Tag Archives: Wildlife

Day 1 – Practice Day: Wal’R’Us

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Saturday 30 August 2025 – When someone says they’ve had a rough night, it’s normally a metaphorical statement. In our case, it was literally a rough night. Not horrendous – neither of us getting seasick or being ejected unexpectedly from our beds – but certainly not smooth. It was enough to make some of the guests seasick, one of them quite severely, poor lass. We were told later that the swell was 1.5 – 1.7 metres, which doesn’t sound much, but this is a small boat, there was quite a lot of roll in the boat’s movement, and our cabin was creaking loudly because of the swell, so sleep was a welcome but only occasional distraction from the rigours of the night.

Nonetheless, we sprang out of bed at the crack of 7am with a song on our lips, for we were now in calm conditions, and the weather for the day looked promising.

After breakfast, having popped out on to the deck to appreciate the scenery,

and OK, yes, to find out how cold it was as well (answer – not – maybe 4°C), we reacquainted ourselves with the joys of trying to remember in which order to deal with trousers, warm shirts and other layers, hats, lifejackets, flotation suits, bloody great big heavy boots, cameras and so forth:- “Practice Day”.

I’d quite forgotten how much fun this could be.

The weather was lovely, the seas were calm, and so boarding the Zodiacs was as unruffled as the sea. The plan had changed overnight, and our first excursion was to be a Zodiac cruise rather than a landing, so Gunnar had gone out early to scout for any potentially interesting sights

and we set out shortly after he returned, with all the guests fitting nicely on to two Zodiacs, with Kuba and Gunnar as the guides.

The scenery (landscape? seascape? icescape?) was lovely.

The scenery illustrates why the island (and once the whole archipelago now known as Svalbard) is called Spitzbergen. First sighted by Dutchman Willem Barentsz in 1596, Spitzbergen is Dutch for “pointy hills”.

We’d noticed before that ice is not white, as one might think from staring at it in a G&T, but can have a variety of colours; a wonderful shade of blue is common.

Kuba, our guide, plucked some ice from the waters by way of demonstration.

All the ice in the water has come from the glaciers that fringe it. Its appearance – how opaque it is – depends on how much air is in it – the deeper the bit of glacier that spawned the lump, the more compression of the snow, the less air remaining. Another factor is that ice tends to reflect blue light better than any of the other colours, so fresh ice – just uncovered, say, by bits of the glacier falling away – shows this blue colour for a while before the sun melts the surface, and “suncrust” forms, with a whiter colour. Because our conditions were so sunny and warm, there was quite some glacier calving going on – we could hear the crashes as chunks of glacier fell into the sea, even if we never saw it with our own eyes, so there was plenty of the gorgeous blue ice to be seen and photographed.

Kuba also pointed out some other glacial calling cards, like the striations in the rock caused by the ice grinding other rock against it.

One can occasionally see shards of rock still embedded in the ice,

and moraine hills,

mounds of rock and stones pushed in front of the glacier as it flows. When it recedes, it leaves the mounds behind. Kuba gave us one extraordinary nugget: Long Island, by New York City, is a moraine hill, created by the Wisconsin Glaciation between 50,000 and 150,000 years ago. It was this glaciation which also created the Great Lakes, if Wikipedia is to be believed (and I see no reason why not).

Scenery was the main attraction of the morning’s cruise, but we did see some birdlife as well. Arctic terns,

Glaucous gulls

and Arctic Skuas

were occasionally to be seen. We also found something that’s not quite a treasure but which is much sought-after by the Kinfish crew.  It’s called “black ice”, and I suppose it’s similar to the stuff that causes road accidents in the UK, but here

it’s simply ice that’s from so deep in a glacier that it’s had all the air compressed out of it, leaving it completely clear and almost invisible in the water. It is therefore suitable for putting in cocktails. Kinfish doesn’t make any of its own ice – it’s all plucked from the sea.

Returning from the Zodiac cruise, we got further confirmation, were it needed, of the level of civilisation of the organisation behind this cruise.

Twinings finest Earl Grey in (we trust) unlimited quantities.

After lunch, during which the ship repositioned itself a bit, we had a second excursion – a landing, this time, at Smeerenburg on Spitsbergen Island (the largest in the Svalbard archipelago) with just a short walk on exiting the Zodiacs. It wasn’t difficult to spot the wildlife we were hoping to encounter;

walruses, relaxing on the shore nearby. Simple as it might have been to identify the quarry, the process of getting near them was not straightforward.  Firstly, Kuba had to go ashore first to scout out the landscape and make sure that there were no polar bears around.

Then he had to brief us on the behaviour most likely to get us the photos we wanted;

basically, a cautious and quiet advance from downwind of the walruses.  Their sight is poor, but their sense of smell is keen (though obviously they can’t smell themselves – they stink!) and it would not have taken much, possibly, to scare them off into the water. So, we advanced slowly and quietly across the flotsam-strewn ground

towards where you can see the walruses right on the shoreline in the picture above.

There were a couple in the water as well.

but the ones on land seemed not to be worried by our approach.

We were in luck; quite often the walruses just basically lie inert, but we got some great pictures because these were somewhat active, mainly jockeying for position among themselves, it seemed.

I also got some video of their interactions.

Kuba explained that their food is mussels – they use their whiskers to help detect the shellfish on the sea floor and simply suck the creatures out from their shells . Apparently, one scientific expedition found a dead walrus and opened it up. They found 70kg of mussels inside the stomach – and not one single mussel shell.

We were able to get really quite close to the walruses;

30 metres is the minimum distance allowed by Norwegian regulation, apparently, and Kuba had a rangefinder with him to enforce that.

There was some birdlife as well – some (we’re reasonably sure) Red-throated Divers

and some delightful Arctic Terns fishing nearby.

There was also a historical remnant to be seen.

This is all that’s left of a “blubber oven” – there would have been several over the land at one stage – a construction to heat the cauldrons wherein walrus and whale blubber were boiled down to the oil which was so vital to life in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries – as we learned in Antarctica, whale oil was just as much a utility for heating and lighting then as electricity is to us these days.

We’d been very lucky to have benign conditions for our first day of expeditions, allowing us to practise all the various things we had to bear in mind as we left the ship. We’d got some great photos, too. The relative calm of the conditions allowed Kuba to hatch a plan that takes us much further north and can potentially lead to some exciting opportunities for close encounters with other wildlife – if our luck holds.  Stay tuned to find out whether it did!

A Musk-see sight

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Saturday 23 August 2025 – In yesterday’s post, I said that the plan for today involved tramping around looking for local wildlife. The activity was described as a “safari”, which conjures up images of hot, sunny conditions and being ferried around between exotic photo opportunities in a robust 4×4. However, we’re in the Norwegian midlands, and so realised that it wasn’t going to be hot, and the forecast suggested that it wouldn’t be sunny, either. So our getting-up activities involved a certain amount of rumination about how much protection we’d need against the almost-certain cold and the apparently likely rain. We also knew that there would be, as I said, a certain amount of tramping about, quite possibly up and down the side of mountains and maybe even in and out of Norwegian woods. So I was also concerned about not getting too hot, since the forecast temperature was some 12°C. In the end, I opted for more protection against the rain than against the cold.

At breakfast, and at the suggestion of the hotel staff, we stacked up a couple of sandwiches each so that we could take a packed lunch with us for the day, and set off for the two dozen kilometres to Hjerkinn, where we would meet up with our guide for the day. On the drive over, we noted a couple of things to be explored on the way back.

We arrived at a windswept car park which featured a few huddled groups of folk who, like us, were expecting a safari,

but there was no immediate information about what to do. There was a troll there, which was laughing at us,

but that was it. I realised at this point that I had probably got the balance between wet and cold wrong in my gear selection – it was chilly and there was a stiff breeze.

After a while, though, some chaps emerged from the building and it became clear that they were the guides for the day. There was a bigger group, around a dozen, who were going with one guide; and we had our own chap, Jakob. But we all piled into vehicles together and headed down the road for a few minutes to the starting point of the day’s safari. Jakob immediately led us off on our trip. I asked him what the plan was for the day, and it was straightforward enough: walk for a couple of hours in the hope of finding our quarry; spend some time eating lunch and watching it; and then walk a couple of hours back. Simples!

We crossed a river,

went under a railway and then headed along a track up the side of a hill.

The scenery was immense

and the wind was strong and cold; but walking up the hill was a nice warming activity. At one point, Jakob stopped and said, “Ah, I can see them already”. He was doing that thing that expert guides do all over the world and which annoys and impresses me in equal measure – picking out an animal from its surrounding scenery, even though it’s entirely invisible to my eyes.

Believe it or not, there’s a Musk Ox in the middle of that picture. In fact, it became clear that there was a small group of them, maybe some 700 metres away, which I could just about make out if I used the 30x telephoto of my phone.

It was clear that we would have a bit of a trek to get to the point where even I could see them with my naked and streaming eyes.

Jakob gave us a choice of route – we could take an easier, but longer way round, or we could do a shorter yomp across the intervening brush which should get us near the animals more quickly. We opted for the brush route, which took us across and through moss, lichen and small scrubby plants of various sorts.  The going was not easy.

but it conveyed the authentic Norwegian safari experience wonderfully well.  We even got to see Musk Ox poo.

Before you get too excited about that, let me show you the scale of this defecation.

This, remarkably, is the poo of an animal which might weigh half a ton. Jakob explained that it was winter poo – more details promised later.  We also, by way of balance, came across some summer poo

which was larger and, unsurprisingly, fresher. This demonstrated that we were actually using a track that a Musk Ox might choose as a route from A to B, via W and C.

We finally got to a place where even I could make out the beasts, some 250 metres away.

We were not the only people out looking for Musk Ox; I hope this picture gives some perspective of what could be seen with the naked eye.

We were not allowed to go any closer than this to the Musk Oxen. We had been told before we embarked on this diversion that that this was the case. I had thought that it was in order to afford the Musk Ox some protection from the ravages wrought by humankind. That’s not the case. The distance rule is for the protection of humans, of whom Musk Ox are not even slightly frightened. Jakob explained that the animals are very protective of their rather large personal space, and can be aggressive if people get too close. In fact, a handful of people get killed by Musk Oxen every year.

So – 250 metres.  Time to get the Big Camera (or, rather, the Big Lens) out.

We could see a family group – female, male and two calves. They seemed utterly unaffected by the proximity of the E6 main road going close by.

The E6, in fact, is a barrier – if they stray beyond it and can’t be shooed back, they have to be shot before they cause aggro.

Jakob had brought a spotter scope with him and was able to assist Jane in getting a couple of shots through it on her phone,

and the results are pretty good; but I was pleased with the results I got, particularly when three of them formed a nice family group photo for me.

Female on the left, 4-month-old calf in the middle, male on the right, distinguishable by the bulk of horns on his head.

I took a little video, also.

We spent probably an hour watching these, whilst we ate our lunch, and Jakob gave us a great deal of information about Musk Oxen, on which he is something of an expert, having written a thesis on the beasts at University.

They are not, despite the name, cattle. They are actually related to sheep and goats. Once you know this, it’s obvious from looking at the heads and eyes. It also explains the habit of the males during mating season of establishing superiority, and hence shagging rights, by running full tilt at each other, which is a disturbing sight.

They are mind-bogglingly stupid, apparently. Several die each year because they will charge an oncoming train, for example.  The area we were in used to be a Norwegian Army training area, and one Musk Ox apparently charged a tank several times. He actually survived, but minus one of his horns, which must have felt as odd to him as it would have looked to us. They are very agile, and will climb steep mountain sides, a la goat, but should they lose their footing it rarely ends well. They are also subject to dying from pneumonia. That said, they are very tough creatures, being able to survive in winter temperatures down as low as -60°C. This explains their winter poo – during extremely cold weather, they stop growing entirely in order to conserve what energy they can derive from what grazing they can dig up from beneath the snow. In summer, when the temperature climbs, they can simply go higher in the mountains to avoid the worst of the heat. And their poo reflects a more normal metabolism.

The big surprise to me is that they are not native to Norway, having gone extinct here some ten thousand years ago.  They were reintroduced from Greenland, a process that was far from straightforward and which took several attempts over the course of centuries, starting in the 18th century and only really succeeding in the 20th.  The group we were watching was part of a population in the area which is managed to only around 200.

We had been joined by the others in our larger group, and they drifted off to watch another pair of oxen just along the way.  We passed them on our trek back to the start.

There are a couple of Musk Ox there, honest.

We took the longer but easier way back to the van.

The way out (3km)
The way back (5km)

and Jakob explained to us a somewhat left-field, but lucrative, industry based around a lichen, the White Curl lichen, which is ubiquitous here. (By the way this is one of the several species collectively known as “Reindeer Lichen” because… er… they form the major part of the diet of reindeer).

These tiny little clumps are prized. People pick them dry them and then sell them – to model railway enthusiasts, who use them as trees. It’s a million-crown industry, apparently.

Generally, the colour and variety of mosses and lichens in the area is remarkable.

So ended our Musk Ox safari, six of the possible 200 animals sighted, altogether a satisfactory day out. The expected rain never materialised, further underlining my poor clothing decision-making ability. Although I found it very chilly at times, it could have been a lot worse; but I really could have done with an extra layer. Never mind – we saw our Musk Oxen and we were happy.

On the way back, we stopped off at the two places we’d noted on the way out.  Firstly, Dovregubbenshallen, which is a remarkable huddle of buildings just beside the E6. The wooden construction and turf roof is in the traditional architectural style called “Gudbrands”, which is a feature of the Gudbrandsdale valley, this region.

Translated, its name means “Old Man’s Hall”, or “King’s Hall”, and it has links with the well-known saga of Peer Gynt. Ibsen’s play confers the name “Dovregubben” to one Jotun Dovre who fostered and raised Norway’s King Harald, called Dovefostre as a youngster. I’m not sure that Edvard Grieg, in writing the part of his Peer Gynt suite called “In the Hall of the Mountain King”, had the cafe there in mind…

The cake (well-deserved, I’m sure you will agree) was good though.

The other place we wanted to visit was, again, a set of striking buildings beside the road.

This was Fokstugu Fjellstue, Fox Cottage Mountain Lodge, which turned out to be a pilgrim hostel and retreat, based upon a sheep farm.  There’s a pilgrim route, Olav’s Way, stretching from Oslo to Trondheim, on the coast, and this is a place where pilgrims could stay.  It looked a bit run down, frankly – the church was closed and some of the building structure was crumbling. But it’s a handsome site.

And that was it for the day – an active and full one, and perfect preparation for my deerburger evening meal back at the hotel.

We have one more day in Dovrefjell before heading back to Oslo to mooch around there. No formal activity is scheduled on our agenda, but Jane has just informed me that she has a few ideas.  I’ll come back to these pages tomorrow to see what it was we got up to.

 

Lizard Island, Part 2

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Monday 7 October 2024 – I was wondering how I would do when I faced the challenge of not making a total arse of myself on a snorkelling expedition yesterday, Sunday 6th, which was our last full day on Lizard Island. We were due to go out at 2pm on an expedition to see turtles and giant clams, so I started worrying thinking about how to prepare at, oh, I dunno, about 7am. Although I had vowed never to snorkel again, for some reason I had brought a waterproof camera with me, the rather capable Olympus Tough TG-5 that I had bought for our first major trip six years ago, when we went to South America, and it came in rather handy then. This, however, was its first serious outing since, and so I wondered whether 6 year old tech would still cut the mustard for creating photos for this blog. We’d also bought a waterproof case for Jane’s phone camera, which had not worked on its previous outing and we hoped it might be a backup in case my efforts came to naught.

There were only five punters for the outing: our American friends Susan and Michael (experienced divers both); Jane and me (experienced snorkellers one of us); and a lady called Louise who was perfectly pleasant but a bit of a chaos catalyst – she was a lady of last-minute decisions, such as would she snorkel or simply observe, and would she therefore fill out the disclaimer even if she was only going to observe, and would she provide credit card info to cover the cost and so forth.

So it was, at quite a few minutes past 2pm, we found Nemo

and set out across to Watson’s Bay, past a nice view of the resort’s main lodge.

Captain Tom briefed us on all the usual things,

like what to do if the boat caught fire, or sank, and Olla, our guide for the dive (sorry, no photo, but she’s a lot prettier than Tom) briefed us on what to do if we sank or otherwise had problems and, importantly, how to get out of the water once we’d finished.

Watson’s Bay revealed no turtles, so Tom steered us a little way out to what the resort calls the clam garden, where we could attempt to see the other half of the brief. Once there, Olla jumped in, Susan and Michael followed her example, as did Jane, and I did my best to slide gently off the boat so as not to get too much of the ocean deep into my sinuses, which I judged would have been a poor start to the activity.

My main reservation about snorkelling has been the dichotomy between being able to see (and photograph) what’s beneath me whilst still keeping up with a group; I can do one or the other, but not both. If I concentrate on looking below the water, I easily become disoriented and lose sight of the group, and then it takes me time to spot them and swim over, by which time, beneath their snorkelling masks, they’re rolling their eyes at my flailing around.  Thus you can imagine that I was a bit worried about keeping up, but Olla was towing a nice visible buoyancy ring, and I found this really helpful. I could see the group, the currents and the waves were small and so I could actually relax and spend a few of my limited mental MIPs on watching the reef below .

Which was fabulous.

For once, I was relaxed enough to be able to work out what the camera was doing and so, among the many dozens of photos I took, there are some good ones.

Blackspot Snapper and Lined Bristletooth
Colourful coral and fishes

Giant clam

Another giant clam

There are several more, which you can view at a Flickr Album I have created.

A photographic note here, since this is a photo blog as well as a travel blog.  If technical photo stuff bores you then (a) you are dead to me and (b) you may skip this bit (the next three images).

Here’s a comparison of what a photo from the Oympus looked like out of the camera, and what a bit of processing can do.

Image straight out of the camera, which means that the camera itself has made some decisions about colours and other key image characteristics

One of the things that I like about the camera is that it can capture images in RAW (sort of a digital negative format), which means two things: firstly, that every image needs some form of processing in order to be viewable; and secondly that a lot more detail can be got out of the image.  I can use my favourite processing software to gussy up the image that the camera has created from its own RAW data,

and you can see an improvement; but if I make exactly the same corrections to the RAW version, you get this:

better colours, more detail, less noise. To any people considering being serious about their photography, I present this as being why you should always make sure you have a camera which can do RAW.

OK, the rest of you can start reading again from here.

The giant clams were amazing – the colours (vivid electric greens, blues and purples) didn’t really look natural! As well as the many giants, there were much smaller clams, around 10-15cms long, embedded in the other corals (a few examples can be seen in the parrot fish picture above) which were equally brightly coloured although they tended to close up as one swam over them. To my untutored eye the coral looked to be in pretty good shape too, offering a multitude of shapes and colours. All in all the whole thing was a lot less stressful and much more rewarding than I had expected it to be.

That was pretty much it for the day, apart from one little item of wildlife that Jane spotted on our balcony before we turned in for the night;

a gecko, which had picked, as its ideal resting spot for the night, the space under my drying swimming trunks.

So: today, then: the day we left Lizard Island. There was something of a timing issue at stake: a visit to the Research Station was possible this morning, but then again our flight back to Cairns also left this morning. The resort staff did a great job of ensuring that we did both, again an example of the great service that accompanies the great food there.

We had a swift breakfast, keeping a stern eye on the seagulls which were positioning themselves for a guerilla raid on our breakfast bacon if we let our attention drift,

and then we (actually the exact same people who had gone out on the boat yesterday) set out in a couple of robust trucks on the track

to the Research Station

to be welcomed by Dr Lyle Vail,

one of the co-directors of the station, an extremely knowledgeable, eloquent and engaging man. He spent some 90 minutes filling our brains to overflowing with information about the station’s 51-year history, its three missions and the area it covers.

Lizard Island was once part of the mainland, back in the Good Old Days, when the sea level was 120 metres below today’s.  This, incidentally means that the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef was a 120-metre high cliff, since deep ocean starts there. That’s 400 feet in old money – it must have been an extraordinary sight to see the waterfalls pouring over the edge. But inland of that edge, some 20,000 years ago, it was dry land, which is how come the island has a significant aboriginal history. Sea levels rose and Lizard Island was cut off about 6,000 years ago. Lyle described (in simple terms such that we mere mortals could understand) some of the scientific research that gives the evidence for that history.

He showed us an example of the research lab space they provide

which doesn’t look like much, but then the researchers bring much of their own gear when they can.  He also showed us an example of gear the station can provide

in the form of sophisticated microscopes, which are a bit tricky for researchers and students to bring for themselves. The centre also provides accommodation for up to 37 visiting scientists and students and boats for them to do their expeditions to the reef for research.

The station was in a quiet time, research-wise, so Lyle wasn’t able to show us much activity in the aquarium section of the station; but there was some work going on concerning the crown of thorns starfish, or COTS.

which (a) has to be handled very carefully on account of the spines being able to inject a very nasty venom

and (b) is causing great concern because of its ability to inflict terminal damage to coral reefs by extruding its stomach (at the centre underneath it) over sections of coral

and digesting the coral polyps. They graze back and forth, basically killing areas of reef.  Again, in the Good Old Days before humans started dicking about with the world’s climate systems, this was not a problem; but the warmer waters that arise from climate change make it easier for the COTS to multiply, in turn threatening the reef. The female can produce millions of eggs; the survival rates of the subsequent larvae are boosted by warmer water temperatures (and higher nutrient levels due to agricultural runoff).

Lyle also talked us through bleaching (another probable consequence of climate change)

and showed us a tank where a controlled temperature is being maintained

in order to make specific observations. The tank, by the way, contained quite a sizeable clam.

It would have been fascinating to spend several more hours there listening to Lyle and appreciating his knowledge, passion and ability to explain stuff. But we had to leave, a departure made slightly more tense by Louise’s indecisiveness a out buying a Research Station T-shirt.  For our part, we made a small contribution to the station in the form of a nice new hat for Jane, swiftly chosen

and then had to take our leave for the airport to start our journey home.

So: is that it? Is That All There Is?

Not quite. We started our journey home as soon as the good old Cessna took off, but getting back to cold, wet, thundery Blighty was a two-day exercise, and I’ll write about that in the next post, which will be the closing entry for this trip.