Iceland - March 2024 - a weekend birding

Earlier this year, the beginning of March to be precise, I spent a couple of days in Iceland. It's a destination I really like - not a great deal of species diversity but typically loads of what birds there are. To illustrate what I mean my Iceland list is only 78 after five trips, and I reckon that is actually pretty decent. The weather is always rather a gamble, but I got lucky with some beautiful sunny weather albeit that this did scupper my plans to sleep somewhere remote in the car because it was too cold for that to be a realistic thing to do.

I left early on a Saturday morning and was recording my first eBird list at Keflavik Airport before midday. Things started very well with a Merlin as I was leaving the car park, and in the town of Keflavik itself I soon came across a large flock of Snow Bunting on the western outskirts, as well as couple of Ptarmigan. Just your regular urban birds in other words.

Snow Bunting

I did a bit of birding at Njardvik, noting it as a potentially nice location for Whooper Swans and Wigeon, and then carried on into central Reykjavik where I found some parking and walked to Tjornin Pond which was almost all frozen and thus had lots of close birds on the remaining water, including a Red-breasted Merganser, not a bird you often get very good views of.

 

There were various good birds on offer north of Reykjavik at the end of the Akranes peninsula so I drove up there for a while, through the town and harbour and out to the lighthouse. I think I was looking for a King Eider that had been reported, but with only bins and a camera that was doomed to failure - I needed a scope. I tried taking photos of distant potential blobs and then zooming in on the screen, which to an extent worked out in so far as I could identify what things were, but none of them were the duck in question and there were many rafts of birds much further out that I simply had no chance with. I really need to buy a travel scope as often the choice is between my regular 80mm scope and a camera. At a push I can bring both, but the bag is then ridiculously heavy plus I have to walk around with it. I suppose that now my camera has reduced substantially both in size and weight it would be easier, but wouldn't it be nice to have fully lightweight kit. That's what my back is telling me. Unlike the camera I would still keep the real scope as it has a role to play birding in the UK, but the additional flexibility of something small and portable would be excellent. Swarovski's new 56mm scope fits the bill and is a mere two thousand pounds. I might get one in green and another in orange....

Despite the frustration of not being able to properly search for the target bird the birding here was excellent in very lovely weather. There were loads of Common Eider and Long-tailed Duck, and I was able to pick out a couple of Harlequin relatively close inshore. Glaucous Gulls were heavily outnumbered by Iceland Gulls, and a few Great Northern Divers bobbed about. I drove around the town a bit to check out all bits of coast and generally had a very nice time in glorious sunshine - crisp and clear. Towards the end of the day I picked my way out to the lighthouse and had one last scan of the sea. Some semi-distant rocks had a large flock of Purple Sandpipers that from time to time all fluttered up into the air when a slightly larger wave threatened, and I managed to find a Red-throated Diver, a Black Guillemot and a solitary Gannet despite my limited optics.

The sun sets late in Iceland in early March, and so it wasn't until gone 7pm that I headed back to Reykjavik. I had booked a room in a hostel.... Those readers who know Iceland will know that there are no bargains to be found, and unless you come from a Scandinavian country the prices for everything seem completely outlandish for what you actually get. Twenty quid for a bowl of soup also extends to hotels, and so the hostel had been the only reasonable option. Hopefully my stay would be so short it wouldn't matter, so I took a bed in a mixed dormitory. My last experience of something like this, in San Diego a couple of years ago, had not been particularly memorable. Once again I was about twice the age (perhaps more!) of every other person there, young Europeans on gap yaas mostly, and this meant that I was going to bed just as they were going out for the evening. This suited me just fine until about 2am when they all came back..... I had assumed therefore that I would be getting up and leaving them all there, perhaps returning the favour but no, they too were all up before first light and getting ready for another fun day on Iceland - 4x4 tours into the interior, some kind of swimming adventure, a boat trip. They must have all been millionaires is all I can say.

Shortly after 8am I was birding at Vatnsmyrin in central Reykjavik. Photography hadn't really been happening for me and so I had reverted to birding. Somewhere on this series of small shallow pools were some Pintail, an Iceland tick apparently. It didn't take me long to find them amongst the hundreds of Greylag Geese, Wigeon, Mallard and Tufted Duck, and a Merlin surveyed the scene from a street lamp. All perfectly normal.

My next stop was Grafarvogur which sounds like something from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's a vaguely rectangular shaped inlet on the north-east side of town, and somewhere on it was an American Wigeon. I started at the west end, but naturally all the birds were at the east end. Once I made it there, via a few dicey moments on frozen paths, I could see that there was a small flock of Wigeon in a rocky section where a stream seemed to come in. Was one of them a bit paler perhaps? I got a bit closer, dicing with broken bones even more, and yes it was! Excellent. I also had a Fieldfare here with two Redwing, and at some point a small flock of Shelduck arrived to join the Wigeon.

American Wigeon

At this point my phone decided to have a meltdown, perhaps because it was too cold. I watched as the battery ticked down to zero before my very eyes and it then switched itself off. Excellent. These days your phone is everything - it is your wallet, your map, your airline ticket home.... I returned to the car in the hope that it would charge a bit but it wasn't having any of it. Luckily I remembered vaguely where the next planned birding stop was and found it without incident. I can't remember what I was looking for at Lambhagi, but there is a small stream that runs along an industrial area and I guess there was something in there I needed. I left my phone in the car in the hope that it would get its shit together and headed off to look for this bird. I didn't find whatever it was in over a mile of searching, but I did find a Little Grebe sheltering under some overhanging pines which I later discovered was another new Iceland tick. A little further along, by a sports centre, there was some nice habitat with good path coverage, and here I found a Grey Heron which is somewhat of a rarity in Iceland. But I'm still not convinced it was the bird I was looking for.

By now it was midday. The happy news was that my phone now worked again, but it had been stuttering for a while and I made a note to myself to replace it when I got home. I'd had it coming up for four years so it hadn't done badly. Out of ideas I decided I would try some Gull photography (gah!), and with a flight mid-afternoon I needed to stick relatively close to Reykjavik. I had a nice drive down to Porlakshofn on the south coast, hoping to then drive a loop back up to the airport, but I'd forgotten that the road passed through Grindavik (doomed volcano town), and so they had actually closed the coast road as well. Still, perhaps I could get a view of this volcanic fissure on the way back.

Geothermal activity

I had a great time on the Porlakshofn quay with the Iceland and Glaucous Gulls, just me and a bunch of trawlermen getting ready for a fishing expedition, loading up huge crates filled with ice into their holds. The ships are absolutely massive when you get up close to them, you could probaly sail around the globe in them if you needed to. I spent about an hour here before needing to leave, retracing my steps via Reykjavik. At the junction to the Blue Lagoon I parked the car near the US Airforce memorial and climbed the hill to see if I could see anything. The road was indeed closed, with a team of security and what looked like an information board explaining what the problem was. In the far distance I could see a line of smoke, but I have to say it was a bit of a disappointment and my dreams of plumes of lava exploding violently into the sky went unfulfilled. 

I then went back to one of my original spots for a last attempt at photographing the Whooper Swan and Wigeon before a short spin back to the airport where I handed the car back and went home. The full eBird trip report page can be found here.