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July 10 2014. Flamborough, ON. High summer is a turning point for many birds. The next big event is the fall migration to wherever they spend the dark months. Parent birds, if not busy feeding and fattening their fledglings or working on a second brood, are moulting out of their spring finery back into their everyday work clothes. The gorgeous spring colours of male Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, Scarlet Tanagers and Bobolinks will be gone in a few weeks.

Today I made two stops between errands. The first at a usually productive marsh that has produced American Bitterns, Sora, Virginia Rails and Pileated Woodpeckers in the past, and later at a large un-mowed field full of Savannah Sparrows, Bobolinks and Eastern Meadowlarks.

It was rather quiet at the marsh. The Cattails had grown up obscuring most of the formerly open expanses, but I could hear several Marsh Wrens chattering. A Pileated Woodpecker flew low overhead and settled on a dead tree that it obviously uses as a drumming post. I was delighted by the sight of this group of young Eastern Kingbirds sitting and waiting for to be fed. They were quite a distance away but I’d guess that they have only been out of the nest for less than a week; clearly they are still very dependent for food on their parents. It’s a tough job making a living as a flycatcher (which Kingbirds are); it’s all about being fast and accurate on the wing to capture the few calories in an insect.

Along the fence-line of the grass field I found a Grasshopper Sparrow and many Savannah Sparrows. Many of the Savannahs looked really shabby, almost scrawny; I suspect they were moulting adults. Moult is a complex business to understand (and I don’t very well). All birds do it; if nothing else they have to replace worn feathers, and of course, as spring approaches, many males moult into showy breeding plumage and afterwards back out into what’s termed ‘basic’ plumage. The sequence and timing of feather loss and replacement varies from species to species; sometimes they go through a complete moult right after breeding and sometimes it’s a partial moult, started after breeding and completed after migration. I think the Savannah Sparrows below are part way through a complete post-breeding moult. (But I’ll be happy to corrected).

28 June 2014. Gothenburg, Sweden. Earlier I commented on a small family group of Common Eiders. Today we took advantage of one of the best and cheapest sightseeing cruises possible and along the way saw dozens of such groups, enough to have a better idea of who’s who among the Eiders of June.

First the cruise. This, I know, is not especially on topic but should you ever find yourself at loose ends in Gothenburg, Sweden, then here’s a suggestion. Buy a single-ride transit ticket for 25 Kroner (about $4.00) and take either the number 9 or number 11 tram all the way out to the coastal community of Saltholm, then transfer onto a ferry (all on the same ticket, the ferry is a part of the public transit system), and enjoy a cruise. Depending on which of the many ferry routes you choose, you’ll return some time later after a no-frills, no-nonsense trip around some to Sweden’s most dramatic coastline; all for 25Kr. We did, and had enough time to ride a ferry that made a dozen stops. We accomplished the whole trip (against a backdrop of dark thunder clouds and distant lightning) in the space of four hours before boarding a train for our return to Stockholm. It all worked smoothly although we had barely fifteen minutes to spare by the time we boarded the train.

It is maybe something of an exaggeration to characterize a ferry ride as a cruise, but there are many tourist excursions operating from Gothenburg that offer cruises that visit the same chain of islands and, other than allowing you time to step ashore and shop for a while, offer little to distinguish them from the ferries.

I’m sharing all of this because it was on this accelerated cruise that I managed to get in a good two solid hours of pelagic bird-watching. Maybe for more money I’d have seen more species but my twelve-species list including: Common Eiders, Black-headed Gull, Grey-lag Geese, Barnacle Geese, Shelducks, Great Black-backed Gulls and a couple of Oystercatchers was probably about as good as it gets.

The Eiders were well worth the money and Birds of the Day. I enjoyed long looks at groups of all-brown ones which as far as I can tell would comprise breeding females (which have pale tipped bills) non-breeding second-year birds and this year’s juveniles. The latter were easy, they were all or somewhat fluffy, brown and anywhere from fist to watermelon size, and they tended to scurry after an adult female. Males were at that difficult eclipse stage where they are undergoing a mid to late summer moult, so generally they appeared all black except for a conspicuous slash of white on the back.

30 June 2014 Skogskyrkogården, Stockholm, Sweden. I spent a couple of hours wandering and looking for birds at Stockholm’s Skogskyrkogården cemetery today. There are a few things you should know about Skogskyrkogården.

First, I’m pretty sure that unless you’re Swedish you have little chance of pronouncing the word. That little circle over the ‘a’ changes things, it’s not an ‘a’ as in card, or back, or wave, but something quite different. Also those ‘k’s and the ‘g’ are not apparently represented with a hard sound. I have heard the full word announced on the subway frequently and each time I repeat in my head until I’m persuaded that I will be able to say it later; I never can.

Second, Skogskyrkogården is not just any old cemetery, it is recognized by the United Nations as a World Heritage Site on account of it’s ground-breaking and revolutionary landscape design. It attracts many visitors including scholars of art, landscape and urban design; and not a few birders too I should imagine. Most of it is a mature pine forest manicured as graveyard although some of it is still quite untouched; an expansive un-forested part is open, landscaped and grassy.

I walked up to the top of a small rise capped with a geometric planting of elms which had started scattering their flat seeds. I noticed a few Greenfinches on top of one of the elms, another joined them and then another until soon it was a flock which, hesitantly at first, moved down to the ground to feed on elm seed. I watched for quite a while and noticed that among them was a Hawfinch; I’d never seen a Hawfinch before, in my childhood they’d only existed in the pages of books, this was quite a find for me.

At first glance they are reminiscent of a Cedar Waxwing, the same general size and colouring. But Hawfinches are top-heavy birds thanks to the large powerful muscles that power a fearsome beak which is powerful enough to split a cherry stone, something none of us would care to try for long.

My subsequent reading justifies why, despite having spent my childhood looking at birds, (without binoculars) I’d never knowingly seen one. They are not uncommon, but the books tell me that Hawfinches are not easy to see, they tend to be elusive, preferring the upper reaches of broad-leaved trees and they’re quick to take flight.

I stayed around for quite a while watching and enjoying the Greenfinches, a trio of Goldfinches and one or two Chaffinches almost as much as the Hawfinch. I spent just as much time waiting for the flock to return to the area and for feeding to resume after the they’d startled and taken flight. Perhaps it was my presence that unnerved them, but it seemed that without warning they’d all explode into flight and fly off, calling and twittering, to a distant forest edge until a few minutes later, one or two would return and then more until gradually they were all back happily feeding until the next alarm.

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.

22 June 2014. Stockholm’s archipelago.  Stockholm sits at a pivot point between the brackish, non-tidal waters of the Baltic Sea and the endlessly branching fresh waters of Lake Malaren, the long fingers of which drain far into the heart of central Sweden.  Indeed Stockholm was founded on a small strategic island astride what must have been some furious rapids where the sweet water dropped the last few meters to meet the salty. Between Stockholm and the open Baltic lies a delta of islands scattered like a handful of gravel, some large and populated but many no more than ice-polished rock humps; this is the archipelago, Stockholm’s playground.

On a sightseeing cruise through the islands and out to fashionable Sandhamn, our boat threaded between steep granite walls, across open stretches of lake and along quiet iris-lined backwaters. It was a day of bright sun interspersed with cold rain that came in black, blustery squall fronts; and to judge by the the Swedish reaction, June can be like that. On the return trip, most passengers stayed out of the cold but I found a sheltered corner and, with a couple of cushions under and blankets over me, was quite comfortable. It was during this watch that I spotted a pair of Black-throated Loons with a single chick in their care.  I was, I admit, excited and quite unprepared for such a surprise but a quick check of my field guide (which doesn’t get excited about individual species – and nor should it) supported the sighting and also, somewhat dryly, informed me that this species is known by North Americans as the Arctic Loon. My mental Loon-list has now accounted for four (Common, Red-throated, Black-throated and Pacific) of the world’s five species. It may be a long wait for the Yellow-billed Loon which is a bird of northern Russia and Norway.
Maybe it’s just North Americans who get dewey-eyed and wistful at the sight and sound of the loon (by which we usually mean the Common Loon), they are after all the familiar hallmark of northern lakes. I have seen no evidence that Europeans hold loons in any particular esteem, they’re just not a recognizable part of the outdoors; at least not conspicuously so. When they are at their most appealing, both in breeding plumage and and voice, they are far away in remote northern waters, except of course here in Scandinavia. In winter, when loons head for the coastlines of America and Europe, they may appear as no more than a distant grey duck.
A straggling family of Common Eiders was another pleasant surprise. There seemed to be about a dozen of them which may have been a female and well-grown young but it also included a handsome summer-plumage male which may have been the father of the brood. If I sound a little tentative it’s because I’m not sure that the drakes have much to do with parenting once the brood is out of the nest; it may be that my group comprised birds that for one reason or another were non-breeders.
Apart from the loons and Eiders, the bird sightings were in many ways illustrative of how alike are so many European and American species. I noted a couple of Common Sandpipers flitting low across quiet stretches of water and for all the world you’d think they were (our North American) Spotted Sandpipers but without the spots as if out of breeding plumage. The same goes for Grey Herons (like Great-blue), Coots (like American Coot), Cormorants and Nuthatches (all much the same world-wide) and Tree Creepers (virtually identical to Brown Creeper); and so goes birding in Sweden.