........taccuini di birdwatching di Claudio Chiossi.......

In the North Sea, to half road between Norway and the earth of Scotland, the Shetlands find, a mysterious earth and soaked of ancient history, where in full summer it is not almost never the sunset and the climate it is surprisingly mild. These islands are rich of wild fauna: ponies from the long and bristly hair turn in complete liberty and seals, otters to even whales can be seen, over whether to spy the enormous colonies of sea birds.

The archipelago of the Shetlands represents one of the most interesting areas in Europe for the sea birds, further to entertain a lot of other northern species that generally find to taller latitudes. In such a composite landscape the visitors ornithologists inevitably have to operate a selection. In reality it can be affirmed that every recess of the Shetlands is ideal for the one who loves to observe the birds, and that each of the inhabited islands is a pleasant place for a vacation.
The sea birds, said, they represent the principal attraction. The tall bluffs that tower on the sea have literally covered of birds: there am enormous quantity of guillemots, fulmars, kittiwakes and gannets. This last ones have established two colonies in the archipelago and they are easy to be observed; the places of nest-building of the storm petrel and the shearwater are not accessible instead. To the Shetlands they are common the great skua and the artic skua, both arctic species, that live of piracy, as it is used to say: they are able to make to release and even to regurgitate the food to the other birds, over whether to plunder the eggs and the small ones of it. Ponds and pastures of the inside entertain the red-throated diver, the dunlin, the whimbrel, the red-necked phalarope, the red-breasted merganser, the wigeon, the velvet scoter and, occasionally, the whooper swan. Other summer breeding species that can be observed are the eider, the snipe, the common sandpiper, the golden plover, the common tern and the artic tern.

The check-list represents the list of the species from me observed during the trip of the duration of two weeks, effected in July 1987.

A COLLECTION OF IMAGES

Attention: for the translation of these texts from Italian I have used the help of an automatic translation program; the signaling through e-mail of possible errors (and them the corrections) they will be welcome.