Tjörnin Lake

7-16-10   We went to the Tjörnin Lake in downtown Reykjavik with one pair of binoculars. The wind in Iceland reminds me of the irritatingly constant wind in Chicago. The temp was 8 °C which is about 47 °F.

The Arctic Tern is the coolest bird we've seen so far. It flies 25 feet off the water, looking down into the water. Its tail is very thin and exorbitantly long. When it fans its tail to turn, the thin needle of a tail becomes an enormously large forked tailed, like that of the Scissor-Tailed and Fork-Tailed Flycatchers in Texas.

A Blue-Winged Teal duck was shielding her brood from the North Atlantic wind by hiding behind the Radhus next to the lake, protecting her ducklings by sitting on them.

Greylag Geese and Pink-Footed Geese are differentiated by their feet. The Pink-Footed breed more in the mountain glaciers. Lesser and Greater Black-Backed Gulls too are differentiated by their feet. And the Black-Headed Gull actually has a chocolate brown head.

Berry and I went to a local seaside dive for dinner and it was filled with local women chirping quietly in Icelandic. You select your meal from a glass display case and sit on long wooden benches. We had the lobster soup and grilled skewers of Halibut and Salmon. Berry was taken aback by the down-home local flare of the place, including a seal impaled high on the wall.

We walked slowly around the lake. Berry noticed the pretty blue-purple wild flower, Nutka Lupine (Lupinus nootkatensis). This species was introduced from the American northwest by the Icelanders, to fix nitrogen in its root system to ultimately enrich the nutrient poor Icelandic soil. Clover is planted by farmers in the US to do the same thing.

There is a chill in the air. It is sweater weather in Reykjavik, but there are no mosquitoes in Iceland. The sea here in Reykjavik is deep blue. We saw sailboats cutting through the whitecaps on the water, just outside the breakwater.

-Robert