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.

Formidable Formica

Finland rightly has a reputation for great northern scenery and nature, including some abundant wildlife.

Most people from the temperate world – if they ever have cause to think about it at all – probably imagine Finland to be a land of moose, bears, and reindeer. They might also think of swans and other waterfowl. All of that is true, of course. If forced to consider insects, some people might recall hearing rumors that here be monster mosquitoes. Very true, indeed.

However, there is one very prominent form of six-legged wildlife that most people (myself included, before I came here) would never have associated with this Nordic landscape.

A Finnish anthill, somewhere in Savo.

Ants are everywhere in Finland. That’s no great surprise, since there is no place on earth without ants. (Well, except Antarctica, ironic when you consider that continent’s name. It's  the “arctica” of ants, isn't it?)

What is surprising in the case of Finland is how conspicuous ants are. In subtropical Georgia, you of course see ants scurrying over the ground almost anywhere you want to look. But you don’t normally pay attention to their homes, usually just marked by a sprinkling of dirt surrounding a tiny hole in the ground. They are easy to overlook, at least in North Georgia. In Finland, that is not a problem.

Ant nests are huge here. They can easily be a meter (three feet) tall, rising out of the green forest floor like a brown pyramid covered in thousands of energetic worker ants.

The sheer size of Finnish ant colonies, teeming with hundreds of thousands of the little buggers, means its best to give them a wide berth. Except that some Finns – living up to a certain national character that can only be described as quirky (some might say masochistic) –  make a point of doing just the opposite.

Leaf-cutting ants. Not found in Finland.

Among one of the strangest of strange Finnish “sports” (and there are some strange ones), “anthill sitting” is one whose appeal is probably lost on anyone who is not a Finn (and, to be honest, most Finns as well).

The goal of this contest is to see who can sit the longest on top of an angry nest of ants. Oh, yes, and to give the ants a sporting chance (they are, after all, pretty small), the human contestants do this in the buff. I think alcohol is often involved. I know that would have to be the case for me to take part.

Needless to say, there are better ways to appreciate ants. I once worked for a botanist at the University of Georgia who studied leaf-cutting ants in South America. These ants are famous for snipping off bits of leaves, which they carry back to their nests to use as fertilizer for their actual foodstuff, fungus. It is basically a kind of farming.

I always hoped my boss would need me to join one of his expeditions to the Amazon, but it never happened. I did eventually get to see leafcutters in action, however, when my four-year-old son and I visited the Parque Natural Metropolitano, a patch of tropical forest in Panama City, Panama.

On a Finland-related note: the Parque Metropolitano is used as a study site by the nearby US Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, which employs a large construction crane to access the 30-meter-high (90-foot) forest canopy. The crane was, I believe, provided by a well-known Finnish machine company and paid for, in part, by the Finnish government. A surprising reminder of Suomi in the jungle.

Young explorer in Panama.

There, under that tropical canopy, I experienced maybe my only true David Attenborough moment when we happened upon a trail of leaf cutting ants marching in a straight line over the forest floor. As we followed this tiny procession of hundreds of ants, each one holding a slice of green leaf, the line joined with another line of ants, coming from a different direction and all carrying, instead of leaves, some sort of red berries. The converged lines of leaf- and berry-carriers continued together, moving relentlessly toward their distant nest. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in the woods.

Still, as we watched this miniature parade, it somehow didn’t occur to me to follow them to their nest and sit on it. Guess I’m not Finnish enough.