This morning whilst I was having breakfast 2 Sulphur-crested Cockatoos flew into our courtyard. They are infrequent visitors.
 
One settled on the Maple tree, the other on the edge of the bird bath beneath the tree. Here it proceeded to pick out one of the pebbles I have in the bath (to aid the smaller birds easy access to the water) He transferred the pebble to his left claw and then began to peck at it. Not satisfied he dropped it in the Ivy outside the bath and tried another doing the same thing. By the time I had gathered my mobile and tried to focus through the window he had discarded several pebbles and moved to a large planter tub nearby where I had temporarily left a small pot plant. Determinedly he plucked at the plant and flung bits of it piece by piece onto the paving, then tackled the pot. Having vented his frustration the pair flew off. I retrieved 7 pebbles amongst the Ivy and cleared up the scattered plant stalks. Of course he could be she?!.  
 
And yes Swartkop the Kookaburra still visits. He has certainly learnt some Kookaburra manners and we occasionally meet at the dustbin and have a chat. Do I give him a treat? Of course!

Vardø and Hornøya island
Vardø is situated in Finnmark county, northern Norway on the Varanger Peninsula, facing onto the Barents Sea. The town is Norway’s eastern-most town (further east than Russia’s Saint Petersburg).  It is located on the island of Vardøya (a derivation of Old Norse meaning Wolf Island), north of the Arctic Circle in the tundra region beyond the tree line.  Access to the town is via a short undersea road tunnel.  Vardø grew up around the Vardøhus Fortress, built on the island in the early 14th century.  Main industries are fishing and fish processing.
On a cool early summer’s morning (it snowed briefly as we had breakfast) in June 2019, we assembled at the pier for the short boat trip to Hornøya (Bird) Island, home to 80,000 seabirds. This steep rocky outcrop is a truly spectacular sight.  Great rafts of guillemots cover the ocean nearby, and tier upon tier of birds occupy every available ledge on the cliffs.  The noise (and smell) was incredible.
The first birds seen were European Shags, nesting under and in one of the few visitor shelters.  They are handsome all-black cormorants, with shaggy black crests and green eyes.    Thousands of Guillemots on the cliffs jostled with Razorbills, Great Black-backed Gulls and Black-legged Kittiwakes.  Often, we saw pointy empty eggshells, bright blue with black spots, in the grass by our feet.  Our Rockjumper guide, Nigel Redman, pointed out different morphs of the Common Guillemot – bridled (who appear to be wearing white spectacles) and non-bridled. Soon, we began to see Atlantic Puffins – at first just a few, then they seemed to be everywhere.  Occasionally one or more large White-tailed Eagles flew by, causing a great explosion of wings as flocks of Guillemots, Razorbills and Puffins flew off in panic.  We spent hours that morning marvelling at the sheer enormity of the bird population.  Some Chinese tourists had a field day with their long-lensed cameras.  At one stage, one of my group signalled to me to be careful as I walked along a narrow rocky path.  Between us, a tiny clutch of gull chicks regarded us nervously.  They were a soft grey with black spots.  We did not see the parent birds, so we were unable to identify them. It was an unforgettable morning and is highly recommended despite the remoteness.
 
 

Phoebe Snetsinger, Birding on Borrowed Time (Colorado Springs: American Birding Association, 2003)
Phoebe Snetsinger’s name has long been synonymous for me with fine birding and big listing. Diagnosed with terminal melanoma at 49 and told she had only a short time to live, she rejected treatment and decided instead to see all the birds she could in what time was left.  She lived for another 19 years and became the first person to see all the 8,500 bird species known in the world at that date. When the second-hand bookseller Andrew Isles announced he had secured a copy of her autobiography, I immediately snaffled it up, and was further delighted to find the forward had been written by another great lister, Peter Kaestner, who was the guide on our India tour in February, back in the pre-Covid 19 era.

Phoebe Snetsinger came to birding late, when she was 34, mother of 4 children, with a “mind starving for some kind of outlet that didn’t revolve around raising a family”. A friend took her birding, handed her a pair of binoculars, and pointed her in the direction of a male Blackburnian Warbler. She was hooked!

As she became more experienced, she also became more ambitious, but also more eager to learn more about her new hobby. She always kept immaculate notes, determined that she would not “count” a bird unless she had seen and identified it properly herself—no merely relying on a guide for her! On a trip to Panama in 1981, when she reached her 2000th species, she became aware of a worrying lump under her arm. Diagnosed and given what she saw as a death sentence, she set off for Alaska, determined to add as many birds as possible, then went to the high Himalayas. On that trip, one of her fellow-travellers died, peacefully, in her sleep. “Jo’s end,” writes Snetsinger, “seemed to me the best that one could possibly ask for” and stiffened her determination to see more and yet more.
Her autobiography is beautifully written, well-paced, and illustrated with lovely drawings and paintings by artist H. Douglas Pratt. It recounts shipwrecks, earthquakes, recurrences of the melanoma and the breakdown of her marriage. To give you a taste of the excitement of reading her, take this extract: “it began to rain heavily, and the falling drops made it impossible to pick out any subtle bird movement—because everything was moving with raindrops. I continued to watch the track for want of something better to do, and suddenly a rufous-brown bird with a semi-cocked tail scuttled rodent-like across the track. Quick, but adequate: it was a Rufous Scrub-bird.”
On her fourth trip to Madagascar, with a want-list of 23 species, five of them representing new genera, her bus crashed and she was killed instantly. Her last sighting had been the Red-shouldered Vanga, a beautiful bird, in a family unique to Madagascar.

As her son Thomas writes in the epilogue, “she went out, as she had always hoped, at the very top of her game, in the middle of doing what she loved to do.” Carpe diem, as she herself often said.
Rosemary Lloyd