We are not amused!

The state of the world does not amuse me at the moment. I’m not even going to get into the stupidity I see from my fellow humans, not only those who are in power and misuse it but also those who believe and act on information from less-than-credible sources. Sometimes I wonder if there’s any hope at all for humanity. Then I look at some of the postings on Facebook, earrings with miniature rolls of toilet paper attached touted as a keepsake from 2020, a photo of many rolls of toilet paper individually wrapped in Christmas paper with the caption “My Christmas Shopping is done.” There are many others that make me smile and I’m grateful for those folks who take the time to make me laugh. I know some people say that there are certain things that are too serious to laugh about.  I’ve always maintained that those are the very things we need to laugh about.

            Somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain there is a conversation held in a university drama class. We were debating the differences between comedy and tragedy and there were logical arguments aplenty. Someone ventured that comedy occurred when the serious consequences of an action were removed and proceeded to site examples of what happens to cartoon characters when they get pushed off cliffs or hit over the head with frying pans. The birds chirp around their heads briefly and then they get up and get on with it. The speaker just about had us convinced when the prof, a man who, with his neatly cropped hair, neatly trimmed moustache, and white button-down shirt, looked a bit out of place in a 1970’s drama department, interjected with a story of his own.

He was in a tank unit in WWII. One of the tanks became stuck and there was close enemy fire. He drove his tank up to the stationary one and yelled to the man inside. He said a very red face popped out of the turret and out of the mouth came “The fu**in’ fu**er’s fu**ed!” The head then disappeared only to reappear a second later with the final words, “fu** off!” The prof said despite the seriousness of the situation, he wept with laughter. I don’t remember if he even told us what happened to the stranded tank.  Clearly, he returned to tell the story. He followed up with an observation that the line between comedy and tragedy is a very thin one. 

One of the ways I deal with situations, such as the one in which we currently find ourselves, is to skip back and forth across the line. So I will be washing my hands; I will be staying in far more than I am used to; I will be watching parrot and cat videos and I will be saying ‘thank you’ not only to the people on the front lines and those who must make hard decisions in the face of this pandemic, but also to the ones who take the time to point out the ridiculousness of some of our behaviour and, who by doing so, make me laugh.

            Wash your hands, keep in touch with each other using all the wonderful technology we have at our fingertips and, if you can, give someone the gift of a laugh.

This is not a travelogue

This is going to be about Iceland, but I find after I’ve been to a place if I try to reconstruct a trip day by day and place by place, I soon lose interest. I’ll provide a map and some context. Mainly though, I’ve grouped the experiences and photos thematically. (How very English-teacherly of me.) A word of warning: if photos of birds are disturbing to you don't go any further.

I’ve already covered Reykjavik and the Faroes, so I’ll start back at Reykjavik where we caught the ship. How we were to make the transfer from the airport to the ship wasn’t exactly clear but because Richard and I had been from the airport to downtown Reykjavik before, we knew where to get the buses. One person from our Faroe trip stayed at the airport to board a flight and the rest of us got our luggage and caught a bus into the city. We had the name of the hotel where the Adventure Canada group stayed so we headed there with our luggage. The person on the desk kindly let us store our luggage until we found out what was up.

Ocean Endeavour, Old Harbour, Reykjavik 

In the meantime, we had lunch with friends we met on last year’s trip and who were on the Faroes with us. We managed to confirm that the ship was going to be moored in the old harbour and figured the Ocean Endeavour would be pretty hard to miss once it was in. By the time we finished lunch, said goodbye to our friends and made our way down the hill, the Ocean Endeavour was moored and we were able to check in. A bonus was that other friends from the Faroe tour had arranged to have our luggage brought down from the hotel! Thank you Christine, Donna, and Clayton! We thought we’d have to go back up the hill and get our own luggage. We then had some time to wander around. 

Richard at the bottom of Thufa

We climbed up Thufa, an art installation that is a manufactured perfectly rounded hill covered in grass with a path of stones that spirals its way to the top. I tried to climb to the top when we were first in Reykjavik, but the wind was pretty stiff, and I was concerned about losing my balance. This time I made it to the top where there is a replica of a fish-drying shed complete with dried fish.  

Rescue exercises

A woman from Rekjavik explained that the mound was a sculpture. She also told us that the helicopter and ship we saw farther out in the harbour were doing rescue drills.  Every person who goes to sea on a ship must be trained in rescue. She says the safety record of the fishermen of Iceland is very good. We watched the helicopter maneuvers for a while before making our way back to the ship to set off on our circumnavigation of Iceland. This is the point at which my chronological account stops.

One of the questions I get most often is, ‘What was your favourite part?’ My favourite part of the Iceland trip was the birds. There were always birds around the ship and we visited some great bird-spotting locations. After being introduced to Arctic terns in Reykjavik, we visited one of the biggest colonies in Iceland on the Snaefellsnes Peninsula. 

Road through the terns

The colony is divided by a road and the terns were not terribly amused by people and cars moving through their territory. We tried to stay back and watch them until our hiking group took to the roadway. The terns dove and scolded, and many people held things above their heads to give the terns a higher target to aim at. I was probably naïve, but I had my Tilley hat on and reasoned that if a tern did strike me on the head it wouldn’t do too much damage through the hat. One actually touched Richard on the head, but I was lucky. I like to think that talking to them and telling them that they were beautiful and that I wasn’t going to hurt them or their babies helped. As I say, probably just naïve.  We heard a story later of a man who got a pretty good gash from a disgruntled tern through his hat. I was able to watch a chick in the grass while one of the parents swooped in to feed it. I had a blast trying to get photos of the fast-moving terns. I think that’s the day I came home with over 1000 photos. I found my new camera quite delightful to use, although I still need lots of practice to get good shots of birds.

Tern and chick

Tern hovering

One of the things that fascinated me was how the terns can hover in mid-air and then swoop down and come up with a small fish. They are stunning birds with their white and black feathers and their orange beaks and it’s a toss-up as to whether they or the puffins were my favourites. We visited another breeding colony in a private nature reserve that we had to reach via two buses. The first was a normal passenger bus and the second was a special 4X4 bus that drove us through 3 rivers.  I would have called them creeks, but they are probably quite a bit more spectacular when there has been a good rain. At any rate, the banks were steep, and the driver didn’t dare stop once in the water or he would get stuck.

Coming in for a landing

The same nature preserve also harboured puffins. I got some good photos of puffins in the Faroes and was delighted with the chance to see more.  One little guy took up a position on a rock slightly below me and stayed there for quite a while. Again, I need a lot of practice in capturing images of birds, but I had a good deal of fun trying and I got one amusing shot of a puffin landing. 
Most of the ones I got of them in flight featured their butts, otherwise dubbed ‘go-away birds.’

Heading for the burrow

My photogenic friend

Puffins are great in the water but not so good in the air. I heard them referred to as ‘flying footballs’ and that’s pretty much what they look like. Sort of like the bumble-bee, they shouldn’t be able to fly but they do. It’s difficult for them to get airborne, especially on the water. The process involves frantic flapping of their wings and running along the surface of the water until they have sufficient lift to take off.  I watched several get almost airborne only to be smacked head-on by a wave. It looked funny from my vantage point, but I couldn’t help wondering how often it happens to any given individual. Because the ship was moving, I wasn’t able to see how the birds reacted to the waves. Since they are expert divers, I assumed the waves merely washed over them and they tried again for a launch.

Fulmar

One evening I watched out the porthole as a series of fulmars flew past just above the water. I couldn’t tell if it was the same group circling the ship or if there was a large contingent passing low near the water. I loved watching as the birds zipped alongside the ship and then cut in front of the bow and veered upward.

Phalarope

We also saw phalaropes, red-throated loons, gannets and eider ducks. Eider down is the best down insulation available and farmers keep close track of the nests. They take the eggs out very briefly and remove some of the down lining before returning the eggs. There are strict rules as to how much down they can take from the nests while the birds are in residence. Once the chicks have fledged farmers go back and take the remaining down from the nests. It’s labour-intensive work which helps me understand the high cost of down clothing. The farmers take their responsibility for the ducks very seriously and the ducks return year after year to the same spots.

Despite the thousands of bird photos I took, I never tired of watching them or of trying to capture them with my camera. It makes me think that perhaps I should look at a birding trip. Just another possibility for the bucket list.

Critters on Lost Loon

Lost Loon Island

Grackle

 For an island of less than an acre in size, Lost Loon has quite a variety of wildlife and the birds were the first to command my attention. Within seconds of our arrival the grackles were commenting. John called them his management team because they vociferously supervised any activity on the north end of the island. When the chicks were hatching, the adults became aggressive and dive-bombed him regularly. By the time we got there the chicks must have fledged because the grackle community was content to scold us from the tree-tops. I don't know if we have grackles in Alberta but, if we do, they certainly aren't common. Instead we have magpies. There wasn't a magpie to be seen on Lost Loon. While the grackles aren't the prettiest of birds, they did give me a chance to practice with my DSLR camera, zoom lenses and teleconverter. I thought I could hold the camera pretty steady until I put the tele on and zoomed the lens out to its maximum. My technique became find the bird, aim the spot focus in the general direction, press the shutter and hope for the best. It's a very good thing that digital photos are easy to delete.

Song Sparrow

     None of us is an expert birder and one little bird had us puzzled for several days. I thought it sounded like some kind of sparrow but I had difficulty finding it. I was looking up high in the trees. It's call was loud and close but I couldn't seem to find the bird. On about the third day I saw movement in one of the bushes closer to the ground and heard the call. From then on I began to look in the bushes rather than the trees but it was Richard who got a good photo of it. He was also able to record its call. We checked bird books and online resources and identified it as a song sparrow. There were also critters on shore and in the water around the island.

Sandpiper

     I once spotted a river otter. Mergansers and loons hung around off shore, and a bald eagle flew by once with a fish in its claws. No photo of that unfortunately. My favourite bird on the island had a nest somewhere near the shore on the north end. We thought it was a killdeer. It flew low over the water and peeped repeatedly trying to draw attention away from one large rock. I never wanted to investigate where the nest was and, as long as I stayed in one spot, the bird wandered around the rocks or puttered in the shallows. Today I showed the photo to a friend who knows much more about birds than I do and she was sure it wasn't a killdeer. Out came the bird books again. We now think the little bird is a spotted sandpiper.

     One evening when we arrived back at the island by boat, I heard the sandpiper and stood absolutely still. As I watched, one other adult and three chicks scurried around on the rocks and then disappeared behind the big rock. After that I never saw more than one birdat a time.

     I met one of the garter snakes just outside the main cabin. As I stepped from the last step to the ground I noticed a movement to my left in the grass. I stopped and the movement stopped. As I continued to watch, a garter snake moved gracefully from the cover of the grasses and across the path a few feet in front of me. It was visible for a few seconds before disappearing into the foliage below the solar panels. I waited for a while but the snake didn't reappear and I didn't see it again. This snake looked like a pretty healthy one with a very attractive pattern of yellow and green on its back and sides. I'm not sure what it found to eat although I think I may have seen a vole or some other small rodent. There didn't seem to be any mice on the island. We weren't too sad about that.

Mayflies

 Then there were the insects. I'd never encountered May flies before. There were abundant which might have pleased the fish and the spiders but didn't exactly thrill the humans. Since we had a decent cell phone signal I Googled Mayflies, also called fish flies, and learned that Mayfly nymphs spend most of their lives in the water. They emerge from the water into a pre-adult stage and fly to foliage where they moult into sexually mature adults. Their claim to insect fame is that they moult once they have fully functional wings. I gather no other group of insects do that. Mayflies don't have working mouths so they don't eat and live for only a few hours or days at most. The Mayflies bugged me most when when they landed on my glasses. I flicked them out of my hair and when any of us came into the cabin the others did a Mayfly check, plucking the insects off clothing and tossing them out the door. When they landed on my glasses the need to get them off seemed much more urgent. Dead and dying Mayflies were entangled in many a spider web and there seemed to be several different kinds of spiders which showed themselves mainly at dusk.

     I heard and swatted a few mosquitos while on the island but the black flies were much more bothersome. They seemed very fond of my socks which I never understood because I wore shorts and there was an ample expanse of bare leg just beyond the top of the socks. I had a few good lessons in concentration when I tried to focus the camera as several black flies ordered dinner through my socks. The black flies won and I packed up the camera gear and retreated inside behind screens on windows and doors.

     I was not sorry to leave the black flies and the Mayflies behind but, on the morning we left, I made a point of going to say goodbye to the little sandpiper. There it was, only distinguishable from the granite by its movements. I hope when we return to Lost Loon next year the sandpipers and song sparrows will already be in residence. Perhaps next year I'll be able to get some good photos of loons.