Last Sunday (6th) we had our independence day here in Finland. After breakfast I took my kids and we drove to Sastamala, pretty near Tampere to see Oriental Turtle Dove which was found two days ago. There was only one other guy searching the bird when we arrived, but soon more and more people arrived. It was nice to see Petteri, Mimosa and Matti Mäkelä from Pori there. People started to walk around and very soon few guys waived us that they spotted the bird in the field. I drove closer and went to take a look. Check. Then I took our stroller and Julius and very important stroller tick in the bag! Julius watched with my binoculars and I tried to take photos of the bird. Distance was some hundred meters and weather was very Grey and small rain, so I was lucky to get something. Bird was subspecies "meena" which is much more common here than "orientalis".
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| From the distance like this photos are totally crap like this.. |
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| Oriental Turtle Dove. |
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| Bird was walking in the back end of this field. |
After fifteen minutes we continued towards Pori and very possible Cackling Goose! About an hour drive and we arrived Maaviiki. Large flock of Whooper Swans and small flock of Geese around. It took me some time to relocate the small Canada Goose from the flock, but finally I saw it. Vilma came to the stroller and another in the bag! Also lone Taiga Bean Goose in the flock. Distance was again hundreds of meters so photo is again like this..
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| Bird was in the flock which is the white stripe in the middle of the picture.. So very far away. |
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| Cackling Goose in the middle watching right, I think! |
Better photos in Tarsiger.com. If this appears to be real Cackling Goose it is second record for Finland after bird in Lappeenranta back in 2014. So, we are talking about very rare bird!
Soon we left and I took kids to McDonald's to have some food and after that we still had time to twitch Caspian Gull from Konepajan ranta. Place was along the Kokemäki river and there was very large flock of large Gulls. I was fortunate to find the right individual from that flock before some reason all gulls took off and lost it. Almost all of the daylight I had left I used to find the bird. After the gulls came back to the roofs it started to be dark already, so we packed our stuff, I gave tablets to the kids and we had long drive back home ahead of us.
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| Konepajan ranta, Kokemäki River. Bird was standing on the roof of the buildings other side of the river.. |
Back in Helsinki around 6 pm. Originally we had plans to go and have some good times outside with kids at Pori, but the weather was so poor that even Vilma said that she stays rather inside the car than outside in the darkness.. Thank god both behaved nicely the whole day and we had great time in the car asking questions and listening Christmas songs.
I had three new stroller ticks in one day, three new winter month ticks (Dec-Feb) and one lifer if rarities committee some day accepts this Cackling Goose as a genuine vagrant. Features looks really good and I really think that it is a good bird.
More birding hopefully next weekend. Days are so short now that no change to go out after work. I also started to do quite a lot of gym lately, so that takes major part of my "free" time four days a week.
-Tom
