Birding Trip to Lauwersmeer, NL 13-17th May 2015

The first visit back to the Netherlands was during Easter week as an introduction trip with the family. Not much birding got done, only driving around the countryside refamiliarising myself with the roads, landscape and feel of the land. Made a second trip middle of May by myself to birdwatch and pick out sites for big wader counts  ... Waddensea of course, Lauwersmeer as a base seemed an obvious choice.

Though the May trip was a short visit it was over several days including a weekend ... Wednesday - Sunday, ample time to cover the important hides near Lauwermeer, watch swarms of migrating Waddensea waders, ride around the polderscapes and a peep to Termunten. And of course everything else in between.

The hide by Ezumazijl was a nice surprise in May ... lekking Ruff (Philomachus pugnax) with front rwo seats and tonnes of Redshanks (maybe Spotted somewhere in between). Most mornings the hide was empty especially during the early part of the morning. The flat polders were a treasure trove of raptors.

Nice views of early players of the Spring migration run along the coast from Wierum to Moddegat till Lauwersoog ...

I took along perhaps too much gear this first focus-on-birding trip ... digiscoping gear for videos with the EOS100D, brackets and scope as well as several lenses for both birds and landscape. Kinda tiresome lugging all those along esp the Kowa scope and tripods!

For future trips ... the digiscope setup would probably be dropped for a Nikon P900 to shave off weight. The camera setup remains but the landscape may change to a smaller mirrorless get up.

In anycase, was I was happy with the images collected during the trip. Only wished I had woken up earlier for the swarmes crossing the Waddensea every morning and shot images of the lekking Ruff instead of making videos. The German birders had it right ... long lenses and images only.

The pictures:

It's nice to be back on old stomping grounds and rediscovering it in a way at a much slower pace in a more focussed mode. I could've done more in the years before but two little ones proved you can only do that in fits and starts. It's more fluid now that the kids are bigger ... which means more birding time the way it should've been.

Images and words: Nazeri Abghani (c) 2015

Aurora in Hundvag 17th April 2015

In the wee hours of the morning, a spectacular showing of the northernlights not 5 mins away from home after a strong geomagnetic storm a few days earlier. I was hoping it'd come around during a clear night ... and so it did.

Here are some of the photos:

 

It was a spectacular display second only perhaps to an earlier event 17th March which I had missed. The show started around 11:37pm and continued well into the morning. by the time I left at 4am it was still there in the northern sky though not as intense. 1000 shots later I now have a complete sequence for a proper timelapse video. Let's us how that turned out.

There were also some very unique shots by other people from the Stavanger Aurora Chasers of which I'm also a member.

Blast from the past ... Balloerveld

There is this very nice dunes and heather preserve near Rolde called Balloerveld. Having driven passed it so many times in the past, we decided to have a picnic there one spring weekend. Though Daddy and Ali have cycled there previously the year Aisya was born, this is the first time for Mommy and Aisya.

Balloerveld is very popular with walkers, cyclist and birdwatchers, and it forms part of the network of the National Drente Landscape. It's populated by heather, silver birch and ancient pines. The silver birch is most beautiful in autumn and spring while the heather holds its own in late summer/ early autumn when the entire place is turned purple by its tiny blooms.

We selected a nice shaded spot near the central sand dunes under some ancient pines and hanged out among the pine cones and heather all morning long. Ali recognised it as a "European old growth forest" (in his own words) though to the uninitiated it may look more like a well tended garden with only the odd twigs and broken pine cones littering the ground.

Aisya was fussy at first but later took quite well to the pine cones, heather and the numerous rabbit trails. Mommy only wished we'd been here more often and maybe even export a piece of "this" back to Malaysia for into own backyard. Daddy already felt at home. We left the outdoors to the confines of home a couple of hours after lunch just in time for the children nap in the car.

Blast from the past ... Keukenhoff

It's finally spring and the flowers are blooming ... not satisfied with tulips we have in our backyard (a few bulbs we were testing on) we went to Keukenhof a day after returning from Maastricht. Mommy and Daddy enjoyed the foray on what was a nice sunny day, Ali didn't seem to as much. He prefered running around and getting physical with the blooms ... which meant that at critical moments he ended up strapped to the buggy ... poor Ali.

Trip back to Rolde and Assen

We took a few days of Easter to revisit Rolde and Assen, 2 hours drive away from Amsterdam Sciphol Airport. This is our first trip back since residing in Norway ... though we've been meaning to do so every year.

Both children agreed that the visit was too short! There wasn't enough time to soak in the early days of living their childhood an idyllic little place like Rolde. We'll definitely try to get back there again.