Glacial Lagoons and Birds

“It’s all yours!” Lars says.  See, the way this blog thing works is: he takes photos all day, sometimes at my suggestion, sometimes not.  When we land somewhere for the evening, he puts the photos in the computer, and we look at them.  Then, it’s my turn.  I do the initial write-up.  Lars reads it and usually adds stuff from his perspective.  Then I read it, ask questions, make corrections.  Then he reads it, and we post it.  Or, we repeat the process a couple more times.  Yes, it’s a bit time-consuming, but we both find it helps solidify the day’s experiences.

Future posts may not come out every day—soon we enter the Great Wi-Fi Desert…at least in terms of free access.  So, we’ll still write every evening, but may only be able to post occasionally.

Okay…today.  We dallied at Hof 1, as we had been too tired after our late evening hikes of the day before to write up the blog.  We only had a 1 1/2-hour drive today, so there was no problem getting a late start.

But, even before breakfast, we were treated to the mating ritual of a pair of snipe.  We didn’t hang around to see the conclusion…she seemed to be ready to go, but he seemed to be injured, hopping on one foot the entire time we watched.  Sorry, guys, no bird sex today! But, some of the moves may be familiar.

Then, we drove past a bunch more glaciers, each with its own name, from the large Vatnajökull (VAHT-nah-Yuh-kut’l) National Park.  Vatnajökull is Iceland’s largest glacier, covering 8% of Iceland. From the perspective of someone traveling around Vatnajökull, it is comprised of many outflow tongues (…30 or so, such as Skaftafellajökull, where we were yesterday, and 120 kilometers away, Hoffellsjökull, which we can see from our bedroom window this evening. (!!!)  Anyway, Vatnajökull (which means “Water Glacier”—duh!) is kind of ever-present for the next couple of days.

Meanwhile, while driving along Highway 1, we were taking all the turn-outs on offer, since we had plenty of time to go the short distance.  One of them looked sort of unpromising, as the parking area had you facing a heap of sand and cindery-looking rock.  Lars said it was a terminal moraine, a long ridge of rocks that mark a location where the glacier paused for a long time, dumping its load of rocks as it melted at its terminus. Terminal moraines are a great place to climb up and have a look at the glacial lagoon and glacier behind them.  Here’s what we saw:

Jökulsárlón, a large glacial lagoon formed when the Breiðamerkurjökull (oh, you don’t really want to know, do you?) retreated from its “recent” terminus, near the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.  Glacial lagoons typically have many icebergs in them, are sometimes packed with them, as in these pictures. We knew we’d be passing it today, but hadn’t realized we were there yet, and there weren’t any signs where we pulled off.  Had we driven another couple hundred meters, there would have been signs.  And people.  And we probably wouldn’t have been able to hear the trickling sounds made by melting ice floes, or the big splashes as highly irregular icebergs broke up into smaller chunks, and we certainly would not have seen the barnacle geese, or the female eider.

We had really good birding luck today…so far, we’ve seen 28 different birds, most of them ones we’ve not seen at home.  Here are some more of today’s “bag”:

From top left—Snow Bunting (snjötittlingur), Great Skua (skúmur), Black-tailed Godwit (jaðrakan), Redshank (stelkur), Arctic Tern (kría).  Geez, I love bird names!

While we didn’t exactly have trouble finding tonight’s lodging, it wasn’t quite where we thought.  Or rather, it was, but there were lots of “false positives”, so we spent half an hour saying to each other, “Well, maybe it’s at the foot of the NEXT glacier!”  Hoffell looks a bit rough on the outside—it’s a working farm, and they obviously haven’t wasted money on the outside of the buildings.  But the rooms are very clean, and larger than any we’ve stayed in so far.  And not only do we have a view of the glacier….there are horses!

We´re in the square, white house with the blue roof.  Icelandic houses tend to look like children’s drawings of houses…square, pointy roof, lots of windows, or maybe a door.