In this great and crazy and terrible world, rich with so much wonder as well as more than its share of horrors, it might be said that a trip such as this was an attempt to escape from the worst aspects of all that through reveling in the glories of the natural world. Was it possible to leave such things as war and disease behind, however briefly? Such was our hope. In the typical caper movie, the protagonist escapes the long arm of the law by crossing into Mexico; were we hoping to escape our troubles by crossing into the magical and other-worldly atmosphere we’d find above the Arctic Circle? Was crossing one border as good as crossing another? If so, it was on this day and the several to follow that we were to find out.
Of course, this project had already provided its share of care-canceling magic as well as a rude reminder that total escape was not easy, if not impossible. We’d seen our owls and savored the richness of nature teeming in the northern Finnish countryside – so many birds, so few people!. We’d also been surveilled by a camera on a tree across from a sign warning us that we were but a few miles from the Russian border. And we were masked every moment we shared in the vans, which turned out to be many moments, indeed, and should I mention the foreboding prospect of getting tested prior to departure was getting ever closer, with all its real and imagined awful consequences? The enlightened and mindful among us no doubt had efficiently compartmentalized this out of their consciousness, and good for them! In reality was that anybody in the group? Let’s just say it was not a topic of daily conversation; we all seemed to be having too good and distracting a time, such is the magic of the “vacation” and no wonder they are so popular.
And there was still plenty of salted licorice left, maybe the greatest of all possible distractions. I’d offered it regularly at mealtime and at random times as a snack. Our guides had been the biggest fans of this marvelous and bizarre Finnish pleasure thus far, Matti for the obvious reason but Gerard was even more vocal in his enthusiasm; licorice is one of those things where you’re either all in or you won’t go near it, and if it’s salted all bets are off. Those members of the group who even agreed to sample it as a new cultural experience deserved full credit for their bravery. The turtles had disappeared the fastest, leaving many skulls and cars and leaping fish and such in the mix, and the timid were going for the jujubes, no doubt due to their diminutive size – once popped into your mouth, how long could the suffering last?
Today was a travel day and the goal was miles. Most birding/nature trips aspire to finding a variety of species, the more the better, and this dictates visiting many kinds of habitat and that means you travel. In a country like Costa Rica changes come with fairly short distances, though there the roads are also pretty slow (one can only wonder about Uganda and Indonesia). A trip we made to central California covered the Pacific shore along with the Sierra Nevada, and you can imagine how long the travel days were, even on America’s magnificent Interstate Highway system where even at 75mph it seems to take a long time to get places. In Finland the main roads tended to be two-laners with light traffic, but unlike in the states one doesn’t move at 75mph (or 85 or faster which seems to be the American norm nowadays – how fast do YOU go when you’re “making time”?) but just slowly enough to make several hundred miles a long travel day,
Just like mom & dad stopping for ice cream or whatever to get the kids to cease asking “daddy are we there yet?”, travel days on nature trips always make stops to look for a bird by the highway here and there. Modern electronics have made the parental ice cream ploy obsolete, from what I hear – I call it a loss of innocence but then you might accuse me of silly nostalgia and you’d be right – but trip guides persist in occasionally stopping to look for new birds on travel days. On this day the habitat did actually change as the miles went by, conifer and birch forests getting thinner and scrubbier, with bogs here and there which always means different plant and bird species.
And always the endless Finnish lakes and ponds, providing mallards and teal and goldeneyes besides the usual daily suspects like magpies and fieldfares and hooded crows and such – thank God for birds you can count on. A special distraction on this day was of course crossing the Arctic Circle, which happened at a ski center closed for the summer season but which had an appropriate roadside marker for souvenir snaps. Our guides showed their usual eminent class by providing a round of cloudberry schnapps or brandy or whatever, whose effect probably helped the following miles to pass more easily. Did I mention that cloudberries are as Finnish as salted licorice?
The big birding moment of the day happened high up on a hillside where the terrain had morphed into scrubby tundra, one of those birds impossible to see for the unsharp of eye (me) but a well-aimed scope did the trick: a dotterel! On a nest! Love the name! In a place barren and open and inhospitable – a perfect locale to hatch a chick if you’re a dotterel, evidently, one which fit all of one’s pictures of what a tundra-nesting bird should look like. Yes we were getting closer to the end of the earth, at least as measured by remoteness and bleakness.
We eventually reached Ivalo (EVE-alo), known as a “winter sports” hub which means business is probably good for half of the year in these parts. Our window looked out on a river as well as on a thermometer, which seemed thoughtful for anyone venturing out who might want to know how to dress for the weather, but on the other hand you might have one of these back home on your patio or outside your kitchen window but have you ever stayed in lodging that provided one? It gets better: have you ever seen a thermometer whose scale tops out at 0º centigrade and only measures temperatures colder than that? Many an overnighter at Hotel Ivalo probably just shrugs their shoulders without giving it another thought, but this reporter, known for overthinking everything, couldn’t just let this go. This reporter, who with his wife also happens to be a dedicated “cross-country” (aka “NORDIC”) skier of many years, at some point gave himself a dope-slap when he realized that a key to success with that sport has long involved matching your ski-wax to the temperature of the snow and that the type of wax varies every ten degrees or so. Did I say that Ivalo is a winter sports hub? Did you know that snow prevails at temperatures below freezing? Is it possible you will find this information useful someday? Nowadays most cross-country skis are waxless, at least in N America, so perhaps not. I like to think Finns and others who ski in the Nordic countries are resisting this trend towards lazy modernity, but then I also prefer to use a bicycle instead of a car when possible, which makes me an eccentric if not a confirmed Luddite.
Matti & Gerard offered another after-dinner hunt for a black grouse lek nearby (did I mention there had been a second hunt a few days before that had turned up a moose but alas no grouse? or that the black woodpecker seen on the first wild grouse chase was the only one of those seen all week?). Today’s excursion yielded the only common buzzard of the trip and one of the few Bohemian waxwings we were to see – and by far the best view – but as of now black grouse lek remains an unticked box on my bucket list. Maybe I will have to go for the sage grouse or prairie chicken at locales a bit closer than Finland to satisfy this need. Regardless, “black grouse lek quest” shall always have a place in my heart as a positive example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
And Ivalo will always have a place in the hearts of those on this trip as the place where we learned that the US had dropped its requirement for returning air travelers to get a covid test, and there’s really nothing more that need be said about that, except that the unbelievably good news – so unbelievable it took a few days to accept it as authentic – immeasurably enhanced the joys of the next few spectacular days.
The key aspects of this spectacle were visual, and a picture can be worth ___words (insert your chosen number here) and at this point words fail me etc. What you basically need to know is the next day we continued north into Norway, had lunch at a cozy cafe, then followed the Tana River up into the Veranger peninsula to the coastal town of Batsfjiord. We stopped at a salt marsh and then proceeded over high country where the winter snows were melting ferociously in the summer sun, before dropping down to the ocean. New birds seen included rough-legged hawks, white-tailed eagles, oystercatchers and black guillemots and more, including my new fave bird group, the jaegers (which is the German word for “hunter”), of which we saw the parasitic on this day (love the name!). They fly fast and low and pursue other birds aggressively to steal any food those might be carrying, and when they show up the sky is filled with drama. As the song goes, who could ask for anything more?
