In restrospect, I wish I’d brought my binoculars to Sweden, because we stumbled upon so many birds I’d never seen before and some I’d never heard of.
The hooded crow stopped me dead in my tracks. I mean, you know it’s some kinda corvid, just from its shape. But the two-tone coloring, light gray and black, was neat.
Then the barnacle geese, another unfamiliar species, that were hanging out in a park and staking out space just anywhere, like their cousins from Canada. And, uh, who named them? Cornell’s “All About Birds” blames a medieval myth that they hatched from barnacles.
My photo of the white wagtail is too blurry to appreciate the little guy, but think of a chickadee only slightly bigger. These were in all the Stockholm parks we visited and tended to scurry about on the gravel walkways.
Many other birds we only heard, and thanks to a phone app that identifies bird calls we knew we were in the presence of Eurasian siskins, Eurasian blackbirds, common chaffinches and wood warblers.
And there were at least two kinds of grebes we spotted from a distance, the red-necked grebe and the great crested grebe.
Also swans. So many on the waterways all around the archipelago. Cygnus swans, I think, with their adorable little cygnets strung out behind them.
We are home now. And two overwhelming sense memories from this trip involve a wonderful chorus of birds in the forests we walked through during our hiking days in the archipelago and the sumptuous aroma of lilacs pervading whenever we were near gardens.
Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now 