A 200-meter high icicle

Birds can be amazingly punctual. Iceland's harbinger of spring, the much-loved European Golden Plover Pluvialis apricaria has arrived in Iceland on 24 March in five of the last nine years, and last Friday was no different with a single bird battling the icy polar winds to arrive on the island of Heimaey off the south coast. Golden Plovers are probably Iceland's most beloved bird, as tradition states that it arrives to bid farewell to the snow with its plaintive DIRRIN-DEE call. As it happens some parts of Iceland are experiencing their heaviest snowfall of the winter and here in the south-west we've had a week of teeth-shattering northerlies and white-topped waves in the bay north of Reykjavík, although we've been spared the snow. At the weekend I did a bit of incidental birding. Firstly, at the summerhouse where I triumphed in a mini-golf tournament (against an eight-year old girl and a ten-year old boy).

The only hazard on the mini-golf course was a flock of twelve tenacious Rock Ptarmigan Lagopus muta which insisted on always occupying the next hole and depositing huge amounts of droppings on the greens. It made me smile to think of the great lengths some people have to go to see Ptarmigan in certain parts of their European range, either by hiking in foul weather up on to the Cairngorm plateau or by walking up to 3,000 metres in the Alps. Here I was having to shoo them away with my putter.
On Sunday I decided to visit one of my favourite places in the world and one of Iceland's best kept secrets, the waterfall Glymur, only an hour's drive away from the city but off the beaten track as it requires a little bit of effort to get there. Although not particularly well known, it is nevertheless Iceland's highest waterfall, falling 200 metres into an extremely narrow and spectacular gorge, and for one reason or another I hadn't been there for three years or so. The walk to the mouth of the gorge, which doesn't come into view until you actually arrive, thus heightening the anticipation, takes you through a mosaic of rocky tors and beautiful birch shrub, a genuine Icelandic forest! In a few weeks' time this scrubland will resound with the song of hundreds of breeding Redwing but they have yet to arrive. Instead, the only signs of life were the ubiquitous Raven Corvus corax, a single overwintering Common Snipe Gallinago gallinago and the delightful song of the hardy Winter Wren Troglodytes troglodytes. Unfortunately, the log bridge over the river had been washed away and although the wire over the river was still in place and I could theoretically have swung over, I'm neither Action Man nor a monkey so we had to make do with the less spectacular west bank. I say less spectacular because you can't see the whole 200-metre drop from the west bank but instead the waterfall remains hidden until the last moment. As you come over the final brow, you are suddenly confronted with the top 50 metres of the waterfall and the hair-raising 250-metre vertical walls of the gorge below. It's not a place for the faint-hearted, especially in yesterday's winds, and after my last visit a few years ago, I had nightmares all the following night about being trapped on a ledge on its vast rock faces. The great thing about a winter visit is that the waterfall is largely frozen, and the mighty cataract Glymur becomes a 200-metre icicle. The photo above shows the frozen top part of the waterfall. The main flow of the river, which drops virtually unbroken, is hidden in the shadows and is not visible from the west bank. The walls behind are 250 metres straight down. The gorge is inhabited by numerous pairs of Northern Fulmars Fulmarus glacialis, whilst on the tops we flushed a Rock Ptarmigan Lagopus muta. We also found the remains of another Ptarmigan and tracks and fur of an Arctic Fox Alopex lagopus. We also experienced one of those great Icelandic weather phenomena, snow from a completely clear blue sky. If you can explain that, let me know. We made a short stop on the way home to see if Harlequin Ducks Histrionicus histrionicus were back on their breeding grounds. They weren't but we did find a very frisky pair on the sea nearby, so it won't be long now.