If you want to see a lot of different bird species, don’t come to Spitsbergen. On a typical tour we see around 25 different species and if we try really hard that might be increased to 30. After 17 seasons on Spitsbergen I now have 57 species of bird on my list. Not an impressive number compared to other areas.

And most new species that I see are common ones back home who took a wrong turn somewhere and are now lost on Spitsbergen. Like this Common Swift that we found earlier this year. Really makes you wonder, what would a Swift eat when the insects hardly fly higher as one meter above the ground…