November 2003
November – Wet and dark
November was pretty awful. Everyone was waiting when the winter arrives. For a while it was some minus degrees and snow on the ground, but every time it came again plus degrees and rains and snow melted away.
I think it was three sunny days in whole month! And all those days I was working! So I couldn’t do almost any photographing. I could say all pictures I took were X-ray pictures at work.
Because it wasn’t snowy it was really dark. Days were very cloudy and foggy. So when I went to work it was STILL dark and when I came home it was ALREADY dark!
At weekends we made some short bird trips with Hanna, but dark landscape wasn’t very inspiring. We couldn’t find almost any better bird species. Some late arctic water birds were found in the beginning of month. In Punkaharju Hirvikoski and Parikkala Simpelejärvi and Siikalahti visits weren’t too bad either. Red-throated Diver, Great Crested Crebes, Common Scoters, Velvet Scoters, Long-tailed Ducks, Tufted Ducks, Scaups and Smews were still found. Maybe the best bird was very late Slavonian Grebe at Oravaniemi. At Saari we almost hit with our car to flying Woodcock. Of course a lot of Whooper Swans were still on the lakes.
The only picture tick I got in November was a Goshawk, which finally let met take two pictures before it got tired of photographer crouching behind the car and continued to the deeper forest.
Once again we visited Siberian Jay forest. Of course we had to visit there because finally Hannu Siitonen’s book about just these birds were published.
If I could take almost any bird pictures I wasn’t lucky with other pictures either. At 8th of November it was still nice and cloudless and I could get nice pictures of moon, but at next night it was totally cloudy – it was impossible to even sense the moon eclipse.
A flock of Black Grouses which was moving at Siikalahti area let me take some kind of pictures of themselves.
At the last day of November we had a little preparation to next weekend’s Independence Day bird rally. The weather was still really bad! It was again +5 degrees, no snow, cloudy and extremely foggy. Visibility was something like 100 meters. So we couldn’t find many birds. Two hours birding produced only 16 species. Best one was Lesser Spotted Woodpecker – not very promising for the rally!