Snowy takatalvi is no joke for the birds

31/5/2024

You will probably not be surprised to hear that Finnish weather is wild... but did you know that, in Helsinki, we had 20 cm of fresh snow on April 23rd this year?

Every spring, we are fooled by one Fool's Spring (well, at least one), when it feels like we're turning the tide and cold/snowy/icy days are behind us. After it comes a Takatalvi, a returning winter. This cycle repeats for a while, until summer actually arrives, often in an abrupt manner (today is May 31 and we have 28ºC outside).

So much snow on April 23rd is quite rare, but you get the idea. After a long winter, people are longing for warm days... but they are usually further ahead than we hope.

However, I must say I enjoyed the last takatalvi episode. Maybe I was the only one, but I had a blast! You see, winter in Finland is a quiet time for nature: all water birds have left because their hideouts are frozen, all insect eaters are gone because insects have died... there's activity around bird feeders, snowy landscapes are magnificent, but it gets a bit boring.
However, when the last snow came this past April, there were lots of birds in the neighbourhood! They surely wondered what was happening to them, but I enjoyed photographing them in such unusual surroundings.

Barnacle goose (Branta leucopsis)

I could feel that the birds were waiting for the storm to stop. Hunkered together on the fields, the Barnacle geese (Branta leucopsis) mostly slept, the bill tucked between their wings. Some gulls tried to find shelter in some deep footsteps, in the middle of the path. On the pond, ducks were mostly at rest too. There was so much snow in the water that it created a thick blanket of slush at the surface. When they needed to move, the water birds often followed a channel created by the passage of another feathered friend before. I had never seen such a phenomenon!