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....!