A longer day-trip
I have done some crazy things before in my life, but the weekend from the 19th to 20th of November will be remembered as one of the craziest. I was supposed to be either in Bongariliitto meeting in Helsinki or BirdLife meeting in Lohja or seeing lots of old friends as they had arranged a meeting in Lappeenranta and I had planned to be in Lappeenranta on Saturday and in Lohja on Sunday as I was a council-member of Bongariliitto in BirdLife, but I got a small injury druring the week and I couldn’t participate on sports that my friends had planned for Saturday. And as I hadn’t booked myself anywhere else on Saturday, I ended up doing something completely different
On Friday afternoon my friend Kalle Larsson was asking other WP-twitchers to join him to twitch American Tree Sparrow to Skåne, Sweden. I wasn’t interested in the beginning but when there were already 3 participants and the flight prices were reasonable, I booked myself in!
So at 2 a.m. on Saturday I started to drive towards Helsinki-Vantaa airport. At 6:30 I met Kalle, Jari Pitkäkoski and Janne Kilpimaa there and an hour later our plane left towards Copenhagen, Denmark.
We landed to Copehagen ar 9:10 a.m. local time and soon we had our rental Skoda Superb and were driving towards Malmö. We crossed long Öresund bridge which cost us 80 euros, so almost as much as the rental car. And after 45 minutes driving we were in Staffanstorp.
There were lots of other twitchers in Staffanstorp and we walked along muddy tracks to see the places where American Tree Sparrow had still been on the previous afternoon. There we met several familiar birders: Swedish Richard Ek and Jesper Segergren, Danish Christian Leth and British Richard Bonser, Josh Jones, Ernest Davis and also other familiar faces. Swedes had of course already seen the bird and also Josh and Ernie had managed to twitch it on previous afternoon but now they had been searching it with about 100 other twitchers from everywhere. It really seemed that the bird was gone. I was still pretty optimistic. but anyway we decided to leave everyone else to search for the bird and continue about 100 kilometers further to twitch a Red-necked Stint that had been twitchable for some days and was still in Vejbystrand. There was also an American Black Duck nearby, so there was anyway a possibility for all of us to get a lifer. And of course we would drive quickly back if the American Tree Sparrow would be found.
We were mostly driving along a huge motorway, so it took only a bit more than an hour to get to Vejbystrand and there we could see a big group of twichers along the shore. We hurried there and soon found out that the Red-necked Stint was only 100 meters from us but sleeping with a flock of Dunlins on a reef but behind the Dunlins and rocks. We tried to see it from every angle but as we had only two scopes with us it was pretty frustrating. It seemed that the locals could see the bird time to time raising its head behind other birds and rocks but even though we were told where to watch exactly, we couldn’t see it at all.
After a couple of hours trying Kalle started to plan to leave to twitch the American Black Duck but then all the birds awaked and started to move. And of course some birders could see the stint again, but they the all flushed and flew straight towards north. We couldn’t even see any smaller bird on the flock.
The atmosphere was pretty bad as we had no idea what to do. Some of the Swedes had seen the bird and some just gave up and left to their cars. But a smallish group started to walk along the coast towards north and we of course followed them. After 1 kilometer walking we heard that the flock had landed to the coast in front of us and there we could soon see birders watching in front of them.
But the situation was now even worse! There was a small rocky island about 100 meters from the shore and the flock had landed behind the rocks so there were only a few Dunlins visible.
After some waiting Kalle decided to leave to try to see the duck and we had only 1 scope left. Again we were a bit frustrated as it was difficult to get any information from the locals, if they were sure that the stint was there at all, or were they just guessing. We also had no idea if this was normal behavior for the flock, we had thought these birds would also feed sometimes.
After some more waiting we met Olof Jönsson who we had contacted before the trip and also during the day for a couple of times. He had arrived just before the flock had flushed and of course he had also managed to see the stint for a couple of seconds then. The flock must have been behind the rocks from the angle where we had been watching as I had been using the scope then. He told that the bird had been very difficult also earlier but not this difficult…
We were again trying to see the flock from every angle and then walked 100 meters further to the sand-dune where we could get a little bit higher to see the island a little bit better but of course more distant. There we could see some tens of Dunlins but still no smaller stint with them.
Most of the twitchers were giving up when the light was getting worse with cloudy weather in the afternoon, but we had to keep on trying. Also Olof had to leave and he wished us luck when we said goodbye to him. Kalle was still trying to find the duck without luck and we had all our warm clothes in the car, so we started to feel pretty cold too.
Then suddenly one older birder got a phone-call and he had heard us talking English with Olof and he told us that someone could see the stint from the dyne. We hurried towards the dune and could see that the group of birders in a place where we had been earlier weren’t watching anything but another group even further but in different angle were clearly watching something and there were more and more twitchers arriving towards them.
We climbed to the dune and almost immediately I decided to ask, if I could watch through someone’s scope to see the bird or at least to find out the exact place where they were watching. And there it really was – the Red-necked Stint – between some Dunlins! It was distant and the light wasn’t too good anymore but with a good scope I could see it was clearly a small stint with short bill and short feet. It also looked like less roundish that Little Stint would have been. But of course I would have wanted to see this very interesting and difficult to identify bird much better but after all this waiting I was pretty happy to see it at all! Jari and Janne K. also saw the bird through other birders scopes and soon Jari had found it with his own Swarovski too. When I was watching the bird once again with Jari’s scope the bird suddenly flew one meter left and behind the rocks. But after some time it had walked back to the same spot where it had been earlier. But the light really started to get too bad to see anything except the small size of the bird anymore, so soon we also decided to start walking back towards the small harbor where we had first arrived.
We walked to do some shopping to the village and after some waiting Kalle arrived to pick us up. Kalle hadn’t been lucky and after all he hadn’t seen any of the 3 birds we had been hoping to see. Luckily he was the only one who had seen Red-necked Stint earlier and even in Finland.
Kilpimaa was driving again and after an hour and half we were in Denmark again. We stopped to eat and fill the tank and once we got back to our car, we had got a parking ticket – 100 €! So we really weren’t enjoying our trip. Anyway I was pretty happy that I had got at least one WP-tick, but of course the American Tree Sparrow had been the target number one on this trip, but it hadn’t been found at all anymore and it never was seen anymore.
Once we had parked our car to the parking hall, we dropped the key to the office; we still had to pay the parking ticket. But soon we had to hurry to catch our plane which was leaving very soon.
Our flight left at 8:10 p.m. and we landed to Helsinki 25 minutes earlier than the schedule at 10:20. We said goodbye to each other and soon I was driving towards Lohja. I was in Kisakallio at 11:30 p.m. and I still went to see some friends that were still spending evening after the BirdLife meetings. Hanna had also been there for the whole day. At 00:30 a.m. it was time to go to sleep.
On Sunday we had BirdLife council meeting which started at 9 a.m. and ended at 1 p.m. Hanna was again chosen as the vice-president of the BirdLife Finland government. In the afternoon we visited my parents in Kirkkonummi before we started a long drive to Parikkala. We were luckily at home in humane time but at least I was very tired. It had been a long weekend!
J.A.