Saturday 5 June 2010

Wolf island & crazy clouds

It feels good to be back in the Varanger. It is windy and raining cats and dogs in this Norwegian coastal area. Today we went to the little town of Vardø (the old norse form of the name was Vargøy; the first element is vargr which means “wolf” and the last element is øy which means “island”) on the eastern tip of the fjord, where I photographed this Kittiwake (Rissa tridactyla/Drieteenmeuw) in a grey-toned setting, in front of the island Reinøya. Two Glaucous Gulls (Larus hyperboreus/Grote Burgemeester) and a Brünnich’s Guillemot (Uria lomvia/Kortbekzeekoet) passed by, but they were too fast for my camera. From there we drove all the way up to Hammingberg, through an extremely rough, hostile and almost surrealistic landscape.
In the late afternoon the rain finally stopped, but the wind freshened into a gale. And at the same time bizarre lens-shaped clouds (altocumulus lenticularis) appeared. Despite the strong wind they held a more or less fixed position in the sky. I postponed diner to record this phenomenon with the stockfish scaffoldings of Vestre Jakobselv as a décor.

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