Background and Logistics Norway: 9 th 21 st August 2007 by David Bradnum Since my partner is a teacher, there s always potential for a long holiday in the summer but since it s not a great time of year for birding, we re generally left with a dilemma over where to go! This year we opted to head up to Norway, attracted by stunning scenery and long days in which to enjoy it. I wasn t able to find many birding trip reports from the southern end of the country, so we generally just explored interesting areas, rather than target particular sites or species. Consequently, this is basically a trip report with a bit of birding here and there, rather than a fullblown birding trip report! We booked a return from Stansted to Kristiansand in the far south of Norway with Norwegian Air Shuttle www.norwegian.no/sw7127.asp for about 70 each (incl taxes), and rented a car through Opodo for the entire trip (rather expensive at 420). However, with a couple of weeks to go, the return flight was cancelled and after a bit of messing about, we switched to a return from Bergen. With hindsight, this turned out to be a good result, since the long drive back down south wouldn t have really added much to the trip. In an effort to reduce costs in a sometimes painfully expensive country, we opted to use campsites for accommodation these were generally excellent with good clean facilities and plenty of peace and quiet. Rather different to many in the UK! During the later part of the trip when the weather was poor, we left the tent in the car and rented out camping huts. These hytter are present on most sites in various sizes and numbers, and work out at about 20-30 per night. Thursday 9 th August Our flight was delayed by about three hours, so we finally touched down in Norway mid-evening. Kristiansand airport is pretty tiny though, so it didn t take long at all to sail through passport control, reclaim luggage, and pick up a Ford Focus hire car. We pitched camp on the nearest site (a rather touristy, sprawling affair), and had a short walk down by the river still daylight well after 10pm, and the first encouraging glimpse of Scandinavian scenery. Friday 10 th August Early morning, I couldn t wait to get out and start the trip list a return visit to the shore and surrounding scrub was quite productive with a Pied Flycatcher, Lesser Whitethroat and a small flock of Mealy Redpolls all being seen. A large number of Swifts over the campsite was a little surprising this late in the summer. We stocked up food supplies in Kristiansand before heading off west along the coast through Mandal a pretty little seaside town featuring crazy locals ski-jumping into the sea! By early afternoon, we d reached the lighthouse at Lista, which doubles up as a bird observatory. http://home.c2i.net/clifu/lifu/english.htm The whole area is excellent for birding with a good variety of habitat. We got good views of a Peregrine on a kill, and a hunting female Red-backed Shrike, plus fly-over waders including Spotted Redshank, Whimbrel and Golden Plover. A couple more Pied Flycatchers were around the woodland fringes.
The remainder of the day was spent driving further round the coast towards Hauge. The scenery was improving all the time, weaving up and down the valleys via some entertaining hairpin bends plenty of opportunities for photo-stops! Saturday 11 th August Another early morning wander from the campsite led me to great views of four europaea race Nuthatches with completely clean white underparts, they re strikingly different to our birds in the UK. Continuing up a forested hillside I was hoping for Nutcracker or woodpeckers, but everything was rather quiet. typical for August! On the road north again, the scenery gradually flattened out towards the Jaeren http://birdingnorway.no/sites/jaren.htm region another good area for birding, which reminded me of the Outer Hebrides. Long windswept white sand beaches, backed by dunes and farmland, were almost entirely deserted. We chose to stop at Orresanden: Suzanne enjoyed the wild flowers while I was checking waders and seabirds. A Great Northern Diver was with about 10 Velvet Scoter fairly close inshore, though the most interesting bird got away unidentified a very large dark falcon hammering through after Sanderlings along the beach and then accelerating out over the sea. Probably a Gyr. but not seen well enough to be entirely sure. Shame! By late afternoon, we d driven and made a quick stop in Stavanger an obviously prosperous town supporting the oil industry. Pressing on once more, we were aiming to camp near the Preikestolen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/prekestolen a spectacular viewpoint over the Lysefjord. The car, however, had other ideas! Several times in the next hour it highlighted an Engine Management System Failure, and cut down to 25% power.. not great for pulling out of Norwegian valleys! We did eventually reach the campsite, and persuaded Hertz that it really was their problem to resolve not ours. By 8pm, we d determined that the car wasn t repairable, and by 12.30am a replacement had been delivered. One (very faint) silver lining was the flyover Common Sandpiper calling overhead at midnight! Sunday 12 th August Not the greatest start to the day, as we discovered the new hire car (an estate) had no parcel shelf to cover the contents of the boot, leaving all our kit, and my optics, exposed to the world. Knowing this would void our insurance, and disappointed that the Preikestolen was completely enclosed in dense low cloud, we opted to drive back to Stavanger and switch to a third hire car! A bit of good customer service from Hertz
saw us upgraded to an Opel Vectra 2.2 diesel, which served us very well for the rest of the trip. Getting the day back on track, we headed north to Haugesund through a series of bridges and sub-sea tunnels (very weird to drive through, with numerous partially hidden speed cameras on the downhill stretches) plus another ferry crossing. The landscape was now more like the Hebridean island of Harris, with thousands of rocky outcrops poking out from rough grassland. I enjoyed some birding in pastures near Forland, where a large flock of feeding passerines included a Spotted Flycatcher, the first few Willow Tits of the trip, and numerous very tame Willow Warblers. We also saw a few Black Darter dragonflies nearby. A walk out to the lighthouse at Ryvarden gave us fantastic scenery, but no notable wildlife. We camped near Stord, failed to find any woodpeckers in the adjacent woodland, and got an early night ready to enter the wilder side of Norway the next day. Monday 13 th August After a leisurely ferry trip across to Sunde, we toured north via several impressive waterfalls the best of these, the Furebergfoss, was a bit of a surprise as we emerged from a tunnel and turned the corner! After lunch, we walked up a narrow valley in the sunshine to a lake fed by the Bondhusbreen glacier, which was visible in the distance. Norwegian glacier meltwater is exceptionally blue-green (due to dissolved clay compounds, I m told!), which gives many of the lakes and rivers a beautiful colouring. By the time we d returned to the car, a band of squally rain had rolled in, so we took the opportunity to cover some miles northwards again, alongside the Hardangerfjord, and eventually past the spectacular Vorringsfoss waterfall (300m drop!) on up to the Hardangervidda a vast arctic plateau about 1300m above sea-level. We took an unsurfaced road out to Tinnholen, a large lake in the heart of the plateau. I d been told that this is a semi-regular site for a summering Gyrfalcon, but we weren t lucky enough to find it. However, a female Velvet Scoter with a brood of ten ducklings was unexpected, and a rather battered Cranberry Fritillary provided an ID challenge! Depending on rodent availability, the Handangervidda holds breeding Snowy Owl, Rough-legged Buzzard and Long-tailed Skuas in some years, though none are easy to find. I ve never seen any landscape so unbelievably vast and wild a few days trekking between the mountain huts here would surely be the ultimate getaway-from-it-all!
Having driven down off the vidda, we picked a campsite in Geilo, and I arranged to meet Bill Sloan (an ex-pat Geordie birder) the next morning. Tuesday 14 th August We met Bill at about 9am, and headed out to woodland at Nord Skurdalen. In previous years, this has been a fairly reliable site for Siberian Jay but sadly not for us! We did see and hear a group of 20 Parrot Crossbills and a purring Crested Tit, and a Merlin hurtled through the canopy after some unfortunate victim! Suzanne was impressed by the wide variety of mushrooms on the forest floor and took about 25 photos to prove it! From here we moved up onto the edge of the NE edge of the Hardangervidda via another privately maintained dirt road. Before the weather took a turn for the worse, we managed to find a smart Shore Lark rather different seeing them here compared to north Norfolk! After thanking Bill for his time, we headed north-west on Highway 50 over a snowy plateau towards Aurland and Flam. Turning a corner to suddenly see the deep blue Aurlandsfjord below us, we felt we d really reached the fjords and all the spectacular scenery they hold. Late afternoon, a short walk beside the ridiculously narrow Naeroyfjord produced very brief views of a Golden Eagle overhead. Once again, the weather turned rather dramatically for the worse, and we found ourselves a bargain hytter for the night. Wednesday 15 th August After a lazy start to the day, visiting a stave church at Undredal (and marvelling at a massive car ferry picking up passengers from a rickety wooden pier), we took the winding old road up out of Aurland. It s recently been replaced by a 24km tunnel, but we were glad to take our time over the top and enjoy the scenery albeit, in the rain! Having dropped back down to Laerdal, I started what was to become a marathon search for White-backed Woodpeckers on the steep wooded hillsides. Thanks to this excellent trip report, I d got several sites to try in the area and the weather was now good enough to start looking. Along the path to Hedler (west from red point 1 in the trip report), I heard some promising calls once or twice, but aside from Nuthatch, more Willow Tits and great views down the valley, we had no luck. On our way back, descending over wet rocks, Suzanne slipped and fell heavily so it didn t go down as a great success overall!
By contrast to the strenuous woodpecker search, the best bird of the day turned up with no effort at all, completely unexpectedly! As we unpacked the car at a campsite in Vindedalen, a grating krrrr krrrr call struck me as familiar: a Nutcracker was right on top of a pine 20 yards away! Thursday 16 th August I resumed the wild goose woodpecker chase at Fodnes, leaving Suzanne to enjoy some sunshine and scenery around the fjord. An Icterine Warbler was nice to see clambering around in birch trees (it, not me!), and Willow Tits were noisy again. I followed the detailed instructions in the trip report, heading steeply up through relatively open pine forest much more pleasant than typical dense British plantations. At Olavskjelda, I paused for a few minutes to locate a peculiar woodpecker call, which eventually proved to be juvenile Great-spotted (though the red cap did briefly have me going!). After some time, I located the area where SB had seen the Whitebackeds in 2005, but initially couldn t find anything. However, as I was about to admit defeat, a series of slightly deeper calls (more like keck than the Greatspotted s kick ) caught my attention, and (after a total of more than 8 hours searching!) there was a pair of White-backed Woodpeckers. I got great views as they fed low in the trees definitely one of the highlights of the trip! Given how close they were to SB s sighting two years ago, I assume this must be an established territory. Descending rapidly back to Suzanne, I flushed a female Capercaillie from just off the path the only one seen during the holiday. Putting the birding back on hold, we resorted to touristy activities, and a visit to the spectacular 12 th century stave church at Borgund definitely not to be missed!
Driving on northwest through Sogndal, we paused to take some photos at the Boyabreen another massive sooty glacier arm, this time much closer to the path. The road continued on through a long tunnel under the glacier, over a mountain pass and then alongside the Nordfjord to a campsite (and grass-roofed hytter) within sight of the Brigsdalsbreen glacier. Friday 17 th August Making a relatively early start in a bid to avoid hordes of tourists, we went for a walk up to the Brigsdalsbreen. The weather wasn t fantastic (in fact it was fairly miserable!), but the spectacle was incredible the glacier reached right down to a bright blue-green lake, and big blocks of ice floated down the river flowing out beside the path. No birdlife to note here at all, but a Stoat performed rather well on the return trip, to complete disinterest from everyone else present! From here, we decided to get some miles under our belt heading north over a mountain pass to Geiranger, since the weather was still poor. I suspect that viewpoints on both sides of the town would have been jaw-dropping in clear conditions, but as it was there was no point lingering at these, let alone taking the rough road up to the top of Dalsnibba, a 1500m peak. After getting a welcome hot meal in Geiranger, we continued north to find another welcome hytter just south of the famous Trollstigen mountain pass. By now, the scenery had become rather bleak, with far fewer trees and bigger expanses of bare rock on the higher ground.
Saturday 18th August Greeted by an improvement in the weather, we hit the road once again to reach the top of the Trollstigen what a road! Highly recommended for enthusiastic drivers (or bikers) One of the most remarkable things about this part of the journey was the rapid change of scenery; barely 20 minutes after hairpinning our way steeply downhill amongst massive rocky peaks, we were surrounded by grassy meadows at sea level again. Certainly a region of incredible contrasts. We reached Andalsnes, a relatively large town, late morning. I had hoped that the sealoch (or whatever the Norwegian equivalent is!) would hold some interesting birds, but it turned out to be rather quiet. until a juvenile White-tailed Eagle appeared in the distance chasing young Common Gulls rather half-heartedly. Perhaps surprisingly, this was the only sea-eagle we saw during the trip, though this one did put on a great performance. The trip list moved on past 100 further along the shoreline, thanks to a couple of Greenshank and some Canada Geese: rock and roll! We detoured to see another (less spectacular) stave church, enjoying the sight of several sizeable groups of dolphins in a nearby fjord at least 30, and probably many more. Our destination for the afternoon was the much-hyped Atlantic Road (or Atlanterhavsvegen) and its sequence of spectacular bridges. This was to be the most northerly point of the holiday, where the rocky coastline produced a few extra birds, the best being ever-present Arctic Skuas harassing Kittiwakes and Arctic Terns.
After failing to find reasonably priced accommodation in Alesund, we spent another night in a hytter on a rural campsite. Although the surrounding woodland looked vaguely promising, it was devoid of birdlife something of a recurring theme for the holiday! Sunday 19 th August We had an early morning tour of Alesund. After a terrible fire destroyed much of the town at the start of the 20 th century, most of the centre consists of spectacular Art Deco buildings very strange, though undeniably attractive with spires and turrets all over the place! The less said about the rest of the day, the better It rained. We drove south. Norwegian roadworks are a joke. All the campsites were closed. You get the idea. Monday 20 th August Having reached the islands south of Bergen, I wanted to visit Herdla, knowing that this was a good area for migrant birds in the right conditions the website of Julian Bell, a local ex-pat birder, gives an idea of what could be possible here www.naturalbornbirder.com/oeygarden/herdlevaer.php. Although I didn t find very much, I can imagine that birding here is a bit like the Northern or Western Isles in the UK, with the best cover for passerines around gardens in the tiny villages. A Wood Warbler was an unexpected find, and showed well with the usual Willow Warblers; I
realised that a single Chiffchaff was the first of the trip. A brief seawatch in calm conditions yielded exactly what I expected not much! Not wishing to make the mistake of leaving accommodation too late again, we found a campsite on the edge of Bergen after lunch, before heading out again in search of White-backed Woodpeckers again! We walked up through the forest (no woodpeckers!) to the Lyshornet viewpoint near the Lysekloster, a ruined Cistercian monastery. Excellent scenery, in better weather, though. Tuesday 21 st August Our last day was spent in and around Bergen, a city to which we d love to return. Ironically after a series of grey and wet days, the weather was stunning not a cloud in the brilliant blue sky. We wandered around the superb fish market before taking the Floibanen funicular railway up to an even better viewpoint set in the forest. Still no birds of any great note (trip list ended up at 112), but it was more than enough to just relax and take in the scenery, bringing back memories of the other stunning places we d visited.
TripList: Red-throated Diver Common Sandpiper Whitethroat Great Northern Diver Turnstone Garden Warbler Cormorant Arctic Skua Blackcap Shag Arctic Tern Willow Warbler Grey Heron Common Tern Wood Warbler Mute Swan Common Gull Chiffchaff Canada Goose Kittiwake Goldcrest Greylag Goose Black-headed Gull Spotted Flycatcher Wigeon LBB Gull Pied Flycatcher Mallard GBB Gull Blue Tit Teal Herring Gull Gt Tit Tufted Duck Rock Dove Coal Tit Eider Woodpigeon Marsh Tit Common Scoter Collared Dove Willow Tit Velvet Scoter Tawny Owl Crested Tit Red-breasted Merganser Swift Nuthatch Goldeneye Green Woodpecker Treecreeper White-tailed Eagle Great Spotted Woodpecker Red-backed Shrike Sparrowhawk White-backed Woodpecker Jay Buzzard Shore Lark Magpie Kestrel Swallow Nutcracker Merlin House Martin Rook Peregrine Sand Martin Hooded Crow Capercaillie Meadow Pipit Raven Oystercatcher Tree Pipit Starling Ringed Plover Yellow Wagtail House Sparrow Golden Plover Pied Wagtail Chaffinch Lapwing Wren Greenfinch Knot Dunnock Goldfinch Sanderling Robin Redpoll Dunlin Wheatear Siskin Ruff Whinchat Crossbill Snipe Song Thrush Parrot Crossbill Curlew Redwing Yellowhammer Whimbrel Blackbird Greenshank Fieldfare Spotted Redshank Icterine Warbler Redshank Lesser Whitethroat