Bizarre bird migration: Little Bustard makes rare visit to Finnish Lapland

© Mikko Lantto
A little bustard.

    

Mikko Lantto is a photographer who lives in the village of Ylikylä, some 10 kilometres from the centre of Rovaniemi, the capital of Finnish Lapland. While not a serious birdwatcher, he managed to pull off a major coup on Wednesday by spotting a little bustard, which usually lives in Asia and southern Europe. There have only been 23 sightings of the species ever in Finland - and none in northern Finland for at least 220 years.

Two larger types of bustards are rated as the world's heaviest flying birds.

"This is a long-necked, heavy-set, short-winged bird with relatively long legs, whose wings appear almost completely white when in flight. This particular bird has been identified as a male because it has a black neck," Anssi Mäkinen of the Lapland ornithological association's rarities committee told Yle on Thursday.

Twitchers flock to area

Another association member, Pirkka Aalto, says that other birds have been seen in the fields behind Mikko Lantto's house in the past two days.

"Warm south-easterly air currents are bringing rarities to Finland, so our birdwatchers' notification messages are beeping all the time. Today people who were here looking for the bustard saw a pallid harrier, a bird of prey that comes from the same direction," says Aalto.

Questionable sighting in 1795

The only reported sighting of a little bustard in Finnish Lapland was in the far-north municipality of Inari in 1795. However there are doubts about that account, which dates from a time when Inari was a virtually uninhabited wilderness.

"Yesterday I went out to take pictures of the ice breaking up on the river when I saw something that looked like a curlew on the edge of a field and I thought I'd shoot a short video of it. I realised pretty quickly that it wasn't a curlew. I tried to find it in a bird book, but had no luck, nor online," he recalls.

Lantto called a birdwatcher friend, who passed a picture on to Ilkka Rautio, president of the Lapland ornithological association. He sent the picture on further and soon received word that it was a little bustard. Despite an influx of ornithologists into the area, no further sightings of the singular visitor have been made.

Distribution map of Little Bustard