Hot pots and horses

Well, this blog-entry is pretty late... but it was officially the First Day Of Summer on 19 March, which is an Icelandic National Holiday. As it happens, I had actually been working in the West Fjorður, but at the end of the day I dashed back to town (a 3 hour dash!) and then my friend Marí and I spent the next 4 hours in this hot-pot, or heittur pottur as is said over here. Not a bad way to celebrate the return of the sun, we thought.

And I really should introduce my new four-legged pal: meet Embla the Icelandic horse.

She is just being borrowed by me... but what a great horse, and how nice to ride again after several horse-less years! However, it´s not quite like 'riding a bike again' as over here there is a different style of riding: Icelandic horses do a rather comfortable 4-step gait called 'tölt', in addition to the regular 2-step trot that a horse normally does. Long and short of it is that tölt is tremendously comfortable to ride, (there´s none of this 'up-down-up-down', etc of trot), and the horses are - mostly! - sensible, relaxed and calm. The Icelandic horse has a 4 month holiday between September and January, which is really great for them. At this time they are just out on the land, doing what horses love best: eating and relaxing. It makes them very happy to work for the rest of the year, and sets them up well for the cold winter as they grow big hairy coats during this non-ridden time.

So, in a country where horses are both eaten and ridden, people here have much respect for their horses. In Stykkishólmur recently there was even a church service to bless the horses (no, the horses didn´t exactly go into church, but they all went to the church and ate some grass in the fields whilst the service went ahead...).

Springtime

Iceland is an important staging area for tens (hundreds?) of thousands of migratory shorebirds and waterfowl that 'stop-off' here to feed and rest a little, before flying on to more northerly breeding grounds. For birds breeding in Greenland and North-Eastern Canada and travelling from southern Europe and even Africa, Iceland serves as an attractive temperate-ish island in the middle of an otherwise very long single-trek north. Birds that have been wintering in the balmy south have just started to come back up to Iceland over the last few weeks, along with Icelandic breeding birds that will stop here for the summer. This photo shows part of a 1000-strong flock of pink footed geese, a species which breed in Icelands highlands.

My job presently is to count them! The idea is to get some figures on relative numbers at specific sites that I re-visit on successive weeks, to see which wader bird species are around and what sort of numbers of each species are out there. I´ve been doing this work for a few weeks now. It involves driving along bumpy roads, craning out of the window to look out over mudflat areas that might contain vast numbers of shorebirds.... trying to stay on the road whilst looking out the window and simultaneously fine-tuning to the BBC World Service is turning into quite an art!

Thankfully, it seems that Spring is Here, which means that although I will definitely miss this sort of weather...

There might be a bit less of this... (this first photo was not actually taken in black and white..!)

And there should be more and more of this...

Ahhh....!