Birding

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been taking regular walks near my home, a part of Helsinki that luckily includes lots of woods and some farmland. These 8-kilometer or so mini-hikes were meant to fill the gap between the cross-country skiing season (that is, if there actually had been a cross-country season this winter worthy of the name) and the time when trails were free enough of snow and ice for bicycling season to commence.

Anyway, on one of those walks a couple of weeks ago I was strolling along a broad trail bordering a large field of last year’s rye stubble that had not yet been tilled. A young man approaching on a bicycle stopped a few meters ahead of me, reached into the pack on his back and pulled out a kind of staff, on which was mounted a pair of large binoculars. He then started quickly scanning the expanse of the sepia-colored field to the north.

This is typical around here, especially this time of year, and in autumn.

Often along the road leading to the nearby Haltiala farm (one of the only two working farms within the city-limits of Helsinki) you will see men standing behind tripods supporting telescopes or large binoculars trained on the empty pastures and fields before them. Along the forest trails you will meet men (again, it’s usually men, for some reason), with powerful optics hanging around their necks.

The Painted Bunting, one of the more colorful residents of Georgia
Photo by Pancomo

Bird-watching is a fairly big thing in Finland. At least, it’s much more popular than in the States, where I’m sure the hobby still enjoys a reputation as a pastime only for nerdy or earth-child types. That’s unfair, I’m sure, since actual bird-watchers (as opposed to caricatured ones) are a diverse bunch. I’ve understood that even someone like Hank Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs and Treasury Secretary to George Bush, is an avid birder.

Still, by comparison, birding in Finland is much more mainstream, not surprising when you consider how passionate nature-lovers Finns are. Along wetlands and other prime habitats, towers have been erected specifically for bird-watching, and I know Finns who are quite seriously into photographing some of this country’s winged wildlife.

Recently a TV reporter ventured out to Utö, a tiny island outpost in the Baltic some 60 kilometers from the mainland, to chat with a trio of hardy birders (it still looked cold out there) who where monitoring the northward migration over the Gulf of Finland. Today's Helsingin Sanomat featured a story on this weekend's competition, held every spring, between bird-watchers manning over 300 towers around the country. The good-natured rivalry was won by a tower-team in the western city of Pori, which spotted a total of 104 species in eight hours. 

At this time of the year, on Yle's  morning news show they report which birds (and bees, and in fact, all kinds of other creatures like snakes) can be expected to appear that week in different parts of the country. I’m pretty sure I never saw something similar on Good Morning America.

All this has started me thinking I should take up birding again. I used to do it more or less seriously when I was young, and I still have my first bird book, “Birds of North America” a Golden Field Guide, inscribed with the date I purchased it, Sept. 2, 1974. I recall buying it in a gift shop on Mt. Mitchell, the highest peak in the US east of the Mississippi, on a family trip just before my 18^th birthday.

My wife also still has the Finnish bird book she used as schoolchild, and we recently noticed that she and I had put a similar “x” by each bird we identified. And that, of course, is a big part of the hobby – not only “watching” the familiar birds you see everywhere in the neighborhood, but also looking out for less-common species you can add to a growing list of birds you have seen. I stopped doing that in 1987. In this way, I am a lapsed birder.

It’s not that I don’t pay attention to the birds around me. I’m familiar with the grebes and swans and terns (uikut, joutsenet, tiirat) I see when I go kayaking off the coast of Helsinki. I often watch the tits (tiaiset) in the fruit trees outside our window or the pheasants (fasaanit) who occasionally stalk through our yard.

But for quite a long time, I’ve not always bothered to study the other little descendants of dinosaurs that I run across, at least not enough to know if they’re a new species that should be on my list.

Some of our bird books.

I recently managed to dig up the old notebook I used to record my most significant sightings. By the time I stopped birding regularly, I had listed over 185 species. I have no idea if this is a lot, or merely typical for the slacker-kind of birder that I apparently am.

My list includes, of course, those ubiquitous birds, like Robins, Common Crows, Red-tail Hawks, or Blue Jays, that anyone growing up in Georgia would have recognized without ever cracking open a field guide. That kind of common natural-history knowledge was handed down by parents, at least by my parents.

The first bird I identified on my own was probably a Yellow-shafted Flicker. Or maybe it was the Dark-eyed Junco, a little sparrow that in North Georgia we called “Snow Bird” because they appeared only in winter. (On some mountain trails in North Carolina, these little birds used to startle us summer hikers when they burst out from their hiding places right at our feet.)

I continued adding to my list after I moved to Athens, where I spent six years studying and working at the University of Georgia. Especially after my college roommates had graduated and moved away, I would go off on solitary bird-watching walks, often along the (then) undeveloped banks of the Oconee River, where I would also see painted turtles sunning themselves on half-submerged logs, or at Sandy Creek Nature Center, where I sometimes volunteered as a guide to groups of school children. That’s where I saw my first Green Heron and Yellow-rumped Warbler (a great name!).

A great thing about bird-watching is that whenever you travel to a different part of the world, you can easily add to your list birds that, while they are completely ordinary in their home surroundings, are quite exotic to you.

Some of my most memorable bird-watching was in the Okefenokee Swamp, near Folkston, Georgia. One of my college roommates had moved there to teach, and on visits to see him, I would make forays into the swamp, either by canoe or on foot along the trails and boardwalks of Chesser Island (which also had a bird tower). Even though I barely penetrated the interior of the swamp, America’s greatest pristine wetlands, I entered an environment completely different from North Georgia – and virgin bird-watching terrain to me, with such new species as Red-cockaded Woodpeckers and White Ibises. A great place to spot alligators, as well.

Other fruitful locales for adding new birds to my list in the past have been Sapelo Island on the Georgia coast (Anhingas, Ospreys, Painted Buntings), the Everglades National Park (Bald Eagles, Roseate Spoonbills, American Coots), many places out West (Roadrunners, Clark’s Nutcrackers, Dippers), and northern India (Purple Sunbirds, Blue-tailed Bee-eaters, Blossom-headed Parakeets – more great names, by the way!).

And, of course, in Finland are many birds that I hadn’t seen until I washed up on these rocky shores. White Wagtails, Mute Swans, and Hooded Crows are common here, but were all new to me, along with Common Eiders, Ruddy Turnstones, and the ever-popular Great Tit. (In America, we avoid making this last one sound like a George Carlin routine by adding “–mouse” to the name, as in the Tufted Titmouse, which is also on my list).

While Finland doesn’t have nearly the diversity of birds that the US does (and there are some species it shares with North America, such as the Common Raven – one of my favorite birds), there are still lots of lintuja here I haven’t yet added to my list. 

Maybe it’s time I dust off my binoculars and join all those guys silently scanning the fields of Haltiala.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1c2-0jaRlfc)

The Raven, an ominous presence from the 

slickrock of Utah to the boreal forests of Finland.

Family Vacation

This is the time of the year when I start thinking seriously about summer vacation.  It’s also the time of the year when I realize it’s almost too late to think about summer vacation.  Back when we used to go to the States almost every year, March was about the last chance to find five decently priced seats on flights across the Atlantic. 

Delicate Arch.  Courtesy: National Park Service.

Maybe that’s still true, though I wouldn't know as we’re no longer often in the market for such trips.  Our summer travels to Georgia – trips to give my kids and parents a chance to spend some time together – are now a thing of the past.  My parents have passed on, and my kids are no longer kids.  The last trip we made to the States together (and maybe the last ever) was eight years ago, which somehow doesn’t seem possible.  It’s a shame it’s already been so long, but at least it was a great vacation. 

On that holiday, we combined, as we often did when the kids were small, a visit to Georgia with a trip to a meeting that my wife was attending.  As a university researcher, she is expected to attend once a year an international scientific meeting in her field, most of which are held in the summer, and often in North America at various locations.  Each summer there were several meetings to choose from, almost all equally relevant and useful for her work, so she has often been able to pick the one with the most promising vacation possibilities.  Over the years, we’ve used this model to weave our holiday plans into my wife’s conferences at such places as Maine, Maryland, Montreal and Oregon. 

Usually, I’d fly over with the kids to spend a week or two in Georgia, before meeting up my wife for the second phase of the holiday.  That’s what we did in 2004.  After, a week in Georgia with the kids, the four of us flew to Denver to meet my wife, who was flying in for a meeting in Utah.  We, however, took our sweet time (and the scenic route) getting to Salt Lake City. 

The boys on a beach in Maine, 1994.

It had long been my dream to take the kids to Yellowstone National Park, one of the true wonders of nature and a place I had not visited myself since a trip there with my parents 25 years earlier. 

It was one of the best road trips ever.  We crossed Wyoming in a day and a half.  We stopped at the grave of Sacagawea (the Lemhi Shoshone woman who as a teenager helped guide the Lewis and Clark expedition across the Rockies).  We made a side trip, at my insistence, to South Pass (exactly the kind of natural gateway for wagon traffic across the Continental Divide that Lewis and Clark were hoping to discover, but didn’t). 

In the Grand Tetons, we saw grizzlies and bison, drove through deserted sagebrush on torturously slow roads, and walked a trail freshly littered with bear scat.  (Also, in a grocery store in Jackson, we happened to meet a Finnish man who apparently has lived there for decades – lucky guy.)  In Yellowstone, we saw all the world-famous geysers, hot springs, mudpots, fumaroles and waterfalls.  We took a rafting trip on the Yellowstone River just north of the park and saw more bears and bison, plus some wapiti. 

It was completely satisfying, and hopefully something the kids will remember fondly.  Leaving Yellowstone, we drove south to Utah and the site of my wife’s meeting at Snowbird, a ski resort situated at almost 8000 feet (2400 meters) at the head of a steep canyon in the Wasatch Range east of the city.  

While my wife attended talks and panel discussions, me and the kids hiked along nearby ridges and visited the Timpanogos caves south of Snowbird.  In the evenings, we hung out in the resort’s heated outdoor swimming pool while the air temperature hovered in the 40s.  Jesus, that was a great place! 

The kids in the Wasatch Range, 2004.

On the return trip, we stopped at Moab, Utah, home to Arches National Park, a kind of Mecca for me since it was here that one of my favorite writers, Edward Abbey, worked as a park ranger, a period of his life he immortalized in his classic book of nature writing, Desert Solitaire.  

We also visited nearby Canyonlands National Park, with its immense views of stark canyon landscape surrounding the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers.  At Canyonlands, we navigated our rented Dodge Durango down the scariest stretch of jeep road I have ever been on, down into a world of naked sandstone carved by the course of the Colorado River.  After reaching the bottom of the escarpment, we didn’t see another human being until we finally emerged once again on paved road near Moab four or five hours later. 

Before finally returning to Denver to catch the plane back to Europe, we made a quick trip to the prehistoric cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado, a spot my wife and I had visited in the early 80s.  We also saw a bear there. 

It was an epic trip, a trip of a lifetime, really.  I’m hoping to do something similar again.  Maybe a road trip from Los Angeles to Colorado via the Grand Canyon.  It won’t happen this year.  The only meeting my wife is thinking of attending this summer is in Ottawa, which means that perhaps a road trip around the Great Lakes is in order (I’ve never been to Michigan!). 

Even if we do have a chance to make that California trip someday, I have to face the fact that it won’t be with the whole family.  They have already mostly left the nest, flown the coop.  And maybe it wouldn’t be that easy to talk them into it anyway, even if they were all still living at home.  As much as I loved the trip to Yellowstone, I’m sure not all the passengers enjoyed every minute of sitting in the car on a 3000-mile (4800-kilometer) drive, no matter how spectacular or historic the scenery passing by might be.  

Delicate Arch, and the raven who 

kept a close eye on us.

View from Green River Overlook

Canyonlands National Park

Driving on the Shafer Trail jeep road

Canyonlands National Park 

The Goose Neck bend of the Colorado River