome. I’ve written about all of them from time to time; memorably (for me) in September 2012 when I encountered this same European species in Holland where it known as the Flemish Jay or Vlaasmse Gaai.