All Hail the King

Equinox rapidly approaches and it really struck me as I went to work this morning that it is actually light as I go out to work now. Today's early sun cast an orange-pink searchlight on the slopes of Mt Esja to the north of Reykjavík, which had had a sprinkling of snow in the night, making it seem a bit more winter like. The weather remains largely very good, with a few wretched days thrown in, which is just as well as it wouldn't be Iceland without a few foul days in there too.
Last Saturday I went out in the perfect sunny and still weather to see if I could find the drake King Eider Somateria spectabilis that GÞ had found a couple of days earlier about 20 km south or Reykjavík. When I arrived at the site, photographer GG was already there and very pleased to have seen his first ever. It was in a raft of about 1,000 Eider Duck Somateria mollissima and as I have often found with this species it easily disappeared amongst the seething masses if you took your eye off it, despite being such a striking bird. It took me a long time to find my first King Eider when when I came to Iceland, but now I usually see several a year and March in the Reykjavík area is as good a time as any to look for this gem. GG managed to get some record shots of the King Eider when suddenly I noticed the flock of Purple Sandpipers Calidris maritima at our feet panic and wheel away from us. The culprit was a pot-bellied and heavy-chested juvenile Gyr Falcon Falco rusticolus which sped past us with a series of powerful yet shallow beats interspersed with flat-winged glides and then turned about 100 metres from us and headed low and straight back over our heads, allowing GG to get the shot on this page. It landed less than a hundred metres away (staight in the sun much to GG's disappointment) and sat there for about five minutes, watching us watching it. Magnificent beast.

Despite the fact that it was my company's lavish annual dinner on Saturday night I somehow managed to let YK convince me to pick him up at 7:00 on Sunday morning. In truth I'm glad I did as we had the best day's birding of the year, excluding perhaps Kenya. Also with us were SÁ and HS and we were off to explore an area around three hours' drive east of Reykjavík along road no. 1. It was a perfect sunny day, cold but with hardly a cloud in the sky. I've said it before in this diary but I make no apologies for repeating the fact the glacial scenery of southern Iceland is ABSOLUTELY MAGNIFICENT and it's such a privilege to live so close to it. We had uninterrupted views of a series of ice-caps, first lofty Eyjafjallajökull, then the larger Mýrdalsjökull (which I'd driven over in a monster jeep the previous weekend) and once we had "rounded the corner" at the southern most point of iceland, Europe's largest icecap, Vatnajökull, came into view, rising 2,000 metres above the sands and the lava. The area we were going to look at is an area very rarely visited by birders but is an excellent winter location, with a series of ice-free pools and rivers dotted in the lava fields and pseudocraters of the southern lowlands. It is a huge expanse of open country, bound by ice and mountains to the north, glacial rivers to the east and west and the Atlantic to the south. The open rivers and lakes are a huge attraction for wildfowl and soon YK was in ornithological mode, peering through the telescope and rattling out a rapid series of sightings of wildfowl by species and sex to HS in the back seat, who somehow managed to write them all down without pausing for breath. Besides the numerous Mallards Anas platyrhynchos and Eurasian Wigeons Anas penelope, there were excellent numbers of Goosander Merganser merganser, almost 40 Common Goldeneyes Bucephala clangula, two pairs of Barrow's Goldeneye Bucephala islandica, Whooper Swans Cygnus cygnus and best of all a female Smew Mergellus albellus, a very rare bird in Iceland although this bird was returning for its third winter. Besides wildfowl we saw two adult White-tailed Eagles Haliaeetus albicilla, a rare bird in southern Iceland and a single Snow Bunting Plectrophenax nivalis and the ubiquitous Raven Corvus corax. As we headed back to Reykjavík past 60 metre high waterfalls caked in ice and icicles hanging off every cliff face, we notched my favourite sighting of the year so far, two Short-eared Owls Asio flammeus hunting in the evening sun, backed by the coruscating ice-cap Mýrdalsjökull. Like Iceland, I too am waking up after a slumbering winter. .