All "Birding stories" from the current blog are now moved to a new address www.NatureMonitoring.com: 2014

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понеделник, 7 юли 2014 г.

Breeding bird survey in Norway: the end

Leaving Tromso early in the morning revealed spectacular landscapes visible from the sky. It was magical. I would assume looking from space is even more beautiful. Have a look.

image: Marina Hadzieva

Breeding bird survey in Norway: day 14

Route 1907 is the last one I had to survey. On the previous day we managed to find out that there is a trail leading to the first survey plot. If we hadn’t found that it would have been really difficult. The first point was about 2 km from the road up on a mountain hill. Having in mind that I had to start at 4 a.m. this meant it would have taken ages to get there. Luckily there was a trail and I managed to find it thanks to a gentleman who told me where to go. It was really kind of him and rather useful. In this occasion I had to wake up at 2,30 a.m. and in other cases may be it had to be even earlier.

The trail took me an hour to get to the first point so I managed to start just on time. This time I was by myself which was probably an advantage in this case because I walked really quickly to be able to start on time. Once I saw the route I realized it wasn’t going to be as difficult as initially imagined. The route was around the top of a plateau with minor change of altitude. Mind you the first point was at 300 m and the highest one was at 650 m a.s.l. so there was some hiking. Nevertheless it was really pleasant. I don’t know if it was because of the rest I had last night or because of the motivation for the route being the last one but it was rather pleasant. There were quite a few birds too. I flushed several Willow Grouses along the way. On the top there was a Rock Ptarmigan and this turned out to be the plot with the highest number of breeding Golden Plovers counting over 10 pairs. They were very noisy birds that made sure I would leave their territory and curiously approached me now and then down to 20m. Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera but at least this let me do the work that I was here for.

The top of the plateau was very easy to walk: no vegetation, small rocks and unfortunately no birds. May be it was too windy for them to breed up there although at the moment the weather was just superb. And the view… Magnificent….

route 1907, copyright Iordan Hristov

Well this was the last of the 11 routes I had to survey. On the next days we traveled to Tromso and spent some time in Oslo where not much birding was involved. I think I will finish with the birding stories. Will upload a collection of photos in any of the next posts.

Hope you enjoyed my Norwegian adventures.

сряда, 11 юни 2014 г.

Breeding bird survey in Norway coming up

New trip is on my list for the coming three weeks when I shall be travelling around the northern parts of Norway to conduct a field bird survey. I have to cover 10 survey routes in the area of Tromso in the second half of June. The terrain is pretty ruff but I have got some good gear so I hope everything would be fine. I have got a Deuter Neosphere -10 sleeping bag (1,4 kg), and a 3.8 cm mat from Robens (610 gr), and a Trimm Himlite tent (1,6 kg). I shall be testing and writing about this gear and its performance. Some of the routes are in pretty remote areas with high altitude difference among the survey points. For some routes it is over 500 m and the starting point of some routes is about 4-5 km from the nearest road. The survey of each route should start at 4 a.m. so it would be quite a challenge to do this trekking during the night. Luckily it would be fairly light up there. Anyway I intend to camp somewhere in the vicinity of the starting point and will probably walk to it on the previous day to reduce the walking time during the night.

field route for surveying breeding birds in Norway

The landscape though looks absolutely stunning. Will try to post updates when possible because I shall be camping most of the time and will be hard with the civiliziration. My notebook will be next to me though so I shall post some news now and then.