Since last time, I have spent almost every single day out birding. Many rare birds have been seen, including the extremely rare and increasingly endangered spoon billed sandpiper. Only a decade ago, the world population were estimated to be about 1200 birds. The last update, based on wintering birds earlier this year, estimates that only about 200 birds still exists in the world. This is only one of many wetland species that really is decreasing in numbers. This is largely due to habitat destruction along their migration route and in the wintering areas, such as those I recently witnessed on a short trip to South Korea. South Korea is amongst the worst in their league, and important mudflat areas are built down as we speak. I will strongly advise you to support Birds Korea, which is one of very few organisations that is working hard to protect this important habitat. South Korea alone holds enormous flocks of shore birds, and we had several flocks of about 30 000 birds including many threatened and endangered species such as great knot, black faced spoonbill, broad billed sandpiper, Norman's greenshank, Chinese egret and others). All these birds will disappear soon, if governments in their countries along the migration route don't immediately see the need for habitat protection. Back in Norway, I been very lucky this November to see no less than 3 birds with less than 10 records in Norway (isabelline wheatear, isabelline shrike and franklin's gull - the two latter ones were lifers). I also found a water pipit (about 20 records in Norway) and a few other semi rarities. In other words - an excellent month!

31 October 2008

The last months have been really busy, with rounding up the field season in the seabird monitoring project in the Barent's sea and then some weeks of birding at my local patch hoping for a few Siberian rarities to turn up. Even though photography has been rather slow these months, I finally managed to get a few nice shots of the tiny yellow browed warbler. A species breeding in Siberia, and normally wintering in South-east Asia. The normally very shy and difficult barred warbler was also an eastern vagrant that long has been on my wanted list what photography is concerned. The higlight birding wise though was Norway's 7th American golden plover ever, which I found at one of my local birding spots. Unfortunately, I didn't get any nice images of it.

27 August 2008

Fieldwork for the Norwegian Polar institute this summer took me to some of the most remote places on Svalbard. Cruising around, counting seabird colonies on the east side of the archipelago, made for some unforgettable scenery and experiences. Again, doing this for a living makes me feel certain about my choice of career and keep me away from the office. In between the work, we got some time to do photography as well. Even though birds are the main focus of the job, we can't avoid encountering some of the other wildlife such as walrus, arctic foxes and polar bear as we travel through the barren landscape. The pictured polar bear, met us on our way back to the zodiac after doing some counting on an island. It approached us to about 50m, before he got the smell of us and ran away. Even the flowers, such as the endemic svalbard poppy, get the deserved attention now and then from a birder. It's nice to get a touch of the untouched, as these areas can offer. It is getting more and more difficult on this planet.

3 August 2008

Fieldwork is taking me to many interesting places, and give me opportunity to explore and experience many new and rare bird and mammals. I really feel privileged to be able to live such a life even though it has its costs some times. The contrasts are big between shooting images of the rare and endemic heaviside dolphin in Namibia to drive into the ice sitting in a small rubber boat in the Arctic only a month and a half later. This time I give you a taste of the best of the two "poles" and try to enclose the circle with the grey phalarope that is the most colourful bird when it breeds in the Arctic where I am at the moment, but more grey and uniform when it arrives the wintering areas in the sea off Namibia in only a few months time. Turning to a more serious matter. The Norwegian government is still giving licence to ruin the Norwegian coastline with putting up inefficient wind turbines, and I hope one of the images this time of a white-tailed eagle manage to illustrate some of the challenges the wildlife in Norway is facing at the moment.

21 June 2008

This is the last update from the Southern Ocean work. A 20 year old dream came through and the trip became better than I could possibly imagine. Unfortunately the trip resulted in some serious changes in my personal life, and I haven't had the energy to produce much new stuff lately. The upside of it is that I now have more time to do photography than ever before. At the moment I am working with seabird monitoring in the Arctic, and if ice conditions permits, we will go to places which should produce some real rare and great photo opportunities alongside the important work. In the meantime, please enjoy the albatrosses from the south.

5 June 2008

Have been editing a lot more images from my Southern Ocean trip. I wanted to try to get the bad weather these seas are so famous for into my images. It's difficult! The waves were about 8 meters tall, and standing on the trawl deck of the boat, I several times had to run for both safety and to keep my camera gear away from the wet element when the waves were splashing into the aft of the boat. But standing low is crucial for getting a feel of the hugeness of this nature. I don't feel that I got the perfect image, but some were ok and I show them here. To get a scale for it, remember that the wandering albatross has a wingspan of about three and a half meters and a body length of one meter! The wandering albatross is according to my literature actually a group of four species impossible to identify down to species level in the field. However, I feel fairly certain that all my images of "wandering albatross" belongs to the species snowy albatross. Of new stuff I visited one of Scandinavia's most special birds, the capercailie. A very angry male that attacked me several times and I left with a few images and some bruises on my body as a memory of our meeting.

20 May 2008

The last weeks I had one of my best times in Norwegian nature, trying to capture wild wolverines onto the camera. This extremely shy large predator is one of my favourite mammals in the world, and after almost 80 hours in a hide it finally came to our bate during the light hours (barely). This species struggle in Norway due to almost 1/3 of the known Norwegian population is killed every year in legal hunting because the Norwegian government is afraid they will eat too many sheep! As a bonus during the waiting time, we had a nice adult white-tailed eagle several times at only 7 meters distance. From the Southern Ocean trip I show you some images of two very curious humpback whales which lingered around our boat for more than two hours while we were taking water sample with our CTD-equipment.

6 May 2008

February 2008 I was fortunate to get an assignment with Norwegian Polar Insitute in collaboration with the Institute of marine research in Norway to count seabirds in the Southern Ocean. A 20 year old dream was about to get realised, and 18 Feb. we left the harbour of Cape Town. Just so its said - nothing is more rewarding for a birder than watching the huge wandering albatrosses glide alongside the ship on an arm's length for days. In shear beauty, very few birds can compete with the elegance of the smart looking light-mantled albatross. These species are every bird watcher's dream to experience, and I now really understand why. Nothing can beat the view of a 3,5 meter snowy albatross glide between the ice bergs at 60 degrees south. The following updates will show some of my experiences during the 6 weeks long trip.

21 April 2008

Again some images from South Africa before I start editing all the Southern Ocean work. The aim was as said to pick up as many of the endemic species as possible that I hadn't seen before. Some of the species, like the aghulas long billed lark, barlow's lark, cape long billed lark and southern tchagra are really just constrained to a few square kilometres on this planet and are some of the rarest birds in the world. More highlights were when we after two nights out searching, finally managed to find cape eagle owl - a fairly widespread bird but extremely difficult to get good views of. Watching the African wildcat is also quite bizarre when they look very much like the cats that roam in my back yard in Norway - down in South Africa they are really shy and nocturnal hunters. Kgalagadi transfrontier park in the Kalahari is never disappointing and famous for all its raptors. I especially enjoyed one morning at a waterhole where no less than 9 different lanners were hunting for pigeons and sandgrouse - though mostly unsuccessful, at least one bird had luck and got its breakfast.

12 April 2008

Again I have to apologize for the late update. The last two months, I've been doing field work for the Norwegian Polar Institute in the Southern Ocean. However, before I entered the ship, I managed to visit some of my favourite national parks in South Africa. A week was to be spent in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier park in hope of getting some of the Kalahari specials onto the memory card. This task was unfortunately seriously altered when I was involved in a car crash (Europeans on the wrong side of the road) and had to spend a couple of days in the hospital. I then proceeded on a twitching trip to clean up all the endemic larks in the region. Succeeded well and my Southern African list has now climbed to about 600 species.

2 February 2008

The winter can be both boring and exciting. Boring because the light here up north really doesn't favour a bird photographer, when it's overcast or snowy (which is quite often actually this time of the year). On the other hand, those days when the sun is shining gives some really nice light conditions all day as the sun is standing really low in the horizon. It is just to find the right objects. Shooting images directly towards the sun under these conditions can give some nice atmosphere moods as well, and I really like experimenting under the winter light. However, one needs to be fast when the light on these latitudes is only present for about 5 hours a day during December and January. I also put in an image of a displaying pectoral sandpiper from last summer, one of the first observed to do so in Europe.