Tag Archives: ringdue

January storms

This January has been a stormy month here in this area with a series of severe weather systems moving past, one (Gyda) with a name, resulting in many trees down, flooding, landslides and avalanches, but my rocky hillside has escaped lightly with just a few branches ripped from trees. With winds largely blowing from the west it’s also been mild with snow coming and going and no frost in the soil. Higher up, there¨’s been large amounts of snow accumulating. 
The latest extreme weather system has given a forecast of very high waves on the Norwegian coast with a deep 960 hPa low located off Eastern Greenland and extensive strong wind fields between there and Norway. Due to the limited fetch lengths in the fjord (maximum about 20 km across the fjord) significant wave heights above 1.5 to 2m are rare. With very strong winds from NE blowing across the fjord and the right stage of the tide, there were some impressive waves in the bay earlier this week. The second video shows a woodpigeon (ringdue) hunched up against the wind. 

 

Stock Dove: A new species for the garden

A new bird species for the garden this morning,  a stock dove (skogdue) in the company of a woodpigeon? Stock doves are very rare breeders in my area, but seem to becoming more common. In fact, apart from one observation in 1928 and, remarkably, one bird on exactly the same day on the other side of Trondheim, I recorded the first stock dove in my county (Trøndelag) on 13th May 1982 at Malvikodden on the other side of the bay from where I live and the first spring after I moved to Norway. I would probably have missed it as I only heard the song, which I was familiar with from living in Scotland. Although breeding was never proven, singing birds were observed on Malvikodden until the last observation in 1987. It was then almost 20 years before the next breeding observation in Trøndelag (see the histogram).
An article was written about this by a neighbour, Stein Are Sæther;
Sæther 1987: Skogdua i Trøndelag. Trøndersk Natur 14: 86-94.

Number of breeding registrations of stock dove in Trøndelag from 1980 to 2021 (NB! there are several registrations of the same breeding pair, so this is not a true record of trends)
Number of records of stock dove in Trøndelag from 1980 to 2021 (NB! there are several registrations of the same birds, so this is not a true record of trends)

Spring song

Spring can’t be stopped and this woodpigeon (ringdue) could be heard singing from the house today and I was woken at 6am (was 5am) by a robin (rødstrupe) singing in the garden (no complaints, always a beautiful moment to hear a returning Robin) ;) A black-headed gull (hettemåke) was also my first of the year and 4 pairs of Oystercatcher (tjeld) were feeding in the bay!!
I also heard singing siskin, great tit, blue tit, greenfinch and coal tit today!
Reports are also coming in of starlings (stær) arriving!

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Long cycle forage to the shops

As I was working from home yesterday and not doing my normal bike ride, I decided to do a longer ride over the hills to the post office to pick up the Japanese seeds (different post)…I arrived home 3 hours later with a haul of, mostly, winter chantarelles / traktkantarell….I just couldn’t not pick them when I saw them :( Guess what I’ll be doing tonight :)