Today I discovered a special guest in our garden, a Great diving beetle. It looked tired and so I brought it to the nearest fresh water brook where it directly used its large back legs to swim away and hide in the mud. Hopefully I chose a good place.
The photo: iPhone and plastic magnifier since my macro lens is unreachable in my tiny room in Tromsø.
| English | German | Swedish | Latin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Great diving beetle | Gelbrandkäfer | Gulbrämad dykare | Dytiscus marginalis |
Another sunny day with temperatures round 10 °C. Today I spotted the first tussilago flowers – two weeks earlier than usual. And even the first butterflies – small tortoiseshells – fluttered around today.
The photo of the butterfly is a bit out of focus, but I didn’t want to disturb the little fellows that probably enjoyed the sun as much as I did.
On Friday came a lot of rain, but yesterday on Saturday the weather was forecasted to be nice – and so it was. Time for a longer tour with my kayak, that I hardly used this year. A quarter past 9 I was on the water.
Soon after I passed the near-shore island Storgrundet the sea became quite wavy. Still no dangerously large waves but enough to keep me busy instead of photographing. Shortly before the island Medgrundet I came into the lee of the island and the water calmed down. There I could take photos again and it was easy to go ashore.
Do you see the brown stuff covering the stones? It guess it was some kind of algae washed ashore. Phew – the smell was awful! On the island I saw probably the last blooming circumpolar pea for this year. Other plants were already bearing bean pods. It was end of August and you could see autumn approaching.
In opposite to most other islands nearby, there are no summer cottages or other buildings on Medgrundet. I went through the forest to the other side of the island, which is hardly wider than 200 m at its widest point. There are some beautiful trees in the small forest, a nice contrast to the many commercial forests in Northern Sweden. From the other side I could spot my next two paddle destinations for today: Snusan and Kågnäshällan. On my way back I accidentally found a shelter amidst the forest. Maybe it’s new, I’ve never seen it before but probably it’s Medgrundet’s first building.
When I approached Snusan I scared away an eagle. It rose into the air to the big dislike of a seagull that tried to shoo the raptor away. The eagle hardly noticed the seabird but spiralled higher and higher into the air. I observed it only en passant, I had to focus on the waves.
Again I approached the island from the lee side. While Medgrundet is covered with a forest – mostly pines – Snusan is quite bleak and looks more like a huge flat rock. Probably it’s quite young, an old map from 1926 shows that it had been much smaller then.
On the north side of the island I could see the island Kågnäshällan, but also the breaking waves, that I already had heard a while before going ashore.
Parts of the island were very wet with a lot of water puddles, inhabited by small fishes and aquatic insects of the family Corixidae. Other parts of the island were very dry and many of the rowan looked dried up. Probably there’s hardly any soil that can store water for a longer time.
I continued paddling. First I had to cross some quite large waves then the sea was much calmer so that I could take a picture of the next island to visit: Kågnäshällan.
The calmness however was only temporary, because I kayaked along the outer coast of Kågnäshällan, where there are a lot of rocks and shallow areas – invitations for the waves to break. I went round the island, just focussing on the waves to come until I reached the sheltered bay on the land-facing side. On the outside I could hear the roar of a water scooter, at the horizon I could spot a white sail of a sailing boat – two very different ways to travel on water. My preference however is still the kayak.
After a yoghurt as a snack and remembering the last time I’ve been here six month ago I continued my kayak tour. To Kågnäshällan I had paddled quite directly over open sea, now I would follow the coast until I would be back again.
I passed Kågnäsudden, a fishing village, and a lot of summer cottages. Some people were working (mostly involving tools or vehicles with a motor), some were just sitting in front of their houses enjoying the warm and sunny weather. And warm it was, although some clouds were gathering. Since I left Kågnäshällan the sea was much calmer and I could take pictures from the kayak.
That made paddling much easier but also a bit more boring. It’s nice to have waves as long as you feel safe. Part of my safety was the drysuit that I put on when starting the tour. And a life vest of course, but that’s common sense and hardly mentionable.
Now I looked for the beach I use to bath sometimes but I just hopped over that very bay. What a pity! Anyway I found a nice replacement, a small and shallow sandy beach.
Lunchtime! The menu: Västerbotten cheese on crisp bread garnished with grapes. One of the ants liked the cheese, too and robbed a large piece. It dragged it over the beach that still was wet from last days rain until it got stuck.
After lunch break I continued paddling, passed the beach Harrbäckssand, the island Björkskär and then I could see on of the summer cottages, where my kayak uses to lie in summertime. One longer final spurt and I was back again, very glad that I could make this extraordinary fine summer kayak tour. Hopefully not the last for this season.
More and more I start to enjoy paddling in the waves. I guess I should learn how to use a kayak sometimes. Perhaps next year?
17.5 km / 3 hours 40 minutes plus a lot of breaks. That’s less than 5 km/h. It’s more leisure than sports.
According to my tracking app the elevation gain (and loss) was 287 meter. The waves?
I saw the eagle, I had a camera, but I didn’t take a photo. Why? Well, there’s a rule set for that, the Eagle’s legals:
(1) When you see me – the eagle – you will not have a camera with you (I had)
(2) But if you have, then you will not have the telephoto lens with you (I had)
(3) But if you have, then you will not have it mounted on the camera (that’s right)
(4) But if you have, then you will be busy with other things until I’m long away (true, I was struggling with the waves)
I found this shell of a cockle on the island Snusan. It lay on the rock. There are no cockles in the Bothnian Bay, this part of the Baltic Sea. The next place where you can find them is in Norway, 400 km away. How does this shell come to this place? I know that seagulls use to take shells in their beaks and let them fall down on rocks to crack the shell and get to the meat. But would a seagull transport it such a long distance? How? And why? A riddle that probably remains unsolved.
This article is part of the series “2019-07: Southern Sweden”.
July 26 – Crea Diem Bokcafé in Od Kyrkby and Solviken bathing place
It’s really hot weather in Europe and so in Sweden (though not as extreme as e.g. in Germany). Time to focus on drinking lemonade in the shadow in the book café, not moving too much, trying to avoid the wasps, eating ice cream and of course taking long baths in the lake Ärtingen together with our friends and hosts Annika and Jonas.
And with this recipe the day becomes another nice one on Annika’s and my summer holiday.
Later that day – after an abundant dinner – we played music together. Clarinet, viola, double bass and piano. Sorry, no recordings and no photos neither.
Today, when I looked out of my kitchen window I saw the flowering lilac being swarmed by butterflies. There were some European peacocks but most of them were painted ladies. Most of them flattered away, when I came with my camera but one of them was so kind to wait with open wings.
If you look closely at its wings you can see that they are frayed and that the colours are not the freshest. No wonder, because these butterflies are long-distance flyers coming from Southern Europe or even from North Africa. They sail with the wind and use to fly north each summer – this year even to the Swedish county Västerbotten. So this little fellow probably has flown 3–4000 km. Incredible!
Now my macro lens was attached and I was eager for more insects. Perhaps some dragonflies at the shore of the Nördfjärden? I packed a neoprene suit into my car and drove to the place. I really saw many dragonflies – for example common blue damselflies or
four-spotted chasers – when I waded through the shallow water. However I didn’t get any photos I’m really content with. The dragonflies are so shy and so fast. I guess I’m too impatient for nature photography.
I made however a dragonfly-related photo I like. It’s a so-called exuvia, the leftover of the dragonfly after it has hatched. These exuviae have a great advantage: they don’t move.
| English | German | Swedish | Latin |
|---|---|---|---|
| European peacock | Tagpfauenauge | Påfågelöga | Inachis io |
| Painted lady | Distelfalter | Tistelfjäril | Vanessa cardui |
| Common blue damselfly | Gemeine Becherjungfer | Sjöflickslända | Enallagma cyathigerum |
| four-spotted chaser | Vierfleck | Fyrfläckad trollslända | Libellula quadrimaculata |
Still summer weather – blue sky, temperatures not too hot and the last rain seems to be away like ages. Flowers are blooming, the Baltic Sea is blue and the cows are left on the green pastures for the first time of the year.
Yesterday I saw the first butterfly of the season on the icebreaker Baus. It was a small tortoiseshell. Today I saw another one fluttering in my sunny front yard. It rested on one of the wooden panels and I wondered if and how it can survive after such a long winter with no flowers around.
I sneaked into the house, fetched the camera (it still had the telephoto lens on) and made a shot for this blog. I made it from the street with a distance of 5 metres because I didn’t want to disturb this little fellow. The photo is a 100% crop of the original image, otherwise you would see only a small orange spot.
Small tortoiseshell · nässelfjäril · Kleiner Fuchs · Aglais urticae
This article is part of the series “2017-07: Tromsø”.
It’s no secret, that blood-sucking vampires exist in Scandinavia. It’s another species then the half-human vampires known from countless fantasy novels and therefore there are some differences:
The bad part: They don’t dread the sunlight, they are countless and they can fly!
The good part: You won’t turn into a vampire yourself when they bite you, they are much smaller and they are easier to kill.
But sometimes you come too late to prevent the vampires attack …
This mosquito died in Miekojärvi between Överkalix and Övertorneå, where Annika and I stayed overnight on our tour to Tromsø.
I hardly can remember the intense snow fall a week ago, when I look at a day as today.
Today in a nutshell: sun, shorts, temperatures between 15° and 22° C, sandals, blue sky, t-shirt only, ice cream.
It looked like early spring with only some of the birches starting to come into leaf but it felt more like high summer with today’s temperatures.
Annika and I have been in the “Arboretum Norr” today, just five days later as last year. Last year we could see many different species of flowers, this year only some, mostly Tussilago and Alpine Penny-cress, the two flowers that use to bloom first in the season. No wonder, April and May has been colder than last year. But today warmth attracted many butterflies, such as this European peacock.
And Tussilago is a beautiful flower anyway.
