Square one - walking the line

For this years vacation we decided to volunteer for the University of Lund, counting birds as part of the larger European Bird Census effort. In theory it seemed like a good plan - get up north, stroll around enjoying great views and fauna while taking a few notes about the birds you see and hear. Basically that's what we do anyway when we're out birding, so there really shouldn't be any problems.

In reality it turned out to be quite a daunting task which really required a lot of physical effort. The way you go about counting birds is of course systematical, so forget about the strolling around and enjoying the views. You need to follow a straight line and deviate as little as humanly possible from that line, regardless of the terrain.



Furthermore you need to do this at a specified time of day (4am in the morning!) and at a specified pace, so forget about taking breaks, or doing it at a time of day that suits you.

In our case the first square was a Godforsaken piece of marshland squeezed in between a small lake and the bigger lake Torneträsk (click for map). Much of it was very wet, filled with mosquitoes and densely vegetated with a small form of birch called Fjällbjörk (direct translation is Fell birch, or Mountain Birch). It was close to impenetrable terrain. In the end it took us around eight hours to do the round and we fought every bit of the way to keep the pace up and to get it right.


Luckily, at that latitude the sun never sets at this time of year, so at least it was light when we climbed our rented mountain bikes for about an hour of biking to get there in time. It's also light enough to take a few photos, which we did, to remember this horrible ordeal.


Parts of the marshland was open and filled with large boulders from the ice age. The fields provided a nice break from the dense vegetation, but in the end it turned out to be almost as hard to balance your way over instable and sharp rocks as it was forcing your way through the undergrowth.

Our favorite parts were however the parts were nature had found a way to combine the rock fields, water and dense overgrowth! It was unbelievable and in the end we had to laugh about it - fighting your way through the marsh at five o'clock in the morning while trying to keep pace and direction while identifying and counting all the birds you hear and see.


Only one person is supposed to do the actual counting, so we split the tasks and Claudia did all the counting and I tried to keep pace and direction. Species wise it wasn't a gold mine, which was good since that meant that most species were familiar and could be counted without too much effort.



Bird of the day: Lövsångare -- Fitis -- Willow warbler -- Pouillot fitis -- Phylloscopus trochilus