Bangor West Patchwork Challenge: Tallinn, St Petersburg, Bolton and the Isle of Man

As you can see I am well travelled this month!! Our trip to Tallinn and St Petersburg was an amazing experience on all levels – birding, football, transport, architecture, history, food etc. We flew to Tallinn and it is an excellent base to explore Estonia and well worth a visit at any time of the year. Mid June is particularly good as there is virtually no night at all. We had four nights en route to Russia and two more on the way back. I squeezed in a couple of hours birding at the reserve closest to the city – Paljasaare and this gave some good birds, but the parks were also interesting as the default thrush is fieldfare and they gave excellent close up views. We also visited the Estonian open air folk museum and saw more spotted flycatchers in two hours than I have seen in the UK in ten years. The highlights for urban birding in Tallinn were white wagtail, goosander, fieldfare, and tree sparrow.

Looking for food from tourists

Ran across the path in front of me

Female goosander in the local park

Default thrush - they were everywhere!

A day trip to Helsinki added a wheatear along the waterfront in a distinctly urban environment, but the most surprising thing about Helsinki was that the default gull was common gull; they seemed to be everywhere – even in the pedestrian areas hoovering up food. Common and Arctic terns breed on the terminal roof in Tallinn but little tern eluded me.

These kite birds and nets were supposed to stop gulls coming in and stealing food from the market......

..... they failed

Scavenging common gulls....

....with one obligatory herring gull

Common gull

Paljasaare had a good variety of species and provided a life first common rosefinch, plus water rail, green sandpiper, sedge warbler, whitethroat, and a male red-backed shrike. The variety of birds is helped by the variety of habitat. The common rosefinch was singing from a telephone wire and was easy to see from the tower thoughtfully built by the Soviet Navy and now a very useful birding point. Apparently it is excellent in winter as well, if a trifle cold with limited daylight.

Salt water bay

Woody scrub

Soviet era tower, now a bird hide

View from the tower

Reedbed

The folk park added spotted flycatcher, pied flycatcher, great spotted woodpecker, black redstart and wood warbler. All in all some nice birds and the memory of sitting outside in a cafe watching swifts screaming overhead will stay with me.

St Petersburg proved more bird free and I was less inclined to use binoculars as the place was full of security due to the World Cup. We took a Metro and a bus to the summer palace at Peterhof and this gave us more fieldfares, white wagtail and spotted flycatchers, plus good views of red squirrels. If you want birds visit Tallinn, if you want history and museums St Petersburg has more.

We're on the path it is beside the railing

No worries at all

White wagtail

Church of the spilled blood

St Petersburg stadium ready to party

Peterhof palace and fountains

You have to have a few touristy ones to prove we were actually there!

A quick turn around and we were off to Bolton. We visited Etherow Country Park but we were well into July and birds were hard to see. We did get the Egyptian goose and an awful lot of mandarin duck which breed freely there. Elton Reservoir was a nice walk as usual but very quiet birdwise.

Mandarin drake in eclipse plumage

Mandarin duck

Egyptian goose

And again

We stopped off in the Isle of Man on the way home for four nights. I have never been there but I would go back as there are some nice birds to be had and lots of stunning scenery. What impressed me was the way in which we left crowds of people, found a nice walk and had it all to ourselves within five minutes of the car park/town centre. There are four good seabird colonies – fulmar, kittiwake, guillemot, razorbill, shag, cormorant, stonechat, meadow and rock pipit were all seen. It is an excellent place to see chough – even ten minutes drive from Douglas. Peel is excellent for black guillemot and there are terns at Point of Ayre. We looked long and hard for little tern but apparently they did not have a good year. Four days provided 47 species without going birding so to speak, but chough was the highlight.