Birds at Söderfjärden

The Birdwatching Tower

From the seven meter high tower visitors can enjoy views of the entire crater plain. Using your own spotting scope or binoculars you can spot many different bird species. You can visit the Meteoria's birdwatching tower all year-around, 24 hours a day, to view the open crater plain and expereince the area's rich birdlife. The tower includes signs about the land uplift and sea-level changes at Söderfjärden as well.

Birds' paradise

Many different bird species thrive at Söderfjärden. Söderfjärden is widely known as Finland's most important crane resting place during the cranes' autumn migration.

Here you will find Finland's most important feeding and resting site for cranes, with many thousands of cranes visiting every autumn. See a grafic below of the amount of cranes at Söderfjärden during autumn.

At dusk, powerful flocks of cranes fly out into the archipelago to spend the night near the warming coastal waters. They return at dawn to feast on spilled grain in the fields.

The cranes can harm unharvested fields, which leads to significant losses for farmers, even though state-funded compensation for crop damage can be obtained. This especially occurs when migrating cranes arrive at fields that have not yet been harvested.

Below is a list of some important bird species that can be found at Söderfjärden. (Parenthesis indicates how many of a species may potentially be seen in a single day at different times of the year):

• Crane (10s of thousands in autumn, see diagram on this page, smaller flocks in spring)
• Geese species: Greylag goose, Barnacle goose and other goose species (total thousands mainly in autumn)
• Whooper swan (thousands in early spring and late autumn)
• Snow sparrow (10s of thousands in spring-winter)
• Starling (thousands in early autumn)
• Mallard, lapwing and song lark (hundreds in the warm season)
• Wood pigeon, heather pipit and grebe (hundreds in autumn)
• Blue heron, brown heron, kestrel, white-tailed eagle, great horned owl, partridge, egret and many more species (single to several dozen during different parts of the year)
• Pigeon (a rarity, a few stopovers at Söderfjärden in spring on their way to breeding grounds in Lapland)

In the Meteoria bird tower, BirdLife Suomi Finland has a webcam where you can follow the birdlife on Söderfjärden. 

You can also register yourself in the database www.tiira.fi and receive bird observations from Söderfjärden.

Number of autumn cranes at Söderfjärden: