6 - meriharakka

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You should be just about able to pick out the bird in this poor mobile phone picture - sorry - and identify it. The oystercatcher has no close relatives, so while it may have a muddy outline here and - sorry again - in the other pic, its characteristic features stand out well enough. See the bright orange beak (and legs, visible in someone else's superior photo image), and black and white plumage.

Finland boasts 4,000 pairs, seen mostly on the coasts. As in Britain, or so I thought, until I saw these on the River Lune, though to be fair this wasn't so far from the coast. Anyway, to return to my self-apponted task of telling you what a bird is in Finnish, I can tell you as per the title of this post, that they call it the meriharakka. I found this quite interesting, because I knew that 'meri-' meant 'sea-' something-or-other. So what is a harakka? The answer is that it's a magpie, so they're calling the oystercatcher a 'sea magpie', which does make sense, regarding the plumage, though it's a very different bird.

And if you've been following this fascinating ornithology series, you may well ask, what happened to the pond? Well, it's still there, but this story is all about our release from some of the coronavirus restrictions, enabling my first bit of socialising since March. Four of us met up from three different directions at an equidistant point, a picnic site near where we were able to enjoy a very pleasant riverside walk, admiring ducks, geese, swans, sand martins and three (I think) oystercatchers, or meriharakat.

The pictures aren't great - yes of course I should have taken my proper camera - but they do serve as a record of the sighting. More interesting was their behaviour. Two of them were positioned like this on adjacent bits of rock sticking out into the stream, calling to each other, the calls bouncing back off the high bank on the other side.

Hmm one of my friends had promised kingfishers on this trip. How annoyed would I have been, if we had seen them and I'd still only had this rubbishy picture taking device?

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