Migratory bird race, place your bets :
The glaucous gulls and northern fulmars are starting to reappear in the fjord and the ptarmigans and black guillemots never left, but the following will all creep up north some time in the next month.
King eider
Common eider
Snow bunting
Dovekie
Who's first?
A statue of a miner, wearing a bright yellow collar shaped like the sun
Solfest tomorrow, to mark actual sunrise, the first time the sun is visible over the mountains.
The Miner is ready to go
Boy Dog is sulking because he headbutted a rock and cut his eyebrow. By sprinting off and diving headlong into a snow pile, without checking the depth and after being called back repeatedly.
There is no helping some dogs.
Peppermint has a nice, cooling effect, so ice cold peppermint cordial should be the perfect, refreshing antidote to overly spicy chips, right?
Gang, it is not.
My mouth is confused, alarmed, distraught and not impressed.
That's the same as here. Where I'm from, melatonin is prescription only.
While I understand the necessity (believe me, at this time of year. I *really* understand the necessity), I don't think I will ever get used to buying melatonin in the supermarket.
Not even OTC, just straight off the supermarket shelves.
You know that thing about 'If you're wondering if you've seen a raven, you haven't. It's a big crow. You will *know* if you've seen a raven'?
Polar bear tracks are like that. There's a million things you could mistake for polar bear tracks, right up until you see your first polar bear tracks.
No, wait. Walking around in its bear feet. Pretend I said that the first time, it's much funnier.
Oh, it's fresh tracks, no sight confirmation. So maybe it was a reindeer, walking around with bear shoes on
Google Translate, translating Bjørn Dalen to Bear Valley
Never explain your jokes
(It's true though. The vast majority of reported bear sightings on the three main tourist hikes are tourists seeing a reindeer and panicking, but this one is an actual bear)
Bear alert out for a bear in Bjørndalen and I can't help feeling like we should maybe have anticipated that.
(is, in fact, more likely to be very high effort birding at this time of year 😂 I have my fingers crossed for two, maybe three birds)
We're going on a micro road trip today (7km, a route we normally walk, but with lots of heavy camera equipment, so we're taking the van). We're going to park up with our back doors to the sea, eat our lunch and do some low effort birding while the cameras whirr away
(as a reminder, the sun rose 2 weeks ago and isn't even visible over the mountains for another week)
I can feel that midnight sun impending now 😂 it is galloping down from the pole like a horrible spectral stallion hellbent on disrupting the cosy sleep pattern we all established in the dark season.
7 hours of daylight today, 7weeks until the last sunset of the year.
A rock ptarmigan, in full winter plumage, looking very round in the snow
We are drifting to the end of aurora season now. Now begins the grumpy snowball season.
Bright pink skies colouring the snow on a mountain purplish
🩷💜🩶
Fyi person who keeps saving my non-image, non-joke posts, mostly about life admin. That's *really* creepy.
An Alaskan husky, clearly very high, looking at the camera with an odd expression
She's out of her hairy mind 😂😂😂
She also tried to snitch on me to my husband, who was still in bed and minding his own business.
Old Lady Dog has surgery scheduled today, so she missed breakfast and had to walk on the short lead. Being a husky, she is describing, in detail and at volume, her plans to leave home immediately (do I have a bindle she can borrow or does she need to provide her own?)
This is not to undermine the very real damage done by colonialism across the world, but the 'explorers' really were almost certainly the first ones here. Please choose an actual fight, you don't need to have this one.
Context in case anybody else feels like whaling (heh) in on something they know nothing about. It has no known indigenous people and it is geographically reasonable to assume they never existed. It started with Dutch, English and/or Russian whalers in the early 17th century.
Today I have been informed that the lack of any protections for indigenous people up here is deeply problematic and it is shameful that I don't recognise the issue and, my dude, it is *so much* further north than you are thinking of.
The fjord is a little tetchy today
Normally, it would also involve filling drinking water, but the tap water has been unsafe for months, so everybody has good reserve stocks already. If you live under the mountainside (fortunately we no longer do), it means waiting to see if/when you're evacuating.
Evening weather forecast. Sustained winds reaching 32 metres per second, with gusts of up to 46 metres per second
We are stormproofing. When the wind looks like that (again, those numbers are in metres per second), this mostly involves moving everything light enough to carry inside and warming up your windowless room.
Screenshot from an avalanche warning app showing Danger Level 4 - high avalanche danger. It is coloured very red.
Swell.
These numbers are wind in metres per second. Some of those gusts are hurricane speed. Fully expecting multiple avalanches, so a lot of people will be evacuating out of the buildings closest to the mountains over the next couple of days.
Yeah, it's not great.
