The national birdwatch 2019 in Finland (& pics today)

On Saturday, yesterday, I took part in the national birdwatch again, the national birdwatch 2019, Pihabongaus 2019, organized by BirdLife Suomi here in Finland. It was my fourth time now and I was standing and walking in our garden again. As usual, I had a good time and I was freezing at the end of the event even though I had warm clothes on. 🙂 But it was only -9 degrees Celsius, they said that it felt like -14 degrees, during my birdwatch hour.

So, I saw… a lot of snow and it was snowing a bit, too. Well, as always, I heard many little birds singing, singing in the trees, but I didn’t see that many birds. I recognized the voices of great tits and blue tits and crows. And I saw a magpie, a great spotted woodpecker, a few great tits and I heard and saw a flock of tree sparrows as well. The great spotted woodpecker was pecking at a pine tree and it was nice to watch it with binoculars. One great tit came to perform a solo in front of me, that was funny.

So that was what happened. 🙂

And just a few pictures that I took in our garden today:

January

We have around 30 centimetres of snow here where I’m living. I suspect that we have more than 30 centimetres… It’s been snowing like every day now – sometimes more, sometimes just a little bit. And they say that it will still be snowing.

January

The sky is blue!

January

…and at night the snow is still blue, too. 😉 This was bad after 1.30 am today.

  • Leena

Some more outdoor hobbies

The first picture I took on Sunday:

January
~’How do you play this instrument…?’

Archery! Getting to know archery, learning archery, actually shooting an arrow from a bow… I’ve wanted to do this for many years, we both have, my boyfriend and I, but we started this only just before Christmas. It looks easy, but when I had the bow in my hands for the first time, I didn’t know, I didn’t understand, which way to hold it… That was funny.

Now we just shoot arrows in our garden, without a target stand, but we’re thinking of building a target stand to my boyfriend’s field for example. We have a lot to learn, but it’s so nice to learn and to finally do something that one has been admiring for a long time. Yay! 🙂

January
January

We had the super blood wolf moonsuperverisusikuu in Finnish, early in the morning on Monday, yesterday. I set my alarm clock for 6.25. When I woke up first I looked out of the window with my still sleepy eyes and saw a shiny edge of the moon and thought to myself “good, not cloudy…”, then I went outside and my eyes were still a bit blurry, but I could see that the moon was already turning red. I looked through binoculars and suddenly my eyes were wide open: “this is really happening!” – No clouds this time. I even had time to make coffee and then enjoy my coffee watching the total lunar eclipse. My coffee was hot, but I was freezing a bit at the end of the event, because it was around -20 degrees Celsius.

January
The picture in the book is by Lesley Anne Ivory. The book is Cats Among The Toys by her, from the year 1993.

Morning coffee today…

January

It was cold last night, well under -20 degrees Celsius. Now, in the afternoon, it’s -10 degrees Celsius and it’s snowing.

  • Leena

Collecting stuff

We collected acorns in October.

acorns

First these…

acorns

…and then these – about 300 acorns in total. Some of the acorns were already sprouting, lovely. 🙂 We collected them from the ground, under big oak trees, here in our home village.

The first two pictures I took in October, the rest of the pictures in this blog post I took today.

acorns planted

So, we planted the acorns in our garden, here…

acorns planted

…and here.

And we also collected some acorns for the land that my boyfriend now has in the region of Etelä-PohjanmaaSouth Ostrobothnia, about 180 kilometres north from our home, that is to say, we already planted the acorns there, into the forest ground. There’s a certain spot or place, an island actually, where broad-leaved trees are growing in the forest, but there are no oak trees, not yet…

So, this is all an experiment, with these acorns, just nice and interesting.

spruce cones

I collected spruce cones, too. These were on the ground in our yard, on the driveway. We don’t have big spruce trees, but there are spruces just outside our yard. I started to collect these just because I think that they are lovely, but my boyfriend said that we could try to get seeds from these as well. Well, that’s a good idea, an interesting experiment, too. The cones have been drying inside the house now.

emptying a compost bin

And I was shoveling compost, emptying a compost bin a bit today. We have this year-round composter for kitchen (and garden) waste.

emptying a compost bin

We shovel the compost into this container, where the process continues, and in the end, it all goes back to nature again. 🙂

-Leena

Autumn leaves, new grounds, beetroot…

The autumn colours are particularly abundant and vibrant this year. We have our own word for the autumn leaf colour here in Finlandautumn leaf colour is called ruska in Finnish.

It’s exceptionally warm for October in many parts of Finland this weekend – over 15 degrees Celsius.

First just a few pictures that I took in our garden today:

October

October

October rose

We still have rose blooming in the garden, in front of the porch. We planted the plant in the summer this year.

October rose

October rose…

Okay, and what else am I doing…? 🙂 Hmm, for example, working by my computer for a bit again. And we, my boyfriend and I, we’ve been familiarizing ourselves with new grounds and exploring a new land – thanks to my boyfriend who had the chance to buy some land – forest and field, in the region of Etelä-PohjanmaaSouth Ostrobothnia, about 180 kilometres north from our home. So, that’s my boyfriend’s project, but there’s plenty of space also for me to learn new things and to help out, and in fact, we both already attended our first day-long course on how to take care of forest.

I already wrote earlier that we are growing beetroot for the first time ever, this year. Here’s now our pickled beetroot that we made yesterday:

pickled beetroot

I used water, vinegar, sugar, whole white peppercorns, cloves, a cinnamon stick and salt when I was cooking the pickling liquid. And I put also cloves of garlic into the jar. Should be nice. 🙂

-Leena

Gone cross-country skiing [in Kuusamo earlier this week]

It’s been like summer here in Finland this week. Especially here in the southern part of the country it’s been warm for a bit over a week now. The temperatures have been between 20 and 25 degrees Celsius during the day. The sun’s been shining, grass is already green, the trees are growing leaves – everything is growing, everything is green… and there’s more flowers and butterflies. The scent of summer is in the air and we can already eat some herbs from the garden as well.

But I started off this week by going backwards in time, so to speak. – I travelled to Kuusamo in Koillismaa region in northern Finland, just below Lapland. This time it took 10 hours and 30 minutes to travel there by car through the western and middle parts of Finland, and during all that time I saw how the spring advanced… backwards and in the wrong direction. But that was just nice for a bit adventurous soul. 😀

We (me and my dad) arrived in Kuusamo late in the evening on Sunday a week ago, spent Monday and Tuesday there, and travelled back home again on Wednesday. After that it’s already been warmer there in Kuusamo, too, around 20 degrees Celsius, but here, in this blog post now, is one of the last opportunities to talk about cross-country skiing in Kuusamo this spring…

And in Kuusamo the roads and many other places already were free of snow and ice, spring was already there in that way – the snow had already almost mostly melted, almost… Well, there still were heaps of snow here and there, still melting and in the forests there still was snow, here and there. And the lakes were not free of ice.

cross-country skiing

So, into the woods I went. My very own cross-country skiing equipment waited for me at the cabin.

cross-country skiing

Kuusamo

In the woods, by the lake.

Kuusamo

I saw two swans flying and honking over the lake for a couple of times. I also saw an otter, an Eurasian otter that is, swimming in the ice-free water by the woods. I’ve seen that type of an animal swimming there before, too, a few years ago. 🙂

Kuusamo

And owls… I think I heard an owl calling! When I first heard the voice I immediately thought something along the lines of “this really might be an owl, there’s possibly something so specific in the voice… is it…?” I heard the voice every evening there, over and over again. Well, here, at home where my computer waited for me, I did some research and it truly might have been the voice of a northern hawk owl. I didn’t see the bird in the woods, but I might also have seen an owl flying when I was travelling in the car from the cabin towards the town centre. I saw the bird pretty well, and there was just something so specific… Or perhaps I’ve finally gone nuts. 😀 Well, nice experiences they were, even though I can’t be 100% sure… But learning new things all the time!

Kuusamo

The tracks of a reindeer on the left, my tracks on the right. We went for a walk in the woods together… Well, no, not together, I didn’t see reindeer by the cabin. But we saw many reindeer by the road when we were travelling to Kuusamo. I called them ‘Santa’s reindeer’, because they had winter coat. And before the reindeer I saw a moose standing in a forest.

And when we were travelling back home, about 11 hours through the middle and western parts of Finland, the spring advanced again in the right way, so to speak. And here at home it was like summer already! – At first all the green that had emerged while I was away really felt strange. Stranger than falling into the snow in the north. Nice and delightful, simple adventures everywhere. 🙂

-Leena

Two and a half weeks in Eastern Finland

I spent two and a half weeks in Eastern Finland, in the municipality of Rautavaara in the region of Northern Savonia, in August and in September. It’s my boyfriend’s home region and I was travelling with him and our two cats. His family has an old house there in Rautavaara, no one lives in the house anymore, it’s just for summertime visits nowadays, and that’s the place we stayed as well. It’s always about an eight hour’s drive from our home to Rautavaara, and the same back of course. – Always worth the travel.

I didn’t take pictures of, like, everything, but naturally I did ‘get caught up in some things’, and the result is this blog post here now. 🙂 I also took some pictures for our, mine and Owlnature‘s, Instagram (owlnatureleena), and the real Instagram widget has, by the way, (finally :p ) been on the sidebar of my blog for some time now as well.

lake Keyritty

By the lake Keyritty, just outside the centre of Rautavaara. It was a summery day. So calm, beautiful… just stunning! And it was completely silent here and everywhere we went. 🙂

lake Keyritty

dragonfly

There were many dragonflies flying and enjoying the sunshine by the house on many days. Here’s two of them.

dragonfly

Tiilikanselkä

By another lake on some other day. This is called Tiilikanselkä.

There are actual creeks in the forest, I’m not sure if this is one of them, or is this just some ditch…? Beautiful water areas in the forests, too, anyway.

monkshood in forest

I went mushroom hunting and all I could find was poisonous monkshood. ;p In this one forest I found monkshood in the wild for the first time.

monkshood in forest

monkshood in forest

boletus edulis, penny bun

But we did find a lot of mushrooms, too, during our trip. Here’s one penny bun mushroom or cep or porcino/porcini or boletus edulis mushroom…

craterellus (or cantharellus) tubaeformis, yellowfoot, winter mushroom

And here’s our biggest amount of yellowfoot mushrooms or winter mushrooms or funnel chanterelles or cantharellus/craterellus tubaeformis mushrooms…

In addition to cooking with mushrooms we enjoyed bilberries (or blueberries), lingonberries and crowberries in the forests.

Another lake again. I was on a ridge. There are lakes on either side of the ridge. And there are many ridges in Rautavaara area, fairly small, beautiful… with lakes, forests and swamps.

creek

A creek in the forest, so clear you can see the bottom.

creek

Tiilikanselkä

By Tiilikanselkä again, we went there actually three times during our trip. 🙂

river flows

And river flows…

river flows...

…and flows. Until next time. 🙂

-Leena

Mushrooms

I absolutely love mushrooms! And mushroom hunting. Self-picked mushrooms and self-prepared food with them are something totally different from the canned mushrooms that we meet on pizzas, for example… – No wonder many people believe that they don’t like mushrooms at all… 🙂

And probably we all know how dangerous mushrooms can be – that is a fact indeed! We, me and my boyfriend, got our first facts on mushroom hunting, and bolete mushrooms or porcini mushrooms in particular, when we were mushroom hunting for the first time, with my boyfriend’s father in Eastern Finland. After that we have used a mushroom guide book and the internet, both. 🙂

This blog post of mine is not a proper guide to these two types of mushrooms that I have in the pics below, so don’t eat mushrooms based only on knowledge you get from here! – I’m just having a bit of fun with mushrooms here in this blog post, with a little bit of information! 🙂

The first five pics I took on our front yard on Friday.

shaggy ink cap

We have numerous shaggy ink caps on our front yard every year. They have their own special place there. 🙂 Shaggy ink caps are quite charming and funny mushrooms; they have many phases when it comes to their appearance.

shaggy ink cap

First they are just white, short and chubby ‘trunks’. Then they grow to be tall and thin mushrooms with a proper cap, which then starts to melt away, to dissolve, to drip down, as black liquid or ‘ink’.

shaggy ink cap

These mushrooms are edible when they are very young and white, that mushroom in the pic above is already too old. We have never eaten these, but they say, these are quite good edible mushrooms when they are young.

shaggy ink cap

This ‘ink’ of shaggy ink caps actually was used as ink in days of old. 🙂

shaggy ink cap

Ink dried up?

woolly milkcap

The rest of the pics I took on Saturday night, after a walk in the forest. – We came out of the forest with our hands full of woolly milkcaps.

woolly milkcap

Fluffy mushrooms! Cute and delightful! 🙂

Woolly milkcaps are fully edible, but they must be boiled, and they must be boiled longer than some other mushrooms. Woolly milkcaps must be boiled about 20-30 minutes. The taste of raw woolly milkcaps is strongly bitter and raw woolly milkcaps don’t agree with one’s stomach, at all. Cooking, boiling and rinsing the mushrooms removes the poison from them. The taste of woolly milkcaps after boiling them is very delicious! We cooked a creamy sauce with these.

woolly milkcap

Mushrooms always have funny and cunning names. In Finnish, for example, this woolly milkcap has two names – other one of them is karvalaukkufur bag, literally. 🙂

woolly milkcap

-Leena