birdwatching.co.uk 17 16 Bird Watching 2013 Travel Extra Travel EXTRA Iceland Matt’s gone to Iceland Matt Merritt enjoys 24-hour daylight, open spaces, evocative names and birds galore in the far north N o matter how much you love birds, there’s a point in any long day’s watching when you begin to be thankful for the onset of dusk. Thoughts turn to good food, a drink or two, perhaps, a chat about the day’s most memorable sightings round a blazing fire, and bed. Visit the far north of Iceland in late spring, though, and you run into a problem. It’s not that the cuisine is bad (it’s excellent), the company disagreeable (it’s very friendly) or the accommodation uncomfortable (it’s a home from home). It is, of course, that it never really gets dark. Theoretically, you can birdwatch around the clock, or at least until you drop from exhaustion. On our first full day in the far north, we gave it a go. We’d been given an inkling of what was in store on the 50-minute drive from Akureyri airport to Hotel Raudaskrida the previous day. The mountains and fells were only just emerging from their snow cover, and the wide river valley that the hotel sits in was studded with pools of every size. Gloriously ruddy Black-tailed Godwits probed the edges, while Red-necked Phalaropes swam in circles. The fields were full of Whimbrels, and Snipe appeared on every fencepost. For the next few days, in fact, there was barely a waking moment at the hotel during which a Snipe wasn’t overhead, doing its beautifully bizarre drumming display. If there was, it was only because a Golden Plover had briefly grabbed the limelight with its own display, a slow, buoyant ‘butterfly’ flight. Add in Ptarmigan (my bogey bird in the UK) displaying just a few yards from the door of my room, and more of those godwits just beyond the car park, and you could almost start to think there was no reason to leave the hotel at all. But leave it we did, at 7am on a gloriously sunny day (the weather was mild and dry throughout, even though we were just a few miles short of the Arctic Circle). Stopping off in nearby Husavik to pick up our second guide, we had an admiring look at the redpolls flocking to his feeders and marvelled at Golden Plovers feeding on suburban lawns, before heading off on an 18-hour odyssey round the north-east coast of Iceland. Even early, brief stops around Lon and Vikingavatn brought a distant Gyrfalcon, Puffin, Fulmar, Long-tailed Duck, Scaup, Raven, Barrow’s Goldeneye, Slavonian Grebe and, remarkably, around 200 Red-necked Phalaropes. It’s impossible to emphasise enough just how empty the landscape is of human clutter, meaning that if you couldn’t find something to watch just offshore, you were sure to turn something up on one of the many little pools inland. A little further on, Skjalftavatn is a rich wetland created by earthquakes in 1976 – we added Bonxie, Red-breasted Merganser, Barnacle and Pink-footed Goose and Merlin to our list, plus many more phalaropes. There’s a visitor centre at Asbyrgi, in the Vatnajokull National Park, where a deep glacial gorge features nesting Fulmars (the sea is a few miles away), and a small lake had a pair of Barrow’s Goldeneye. As we headed north along the coast, small estuaries and pools just behind the shoreline turned up pretty well every gull you’d expect, including Glaucous and Iceland, plus an Arctic Skua or two, while Scaup, Knot, and both Great Northern and Red-throated Divers were seen well. We were heading for the Langanes peninsula, right at the north-east corner of Iceland. A greater range of waders started to become obvious, including large numbers of Ringed Plover and Sanderling, Turnstone, Dunlin, and a few Purple Sandpipers. Kittiwakes were plentiful, with the odd Gannet fishing offshore, large rafts of Eider bobbed on the waves, and a single skua put the whole lot up like a Peregrine. It’s impossible to emphasise enough just how empty the landscape is of human clutter Out of the ordinary One of the pleasures of birding outside Britain is getting to grips with what’s common locally. In Iceland, for example, the locals barely give a second glance to a Redwing, even though theirs are typically a little larger and brighter than the Scandinavian birds we get in Britain in winter. One was even using a nestbox directly outside the hotel, and it was always a pleasure to see this beautiful thrush at close quarters. Elsewhere, Meadow Pipit is the default bird of open country, while Whooper Swan, Greylag Goose, Mallard, Wigeon, Teal, Tufted Duck, Oystercatcher, Golden Plover, Snipe, Whimbrel, Redshank, Arctic Tern, Kittiwake, Fulmar, White Wagtail and Raven were also pretty ubiquitous in appropriate habitat. Small birds, you’ll notice, were at a premium, the inevitable result of a landscape without much tree cover. Golden Plover Arctic Skua Asta Magnusdottir Asta Magnusdottir Matt Merritt