So what’s your travel style, socially speaking? Do you prefer to go it alone, wandering the world savoring and experiencing it all in your own private space, only engaging others as you encounter them in your various fabulous adventures? Call it a Marco Polo style, though Marco did often travel with his uncles as well, but not always. Could it be you’re looking for love, in which case any accompaniment might just complicate things a bit too much? We don’t know if this was a hidden agenda of Marco’s, but just maybe it was. One might also travel accompanied by one’s best friend who happens to be of a different species, a style made famous by John Steinbeck in Travels with Charley, the latter being his canine pal with whom he searched for America. Mr. Steinbeck wrote a whole book about this but one can only wonder what a dog searching for America might have found, likely something quite different from human discoveries and potentially even more interesting. We shall never know.
Or do you travel with a partner, either a friend or someone more intimate, perhaps? Or several partners with whom sharing the experience makes it extra special? This style holds much promise but also has its perils; many a friendship has suffered when a good friend from home turns out to be a lousy travel partner, as “friend from home” is a very different role than that of “travel partner” and many friends have discovered this the hard way. Travel can require great flexibility and tolerance for the unexpected in ways that never arise in one’s familiar neighborhood or with daily routines. Call it the adventurous spirit, and let the partnered-traveler beware.
Then there is group travel, a style abhorrent to many, favored by some only insofar as it affords opportunities not otherwise available, especially when it comes to cost. Most nature trips are done with groups, though one can always hire a personal guide, better in most ways if money is not an object. Our guide in Honduras talked about the birding life-listers who’d give him a specific species list saying “I need these can you get them for me?” and he was quite proud at having the reputation for being the “go-to” guy for that kind of thing. We can imagine this made for a good living and one well-deserved. His passion for butterflies might have surpassed his interest in birds, but as he told us “you can’t make a living with butterflies, but birds are a different story” or something to that effect, one of the hard realities of eco-travel.
So it was that our fellow travelers trickled into Oulu for a couple of days, until Saturday night when we all met up at the Airport Hotel bar. In honor of all things Finnish I tried the cloudberry schnapps or whatever it was, and it was most excellent though I suppose snacking on salted licorice might’ve heightened the experience to another level; chance missed. Frankly I have always enjoyed the social complexities of the group experience, with only a few personalties over the years offering difficult challenges, but coping successfully with same is a special reward of group travel. Did I say group travel is abhorrent to some? Did I mention I had a career in social work and loved almost every minute of it?
We also met our guides, Gerard and Matti. Gerard was originally from Liverpool and had that familiar accent reminiscent of a well known English rock band from the 60s whose name escapes me at the moment. As a Brit from Liverpool, he educated us Americans on how the proper pronunciation of his name dropped the second “r” sound, as anyone from Liverpool could tell you, so that it sounded like what would be commonly spelled and pronounced “Jared” in this country, forget about saying “JerARD”, at least for a couple of weeks. It also turns out he’d lived in Budapest for many years, had married a Hungarian and raised a family there, and besides being a known authority on woodpeckers, also leads trips in central Europe, and Africa, and perhaps elsewhere, too, who knows?
Our other guide was the “local” person not mentioned in the original itinerary. His name was Matti and he was as local as it gets, not only Finnish but northern Finnish, as in he was going to show us his backyard and what lived there. He’d also been at this for a very long time and this was one factor as to why our trip succeeded spectacularly, as we shall see. He and Gerard also knew each other previously and had great chemistry together, Matti kind of low-key and Gerard more high-energy, and let’s just say we’ve always had several guides on these nature trips and that these guys working together complemented one another in a way that was special.
It was most special, for instance, that they told us that the first day would be owl day, so to speak. On all our trips we’d never heard of such a thing. You feeling lucky, punk? because usually that’s what it takes to see an owl. Owls tend to be active by night and are very quiet and nearly inanimate during the day, sitting high in trees for which most of them are very, very well camouflaged, often right next to the trunk behind curtains of branches. They don’t want you to see them and they are practiced at achieving this. Where we live they are seen if there happens to be an active nest (always a great horned owl, it seems), or if it is winter and one knows about that particular hole where a screech owl will often sit to catch some rays, if the sun is out.
Or if one is simply lucky. One needn’t be a birder to have some prominent memory of walking in the woods and coming upon a member of this unmistakable species, sitting in plain view for all to see, most spectacularly and God only knows why. It happens. The most prominent and cherished of these, for me, was that bird I came across while skiing on a cold January day up in the park near our house, right in the middle of the city. It was sitting six feet off the ground on the branch of some conifer. It was all of eight inches tall and I wondered if somebody’d slipped a hallucinogen into my morning coffee, it was so Disneyesque. I had no idea that owls that small even existed – it was a saw-whet, a species little seen or known in New England until they started netting them in the past few years, to discover there can be a whole lot of them some years, despite limited historical records of any being sighted. Owls might be the most wonderfully mysterious of all birds, even in real life.
It is hardly a mystery however that we have had owls listed as “possibles” on any number of birding trips that never materialized, have gone on deep winter “owl prowls”, as they are called, to never see or hear a thing; so it can be with owls, and too damn often for this birder. But Finland is a country particularly blessed with organizations dedicated to nature, one with whom Matti had very close ties. As we were to find out, the country is home to a number of owl species, with strong efforts are made to promote their numbers, which includes providing owl nesting boxes. There may be owl nesting boxes elsewhere in the world, but until this trip I had never seen one. A remarkable feature throughout the trip, in fact, was the constant presence of nesting boxes in all shapes and sizes, many individually and quite well-crafted, not just hammered together with your basic boxy template, like all those “bluebird” boxes in New England whose most frequent tenants tend to be swallows or in the worst case pushy house sparrows. Being a mostly rural country blessed by any number of breeding birds in the short summer, Finns live closer to nature than is the case in many countries, and all those boxes are evidence for this.
So it was that we set out from Airport Hotel for the fields and forests of the greater Oulu metro area, looking for whatever but with owls prominent on the agenda. One thing that stands out is that “metro area” is a rather humble concept in the north of Finland, as things get rural pretty fast as one passes through various small population centers, where it’s all small farms surrounded by woods or woods and then more woods, interspersed by fields that tended to look like grassy meadows more than anything else, and all of it with hardly a person in sight, anywhere. Timber is still a major commodity as it has been since time immemorial in this region, although at nowhere near the grand scale one sees in America’s Pacific Northwest. In fact the clearest evidence we saw that trees are coming down was the many trucks loaded with logs one saw on the highway.
As one with fairly extensive experience road-tripping through America’s vast agricultural lands – places like Iowa and Nebraska, California’s central valley and southern Texas, the Connecticut valley in Massachusetts and for the past 40 years many hours on the way to visit family in upstate New York – what was striking traveling past miles of Finnish farms was the total lack of evidence of any monoculture-crops and the tiny scale of it all. It fit my fantasies of what rural America must’ve looked like 50 or 100 years ago or maybe even long before that. Adding to this was the constant presence of birds of all kinds out there in the fields that resembled meadows, of geese and swans and curlews and godwits, magpies and hooded crows. We paused to get a good look at a northern lapwing, a particularly striking bird though one so common most Finns probably don’t give it a second look, a counterpart to the bluejays screeching in our Boston neighborhood year around that are visually spectacular though nobody seems to notice.
As for owls: Matti informed us early in the day that he had leads on several different nests where young had fledged very recently, or where there might be activity in a nest box. Timing was everything, as it was always possible that on this day parents and/or young had flown the coop, so to speak. Our mission was to check out all the possibilities, with no assured outcomes for the most part; birding is about playing the odds whereby sometimes you score big, sometimes you score a lot less, and sometimes you don’t score at all, which is one reason many don’t bother.
The Strategy for Strigiformes Success, as a book or seminar on the subject might have been titled, entailed traveling through the forested mazes of north central Finland, down any number of rather miserable but also wonderfully claustrophobic narrow bumpy dirt roads – was this the way to the end of the earth? – of which there are very many in Finland (the better to test their rally-driving skills, no doubt, or maybe just to haul out timber). At some point we stopped and proceeded on foot through the woods on a landscape of lichen and spongy understory that felt kind of like walking on a mattress, not that I’ve walked on too many mattresses in my day. It neither looked nor had the vibes of woodsy places in N America, at least not quite. To add to the disorientation we soon came upon a largish box up a tree trunk, which Matti proceeded to check out, showing off his tree-climbing skills which he might’ve learned as a lumberjack, as all Finnish men are lumberjacks at some point, or so this American tourist liked to believe. Nada. Zip. Crickets. Bupkus. Our guides conferred quietly, in a pattern that was to repeat many times over the week, about their next steps. My own defeatist nihilist jaded owl-hunting mind was sending out its own stream of propaganda based on past bitter experience, something like here-we-go-again-another-day-where-the-owls-never-show-up. It was early in the day, however, and hope struggled to spring eternal.
We lurched our way out of that forest and back to the main road, presumably headed for the next enchanting woodsy (owlless?) locale so it was still kind of a surprise when we stopped at a farm where Matti got out and walked down the driveway and came back with the news: a northern hawk owl fledgling, there by a shed. The group piled out of the vans and proceeded cautiously and stealthily down the driveway, if “stealthy” is even possible for eleven people at once, and sure enough, right there in the yard, seemingly oblivious to us but of course that is only how things appeared. As people gawked (yes sometimes birders gawk, like when it’s a baby hawk owl) Matti kept wandering around – which was to be his modus operandi throughout the week – and one by one another owl turned up until there were four. We’d hit the trifecta and then gone one better, and for many of us this was the first ever look at this species. The parents didn’t seem to be around, as it seems with owls there is a point when mum & dad decide the kids no longer need watching, and they split. If one comes upon baby owls before this moment, all bets are off. Allow me to quote from the Collins guide regarding hawk owls: “Caution: Can fiercely attack intruders when young leave nest; do not go near, and keep your eyes fixed on the parents while in sight of young just out of a nest!”. Clearly these birds had left the nest awhile previous, and it is of note that Gerard heard from a British group staying at Airport Hotel who visited this site the next day or the day after – these birds were gone. What did I tell you, punk, about how ya gotta be lucky? Did I also tell you that timing is everything in life? Are you writing all of this down, punk? you look pretty forgetful.
So it was mid-afternoon when we headed down yet another very narrow claustrophobic bumpy dirt road to check out a reported Ural owl nest location when Matti stops his van and walks back to ours to say to Gerard “great gray owl”, words to stir the imagination of any birder or maybe just anybody in particular, if they’ve the tiniest bit of interest in birds or the natural world. And there it was, just a ways off the road but still hard to see in the beginning, as it often is with owls, but the eyes and brain adjust eventually and the size of the bird and the nest become impossible not to notice. The great gray is large and distinctive and kind of a holy grail for many birders, even those who’ve seen a lot of owls. This one fit the bill nicely, and as people watched, the head of baby appeared at the bottom of the great mass of feathers. More gawking, many more pictures; we kept on down the road.
A clearing in the woods; another walk across spongy ground thick with lichen of various colors, most of it white and quite surreal; a largish baby owl high up in a tree, and then another, and then another – or did Gerard say one of these was a parent? To quote Collins regarding Ural owls (love the name!): “Caution: Very aggressive when young about to leave nest and can attack intruder fiercely; keep your eyes fixed on the parents if you stumble on an inhabited nest, and leave area quickly!” Of course these birds were out of the nest and spread around the forest nearby, so of course we were absolutely safe, no doubt about it. No doubt at all. None whatsoever. Nope.
Nearby in a clearing I found the remains of a hare, or rather half a hare. Matti said probably hunters, but is it just possible this bunny had stumbled a bit too close to that owl nest a few days before? No way, of course, but the mind conjectures on regardless: a forest that looks like something from Hansel and Gretel, dense and disorienting, spongy underfoot with animal remains lying about – did I mention the giant ant hills everywhere? – and full of owls. Was this the end of the earth? One could make a good case, surely.
