Hardangervidda

For a few years before the pandemic, I spent a few weeks each summer camping in the Norwegian uplands working on the Norwegian breeding bird survey. Locals got first dibs on surveys so I was given the ones no-one else wanted: this meant they were at the tops of mountains or I had to walk for miles and miles to get to the start of the survey. I didn't mind - I was there for no other reason than to breach the treeline and wander through the endless rolling mosaics of Bog Myrtle, Juniper, willow and heather, crunch across lichen beds and scramble over rocks.

One July night I camped by a loch high in the Hardangervidda plateau a day and half's walk from the car: the temperature plunged, snow fell hard and I didn't sleep a wink. I lay freezing in my tent wondering if I'd finally bitten off more of this bird survey stuff than I could chew.

At Dovrefjell I went and searched for the Musk Ox; I walked and walked towards the mountain until enormous, dark boulders that poked out the side of the slopes started shuffling forwards and back. I sat and watched for hours as they flailed at the willows, grabbing great chunks in their gobs, ripping and tearing at it while their dense coats rippled in the breeze.

Temminck's Stints buzzed and trilled on marshy loch shores; a Great Snipe brood exploded from a tangle of juniper and heather, fat chunks of bird whirring away on tiny wings; Rough-legged Buzzards and Golden Eagles soared; Short-eared Owls and Hen Harriers quartered.

I lay awake in my tent in the gloaming that passed for night as Cranes bugled in a valley so vast and quiet they could have been a few yards overhead or kilometres away for all I could fathom. From lichen crusted trees a Hawk Owl brood squawked furiously and hopped from branch to branch as I passed. An enormous Bull Moose fixed me with an empty gaze from ten paces after I startled him in a dense Birch forest.

I've never written anything down about those trips before aside from page after page of abbreviations scribbled in a tiny waterproof notebook. Some memories are hazy now, others are still as clear as the water that tumbles down from Norwegian glaciers in the height of summer. I'd come home exhausted but satisfied; the whole trip condensed down to a scramble of pencilled, occasionally indecipherable codes.

I never really made head nor tail of the birds if truth be told; I knew the songs and calls and my data were good, but I never really knew them like I'd wanted: I'd think I had it all sorted, then a Bluethroat or Lapland Bunting would pop up somewhere all wrong, and I'd be back to square one. When I hear it said that if we only did this or that to our hills in Scotland we'd have some Fenno-Scandian bird colonising, I remember how certain I used to be about those kinds of things too. Aside from the memories, when I think back to those trips, I reflect on how much certainty they divested from me: how much I knew about Scotland before, and how little I knew afterwards.

Bluethroat pair (female in front) in Hardangervidda, July 2017.

Hawk Owl chick, Otta, July 2018

Dunlin, Fagerheim, June 2019

Willow and Juniper at the head of Jonndalen, July 2019

Golden Plover overlooking Øvre Hein, July 2018