2 - isokoskelo

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We've had another less common visitor to the pond up the hill. Three of them. Not that they're rare or anything, but I can't recall seeing them here before. I have to admit I didn't identify them straightaway, to the extent of thinking they were 'light phase' versions of the resident mallards. I really wasn't paying proper attention, because they're goosanders, members of a small family we know as mergansers, which have differences from 'normal' ducks I should have noticed.


Below is the first picture I took, yesterday ie. 13.2.2019, when I went up there with my new smartphone. I haven't had a smartphone before, and this was an exercise in taking a picture and straightaway mailing it to a bird-watching friend, to see if she could confirm they were what I thought they were. Yes, she had the common sense to realise I wasn't referring to the coots in the foreground.

I went into the nearby Starbucks (I know, I know) to have a coffee and attend to the picture. The phone's software happily cropped the image; yes, that partly explains the poor quality of the picture (the second one to the right here). But if I'd had my little pocket camera, supposedly possessed of much less megabytage of pixels than the camera, I know I'd have come away with a much sharper photo which I could have cropped down and still have had a useful image. I suppose the big difference is that, although the phone camera has more pixels, the camera, titchy though it is, has a much better lens.

As ever I was curious to see if they feature in the Finnish landscape, and yes, their Finnish name is isokoskelo ('iso' is 'big). As opposed to the slightly smaller tukkakoskelo ('tukka' refers to hair) we know as the red-breasted merganser (I guess you could say it has a more noticeable tuft at the back of its head).

Today, it was sunny and pleasant and I walked up again, this time with my proper camera, to take a comparison shot. Unfortunately, although I saw swans (Finnish: joutsen - it's the Finnish national bird), mallards (sinisorsa), coots (nokikana - noki is soot, kana is a hen) and moorhens (liejukana - lieju is mud), the goosanders were nowhere to be seen. I'll keep my eye out and if they come back, I'll edit this and post a picture...

Sunday update 17.2.2019: I did, and you saw the picture up at the top. Who knows if it's one of the original three birds. It was another sunny day, and there it was, this time associating with the mallards, but even more clearly not a mallard. Like the first picture from my smartphone, it's a crop from a small portion of the image, even smaller in fact, but isn't it so much better?

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