Author: corvidsketcher

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The Whales of Iceland

Whales are some of the most amazing creatures that have ever lived on planet Earth. And one Reykjavik site that really piqued my interest was Whales of Iceland!

This museum is housed in a massive warehouse near the harbor and includes life sized models of all the dolphins, porpoises, and whales found off the shores of Iceland.

This really is a sketcher’s paradise and I found a bench located against a wall and I started to sketch the humpback, blue, and right whales that were suspended from the ceiling.

I was interrupted in mid-sketch, by a Yank (yes there are Yanks working in Iceland!) who informed me that I was not sitting on a bench but on a child’s coloring table and I was about to break it! Opps, so I found a chair and finished the sketch (featured sketch).

A small child provides scale to how large these whales really are. Perhaps she is headed towards the coloring/sketching table/bench.

It was really interesting to see the true sizes of the whales compared to others. I had seen a handful of blue whales off the California coast but you only see small parts of the dorsal side and if you’re lucky, the fluke. Here you could see the entirety of the whales. I was impressive to see just how large the largest animal that ever lived on the earth really is!

For my second sketch I drew the bowhead whale, the whale was so large that it did not fit into the pages of my sketchbook.

The eye of the largest animal on earth: the blue whale.
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Birds of Iceland

I figured I might see 20 to 25 lifers on my ten day Icelandic birding tour. This was a good goal and I hoped I’d meet it.

In the end I added 22 lifers to my world life list bringing my total to 1,740!

Aside from puffin of course, I had two species that stood out as lifers of the trip. One was the stunning male king eider, the other the powerful and menacing great skua!

The king eider is just one of those ducks that you see in a field guide and say to yourself, “I really want to see that bird!”. The male is such an amazing mix of color, shape, and form. So I had to sketch it of course.

Lifers weren’t the only draw for my Iceland trip, getting quality looks at birds, most in their stunning summer plumage, was another.

I had only seen Arctic terns while on pelagic birding trips off the California coast (it was a good day if you saw one or two on an eight hour cruise). Here in Iceland, the world’s longest migrant can be seen in the thousands. And from land! The terns have to come to land to breed and Iceland is that land.

Another pelagic species that I had seen on pelagic boat trips and occasionally while doing a land-based seawatch was northern fulmar. Fulmars where everywhere in coastal Iceland where they nest on cliffs with a close proximity to the ocean. Walking along the coast, at times fulmars outnumbered gulls as they most common bird passing overhead.

One benefit of living on the California coast is that rarities often work their way down south along the coastline. Such was the case when a snow bunting over wintered on a beach in Half Moon Bay. I first saw the bird on November 19, 2022 and the bird stayed into the new year despite the epic rains of 2023. The bunting was being seen until at least late March.

Now in the summer of 2023 on a beach in northern Iceland I was watching a beautiful male snow bunting perched on a rock. He was decked out in his black and white finery and it really put the word “snow” into snow bunting!

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Hallgrimskirkja

Hallgrimskirkja dominates the skyline of Reykjavik, Iceland. It’s the first thing you see as you head into the city from the airport. For many years it was the tallest building in the entire country. It’s design mimics the basalt columns found across the geology of Iceland. This Lutheran church is essentially Icelandic.

At first I thought this was some modern art but I soon realized it was really just a bicycle chained to the top of a light post, with Iceland’s largest church in the background.

Hallgrimskirkja is the largest church in Iceland. It was designed in 1945 but it was not completed until 1986. This gives hope to the continuous mass that is Barcelona’s unfinished Gaudi masterpiece La Sagrada Familia. It will be finished, someday.

This church topped my sketch list for Reykjavik. I love to sketch architecture. It is the best way to get to know a building and I sketched Hallgrimskirkja from a few different angles and perspectives. It is a building that holds up to many sketches. Here’s one:

While in Reykjavik, my apartment was a block and a half from Hallgrimskirkja, so it was easy to wander back to my home base. All I had to do was look for the tall spire, like a beacon announcing my Icelandic digs and wander towards it. It worked every time.

The church changes with the weather, from overcast to Icelandic sun.

One sketch I did was from a children’s playground at Njalsgata (half a block from my digs). The sketch was dominated by the tall spire of Hallgrimskirkja and in the foreground was my local coffee shop, Reykjavik Roasters. Here I enjoyed an double cappuccino and a blueberry muffin. Coffee in Europe always seems so much better. Perhaps it’s the porcelain. Perhaps it’s the view, perhaps it’s the knowledge of being somewhere exciting and new.

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Lifer on a Dirt Road

On the first day of my WINGS ten day birding tour of Iceland, we headed out from Kelavik International Airport and birded a dirt road between the airport the capital of Reykjavik.

We were birding from our Mercedes Bird Mobile and it served as a moving blind, allowing us to get close to the birds, including the hundreds of Arctic terns that were roosting on the road.

One of these birds is not like the others. A black-headed gull amongst the Arctic terns.

As we where driving north on the dirt road, we stopped to look at a common ringed plover (rhymes with “lover”) when I looked off to my right at what appeared to be a feathered periscope poking out of the green grasses. I put binoculars on the object and it turned into a lifer, the first one of the tour! A rock ptarmigan (Lagopus muta).

The ptarmigan seemed a little agitated by our presence. Perhaps the bird was on some eggs. The ptarmigan flushed, flying away from our van so we move off down the road.

We stopped at Garðskagi Lighthouse where I saw more black-footed kittiwakes (perhaps 1,000) than I have ever seen before and just below us we had amazingly close looks at common eider both males and females with their newly hatched chicks.

Now that’s a lot of kittiwakes! On the California coast I occasionally see a lone individual roosting with other gulls in the winter. This was something amazing. And kittiwakes were in breeding plumage.
The beautiful male and female common eider, the most common duck seen in coastal Iceland.
A mother eider leading her perhaps newly hatched ducklings down to the water for the first time.
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SFO to SEA, SEA to KEF

In previous SFO airport sketches I have drawn airplanes as they waited at gates. But this time I drew a swivel lounge chair. These are always prime real-estate at the airport and I found one to sit and swivel on and an empty chair to sketch.

I was pleased to know, after a bit of research, that my home international airport is highly rated amongst other airports. I guess it comes down to some simple details like where you park your butt on while you wait for your flight, and being able to swivel around to people watch.

Once on my flight to Seattle (SEA) I had a window seat in aisle 11, right in front of the starboard engine.

We were somewhere above Oregon or Washington, high above the clouds at our cruising altitude and I watched the clouds play across the landscape and the cloud’s shadows, well, shadowing it on the ground.

I did a sketch with my smaller panoramic journal, drawing in the starboard engine as a point of reference (featured sketch). Did I draw every cloud in my window view? We no, I used a bit of sketcher’s shorthand to sketch the most sketchable clouds.

At SEA, where it was raining of course, I transferred to my Icelandair flight to the Land of Fire and Ice.

On this flight I was glad to see some Icelandic beers onboard. Being a bird nerd, I ordered a Gull Lager. It met my expectations and I did a sketch to pass the time.

Skal!

I couldn’t wait to set foot in Iceland and add more ink and paint to my journals.

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Reykjavik Sketches

The capital of Iceland is very walkable and sketchable.

From my apartment, a few blocks from the Hallgrimskirkja, I could easily explore Reykjavik on foot with my sketching kit in my pack. I kept my sketchbooks, paint palette, and Escoda travel brushes in a Sea to Summit dry bag, rain and watercolor doesn’t always go well together.

In this post I had included a few of my sketches I did on my Reykjavik walk-abouts.

The featured sketch is the music venue Harpa, which I sketched from the hill at Arnarhóll. Harpa is the most important musical venue in Iceland. This is the home of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and the Reykjavik Big Band. The modernistic music hall was designed by Olafur Eliasson and Harpa helped revitalized the harbor area.

Iceland does not have a great public transportation system. Buses can take you places but you really need a car to get around. The country has no rail but in 1919 the locomotive Minor was the apex of Icelandic rail. She is a diminutive 0-4-0 and is now on display in the Old Harbor, so I had to sketch it. I added steam rising from the stack which is purely artist whimsy.

I have always loved sketching statues because they don’t move and they really tell you about the values and culture of a nation. So I sketched the Iceland’s first settler, Ingolfor Arnarson sculpted by Einar Jonsson. Arnarson noticed steam rising from the area’s hot springs and gave name to Reykjavik meaning “Smoke Cove”.

I visited Einar Jonsson’s house and museum, which is across the street from Hallgrimskirkja. This early prototype of the Ingolfor Arnarson statue that now is a much photographed icon of Reykjavik and Iceland.
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Europe’s Largest Eagle

High on my wishlist was Iceland’s and Europe’s largest eagle: the white-tailed eagle.

This eagle is a sea eagle and is slightly larger than the bald or golden eagle found in North America. The white-tailed is both an apex predator and a scavenger and fills a similar niche as the bald eagle in North America.

The eagle has become rare or extinct in parts of its Eurasian range because of human and other causes.

According to a recent BBC article, white-tailed eagles has been hit hard by the avian flu. The eagle has shown declines in Scotland over the past few years. The avian flu has also caused declines in birth rates of seabirds such as gannets and skuas.

In total we saw seven individuals in the Westfjords of Iceland. Most were far off, best seen through a scope. But there was one that I first I spotted flying parallel to the road, just below us along the shore of a fjord being pursued by two territorial redshanks. It was amazing to see this sea eagle in flight with the naked eye.

Two white-tailed eagles with eaglets (not visible in photo).
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Viking Longship Islendingur

South, just across the bay from Reykjavik, is a ship that I wanted to see and sketch.

This is the replica of a Viking longship named Islendingur. The longship is now out of the water and preserved indoors at the Viking World Museum in Keflavik.

The Islendingur is a replica of the Gokstad longship. The Gokstad ship is a 9th century ship that was found in a burial mound in Sandar, Norway. It is one of the largest preserved Viking ship in existence and is on display at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, Norway. The ship was found on Gokstad Farm in 1880. The oak ship is 78 feet long and almost 17 feet wide. The Islendingur is almost an exact replica of this iconic ship.

In the summer of 2000, to celebrate the millennial anniversary of Lief Erikson’s discovery of North America (500 years before Columbus), the Islendingur set sail, retracing the original route of the famous Norseman. The boat was built and piloted by a descendant of Erikson.

The wooden ship travelled 4,200 miles, stopping at over 24 ports along the way to New York City.

The beautiful form of a Viking longship.

I picked a spot on the starboard side of the longship in the upper gallery and sketched it into my Icelandic sketchbook. I started with the iconic dragon’s figurehead on the bow and sketched the curvaceous oak hull.

On the deck of the Islendingur looking towards the bow. I had the ship all to myself!
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The Last of the Great Auks

One location I wanted to visit was about 20 minutes from Keflavik International Airport but without a car, it seemed a remote possibility that I would see the island where the last great auk lived.

As it turns out, we had some extra time on the last day of my WINGS Iceland tour and our guide thought we would spend some time at the volcanic bit of land closest to Eldey Island.

We pulled into the black sand parking lot between a lighthouse and the Atlantic. Near and just off shore are large kittiwake breeding colonies. A little further off shore were lines of murres, razorbills, and puffins. Add to that, there were a movement of Manx shearwaters heading north. And beyond the bird movement, nine miles from shore, is Eldey Island.

Eldey Island, nine miles off the coast of Iceland.

This is the last place the great auk (Pinguinus impennis) occurred on Planet Earth. This large flightless auk once lived on both sides of the northern Atlantic.

By the early 19th century, the auk population had been severely reduced because of predation by humans.

Because the auk was becoming so rare, naturalists wanted to collect the auk before it disappeared from the earth, paradoxically pushing the great auk to extinction.

One of the last bastions of the great auk was Eldey. It was here on June 3, 1844 that the last two great auks were killed and one of the captors stepped back and crushed the last great auk egg sending the large flightless seabird into oblivion.

The extinction of the great auk is commemorated by a large sculpture by Todd McGrain, which I sketched (featured sketch).

The white on top of the island are all northern gannets. This is Europe’s largest gannet breeding colony.
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Whale Watching: Húsavík

It seems like a no brainer not to visit the island of Iceland without going out on the waters surrounding it. So we left out of the port of Húsavík in northern Iceland on a whale watching trip.

Our ship was the Sylvia, a fishing boat built in 1976. It felt good to to have vessel under my feet that was slightly younger than I am. Our to guides where biologists from Portugal but our captain was purely Icelandic.

We headed out of port under gray skies and light winds. A rain system had passed through the previous night and it looked like a good day for a three hour cruise, a three hour cruise.

As we left port we passed a large cruise ship. Black guillemots where in the harbor and once out of the harbor, gulls, terns, and fulmars circled the boat. Further out and we began to see our first lines of puffins crossing our bow. We had to get a little further out in the fjord to see our first cetaceans.

On the hunt for cetaceans. The crew provided use with dry suits, hence we all appeared to be part of the crew.

Our first cetacean of the cruise was a lifer for me, a small pod of white-beaked dolphins! Well this was a great start. Let’s see if we could get some whales!

It was not too long before we saw the bushy blow of a whale. We headed towards the blow and we saw the first whale of our trip, a humpback whale. On the rest of the cruise we saw about five other humpbacks, with amazing looks at the whales and their unique flukes.

A real treat was seeing two humpbacks swimming parallel to the Sylvia.
What a great look at the humpback’s blowholes as it foraged at the surface.

After seeing about seven different humpbacks we headed back to port. As we neared Húsavík I looked off to the southwest and saw a dark bird with white “wing lights” flying towards. “Skua!”, I shouted. Once the passengers figured out that a skua was not a whale but a pelagic bird, they suddenly lost interest. But I, and my fellow bird nerds enjoyed the great skua flyby!

Coda: There are three nations that still actively whale, one of which is Iceland. Shortly before we set out on our whale watching trip er learned that Iceland had put a three month moratorium on whaling. Hopefully this will lead to a permanent ban.