Mute swan - Cygnus olor
I was in Stockholm for work, and had a chance to spend a few days in this beautiful city. We absorb images of Scandinavia from stories and books in childhood; Stockholm reinforces all of them. A bunch of fleshy, gross cygnets swim by? It's impossible not to immediately think of "The Ugly Duckling". Even in the city, one can see a range of birds not found in North America, some small avian dramas and occasionally something new or surprising. This diary describes some common birds of northern Europe, with a little history thrown in. Sweden has become something of a refuge for both birds and people, so indulge me in a short digression about refugees at the end of this diary.
Northern Sweden is vast and wild, but unfortunately time limitations and work obligations prevented me from getting into the wilderness. Swedish law allows anyone to hike across private property, and the whole nation is a paradise for backpackers and hikers. So let me start right off with three photographs of fantastic Swedish birds that I didn't see, but that I sure want to: (L) Eagle owl - one of the world's largest and most powerful owls. (C) Black woodpecker, the dapper European relative of our pileated woodpecker, and (R) Smew, a truly beautiful European merganser.
(L) M. Mecnarowski (C) A. Rae, (R) D. Daniels, all Creative Commons
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If you have only a few hours in Stockholm, Djurgården is a great place to go birding. This wooded isle in the middle of the city served a dual role as royal hunting preserve and retirement community for disabled sailors. These days, the Swedish government has preserved Djurgården as a nature reserve and park, in much the same way Central Park is an oasis of nature in the middle of NYC.
Djurgården now and in 1535
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Fieldfare Turdus pilaris
Walking through the forest, I almost stepped on this fieldfare, a small thrush. "Feldefare" in Anglo-Saxon meant "traveler through the fields", and this bird migrates from Scandinavia into the UK and central Europe during the winter, wandering here and there in search of food. Like its relative the American robin, the fieldfare specializes in berries and earthworms. This bird's scientific name,
Turdus pilaris (Linnaeus-1758), contains yet another link to Sweden: The inventor of taxonomy, Carl von Linne (a.k.a. Linnaeus) was was from Sweden, and he described this species in his first edition of Systema Naturae. Naming forces one to to establish logical relationships between species, which leads to questioning how one species is related to another, whether species are static or mutable, and what exactly a species
is . Without Linnaeus, there would have been no Darwin. Whenever you see "Linnaeus" at the end of a scientific name, you know it's one of the first species formally described by science. It would seem to be quite a pedigree to get one's name in the first published taxonomy... but like having a collection tag signed by Charles Darwin tied on your toe, it's probably of very little practical value to the bird.
Here are three other common passerines: (L) A juvenile European blackbird, Turdus merula. (C) The great tit, Parus major, the Swedish equivalent of a chickadee. This is one of the few European birds that is actually more colorful than its North American counterpart. We are lucky to have so many brilliantly colorful Neotropical migrants! (R) The white wagtail Motacilla alba. Wagtails are exclusively old world birds with the exception of two species which just barely make it into Alaska. I have often wondered why they are not more common in North America, as nothing else seems to occupy quite the same niche. They are found wherever there are muddy algae-rich shores or wet pastures, feeding off of sand flies and other small invertebrates, and constantly wagging their long tails up and down. All three made it into Linnaeus' Systema Naturae.
And now for a bird I wasn't expecting... the barnacle goose, Branta leucopsis. These seem to occupy the same niche in Stockholm that Canada geese do in Chicago, converting grass to feces which they liberally deposit on sidewalks and football fields.
Barnacle geese nest in arctic Greenland, Novaya Zemlya and Svalbard, and migrate south to winter in Scotland, Ireland and Netherlands. Some birds from Novaya Zemlya in the Russian arctic seem to have decided that the long commute no longer made sense, as Sweden is so tolerant and hospitable to migrants. They started breeding on islands in the Baltic, and to everyone's surprise, adapted quickly to the urban environment.
Historically, these geese were never seen in the summer and all sorts of legends came about regarding where they came from, and how they reproduced. A writer named Giraldus Cambrensis wrote a natural history of Ireland called Topographica Hiberniae in 1187. He believed that barnacle geese "do not breed and lay eggs like other birds, nor do they ever hatch any eggs, nor do they seem to build nests in any corner of the earth." Instead, he came across gooseneck barnacles on driftwood and somehow convinced himself that barnacle geese actually began life as sessile marine arthropods rather than fluffy chicks. "Barnacle" was originally the name for this species of goose. The marine crustacean is named after the bird rather than vice-versa!
Interestingly, this theory had one big self-serving advantage: Irish priests argued that since barnacle geese were generated by the sea and not hatched, their meat was not exactly meat, and therefore God smiled upon those who roast barnacle geese on fast days. Pope Innocent III wasn't buying it. He didn't dispute the obvious absurdity that barnacle geese developed from barnacles, but determined that a roast goose, no matter the circumstances of its birth, was still meat. In 1215, he issued an edict banning their consumption on fast days.
I saw other waterfowl, including some that were familiar to me (female red-breasted merganser, Mergus serrator), one that was new (ferruginous duck, Aythya nyroca and one that has me puzzled. Anyone know what the mystery duck is? It's a diving duck, only about the size of a golden eye, and too small to be a white-winged scoter.
Red-breasted merganser, Mergus serrator Ferruginous duck, Aythya nyroca mystery diving duck
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Well, now we've left Djurgården so let's take a quick diversion into gulls and corvids. Even in late July, it gets light at 3:30 AM and in the early morning hours the people sleep and the city is taken over by birds. I confess to a fondness for gulls - loud, brash, elegant. Here are two - (L) the European version of the herring gull, Larus argentatus. (R) the lesser black-backed gull, Larus fuscus. I probably saw half a dozen species of gulls, but am highlighting these pictures for two reasons: First, the image of herring gulls eating drowned rats in the harbor seems timeless - the image could just as easily be from 1625 as 2014. Second, the lesser black-backed gull is just too pretty a bird not to show.
No diary about birds in Europe would be complete without mentioning corvids, maybe my favorite family of birds. Stockholm is a clean city, but I came across a small drama on a side alley in which two gulls and several jackdaws were ripping apart a trash bag. The gulls behaved like out-of-control teenagers, screaming and flailing at the bag, and the jackdaws nervously pecked at the bag from the other side. A big hooded crow perched above, patiently waiting while the other birds did the work. A mouse ran out of the bag. The crow suddenly flew down and ate the mouse while the other birds and I looked on, stunned. I was pretty sure that this was a deliberate feeding strategy. The photo to the left is that hooded crow Corvus cornix a couple minutes before it caught the mouse. On the right is the western jackdaw, Corvus monedula, a small black crow named by Linneaus after its supposed habit of picking up coins. Jackdaws are about twice the weight of a starling, but far smaller than our common North American crow. The hooded crows in Sweden are bigger than those farther south, almost as big as a raven.
So what was I doing in Sweden? The US embassy sponsored a series of events on LGBT refugee issues for Pride Week in Sweden. My organization in the US provides pro bono representation to LGBT asylum seekers, and I've been doing some policy work on LGBT refugee issues outside the US. It was also an opportunity to see my friend E.K., who ran a safe house in Damascus, Syria from 2007 until 2009 for LGBT Iraqi refugees in transit to Lebanon and Europe. (E.K. is a real-life M. Gustave, if any of you have seen The Grand Budapest Hotel.) We funded the safe house through an Iraqi intermediary in London, who ended up ripping off some of the money. E.K. was honest, and despite the risks and corruption, he helped dozens of gay men and lesbians to safety. The Syrians finally caught him, beat him severely and deported him to Iraq. UNHCR helped get him released, and we hid him in Kurdistan, which is not exactly gay friendly, until Sweden granted him refugee status. He now is a Swedish citizen and is making a living as a fashion designer, which was his dream. It's good to remember that for each idiot jihadi from Europe who rejects the Enlightenment and runs off to join the Islamic State, there is an E.K. out there, moving in the opposite direction, who knows the value of a human life. Anyway, the photo at (L) is of a woman and her beagle in Stockholm's huge pride parade, and the photo on the (R) shows E.K. - on the left - looking ten years younger than he did when I last saw him.
So what's new in your location this last week?