Finnmark birds

A Common Crane strides with ease through dwarf birch and willow scrub on the edge of a mire in  Finnmark, arctic Norway.

I was there to continue helping with surveys and monitoring of birds. For more information, follow this link to the main part of the project, Broad-billed Sandpiper study. The study is still ongoing, as we have deployed geolocator tags on the sandpipers and aim the retrieve them next summer when the birds return from their wintering grounds. So, this post gives only a brief sample of some of the other birds I saw while in the area.

Whimbrel are one of the larger waders that breed in the tundra, especially on lichen-rich heaths or as in this case, cloudberry-crowberry dominated peaty heath next to a mire.

There were a few rainy days when all was quiet. This Ringed Plover was sitting tight on its nest next to a road. The birds colouring fitted well with the lichen-crusted ground.

Out on the mires, there were numerous Red-necked Phalaropes on the open water of tiny pools in the extensive swards of sedges and mosses.

These are great birds, my friends, as they eat hundreds and thousands of mosquitoes, picking them off the water surface or the leaves of waterside vegetation. The mosquitoes make working in the mires extremely difficult due to their incessant biting and swarming around face and hands.

This female Lapland Bunting was feeding on insects, hopefully mosquitoes, in a patch of peat hummocks covered with Labrador tea, cloudberry, crowberry and bilberry.

Her mate was close beside her all the time she was out in the open. The patterns of their markings are similar, but that of the male is much bolder. The flower beside him is Labrador tea.

Down in the valleys, where there are taller trees, woodland passerines are more common, like this female Common Redstart in a Scots pine wood.

Her partner might be more brightly coloured, but he still blended in well with the reds and greys of the pine bark.

It might seem that there is not much to see in the vast landscape of apparently endless mires and woods of Finnmark, but there are plenty, lots, of birds nesting and rearing their young there every summer. Just look a little more closely.

Ousted cuckoo?

An adult male Lapland Bunting Calcarius lapponicus 

While surveying birds in northern Norway I came across a Lapland Bunting nest, which is not too unusual as they are common birds in the tundra there, although there was something different about this one. There were chicks in the nest as well as an unhatched egg and an eggshell, again nothing unusual there, except that the eggshell was of the wrong colouring for a Lapland Bunting egg.

The eggshell was a dull blue colour with brown freckling,
unlike the grey-brown background with scribbly line markings of the bunting egg

I immediately thought of a Cuckoo Cuculus canorus having laid an egg in the nest, so I checked the young to see if any were a cuckoo. None were, so what had happened? Thinking it through, the only explanation I can think of is that the buntings had detected the cuckoo when it hatched and ousted it from the nest.

The cuckoo egg did not resemble those of the buntings. It was more like a composite match between a Meadow Pipit Anthus pratensis and a Red-Spotted Bluethroat Luscinia svecica - two other common passerines in the area, and likely species to be targeted by cuckoos. Pipit eggs are grey-brown with dark brown freckles, and bluethroat eggs are dull blue coloured with tiny faint freckles. Yet this egg seemed to still pass unnoticed by the hosts.

The cuckoo eggshell on the left, the unhatched bunting egg on the right

I checked the nest a few days later and all the chicks, four, were alive and similar in plumage - all were buntings. So it seems that a cuckoo had failed in its attempt to dupe the buntings into rearing its chick. They perhaps detected the cuckoo chick when it hatched as different from their own and ejected it. This must happen more often than we assume, for there is an arms race between cuckoos and their hosts. In this case the cuckoo seemed to have laid its egg too late for the chick to gain the advantage of hatching first and ousting the buntings' eggs or newly hatched chicks.

Then, why had the cuckoo laid its egg in a bunting nest, were there too few pipits or bluethroat nests with eggs for it to parasitise in this late cold Spring?

The growing bunting chicks