Strictly for the Birds

If all talk of birding and twitching and SBJs and spotted this and red-breasted that bore you to tears then you have my permission to skip this post. It's all about birds and nothing but the birds.

The joy of Iceland for the bird photographer is that there are relatively few species, but most of them are abundant and so many of them are ones we consider "charismatic". By this I mean the ones which are exciting to watch, have beautiful plumage, evocative calls, graceful flight, mellifluous song or appealing ways of going about their lives. Puffins and Gannets are two good examples:

These were taken at the bird cliffs at Raudinupur  in the far north of Iceland. And I would like to put forward a candidate to rival the Puffin as the cutest northern bird - the tiny Red-Necked Phalarope:

This is a female, and this a male:

Then there are familiar birds which we only see in the winter. Here they are in their full breeding plumage - all primped up for the dance:

This is a redwing. He's a bit uptight because there is a rival for his territory in the offing. They end up fighting:

There are not many passerines in Iceland, so this redpoll is quite special:

This was in the Aspergi canyon, a place which looks like the biggest sink hole in the world with 10metre vertical lava cliffs all round it.
Birds can also be charismatic if they live in remote places. This one is especially so: its North American name is "loon" because of its eerie call - the Great Northern Diver:

Arctic terns are so common here that we are tempted to forget that they have travelled from the Antarctic to breed here and will fly back again in the autumn.

Mallard ducks don't qualify as charismatic, but you never see them with so many ducklings in our predator infested wetlands:

It's also wonderful to see so many Snipe everywhere, and they are quite tame. This one was wondering what I was doing camping on its breeding territory.

Lastly, 5 more birds imbued with the romance of the North: The Arctic Skua, Golden Plover, Ptarmigan, Knot (pictured through the windscreen on a wet morning), and a really charismatic bird given the demeaning acronym "snob" by British twitchers - the Snow Bunting.