In the sphere of life, in which I struggle, weather has easily the most important influence upon daily life. The etiquette of urban customs is malignant against opening discussion with a weather survey. But in my world, weather is an inseparable part of meetings between people at yards and in houses, at road and in village store. Even if discussion is sparked by the new regulations on fallowing, undertakings of the local burglar, a new exhibition at the art center or Kauko Juhantalo, it will quickly turn to a matter of everyday reality close to our hearts, weather and climate.

Climate matters are also topmost even more often in the circles of friends, where the reference group of outdoorsy people is larger: naturalists, hikers, fishermen, hunters. There are many ideological brothers then too when we begin to tear meteorologists to shreds.

The professional ethic and statistical qualification of meteorologists appear more and more peculiar to us. The more there are deviations from averages and statistical records of months - even at the end of the century, which we think to increase the weight of records -, the more inevitably winter vanishes fully from the seasons, the more stubbornly those miserable ones nag that everything is just normal fluctuation of the climate. I have myself studied lot of the psychology of a meteorologist and developed a definition that all temperatures that can be measured with either Celsius' or Fahrenheit's scale, are part of climate's normal variation.

I remember only a single exception among professionals. It may have just slipped from Esko Kuusisto when he observed the melting of ice in Vanajanselk� in 1990 and had to admit that the date - most of the middle of the lake open by April 8th - would be statistically plausible once in a hundred thousand years, if the climate was the same as it had been in the period of a century and half that statistics were compiled on until then.

Man believes what he sees for himself. My own reality has been for the last fifty years in the events of nature; forests, marshlands, lakes and sea archipelagos. My memory is exceptionally good. I remember the process of that period of time quite well also in the secondary world of humans, in cities and countryside; of the essential phenomena only a few, like fluctuations of stock rates, have been buried under other, remembered information. But most vividly I recall the general outline of each year's climate; the early and late springs, the phasing of summer weather, the cold autumns and Indian summers and most importantly; the progress of winter, the most pivotal season for me. When young, I squandered in my notes about nature, almost as much text as in this causerie, into Wulf's large silver-grey notebooks to describe the day's weather before I proceeded to the essential; bird observations of the day.

The memory picks many kinds of extremities as well, although dates do not always emerge so clearly. The material is valid for comparisons, the majority of it is from southern and middle Tavastia. There are frosts of late spring, when even between May and June new snow lingers in the crevices of plowed fields for over a day, and rising up from a sleeping bag under a spruce tree at morning demands an epilogue: thawing the hopelessly frozen rubber boots on tummy in the bag. And on the other hand, there are gnawing heats even before May Day. I remember a year from the sixties, when the temperature of P�ij�nne's water rose up to the record of the summer: twentyfive, in fourth of September - oh how it was urgent to jump midst bream nets to cool off while working at the shoals of Tehinselk�.

I recall how on my usual cycling trip - the exact date being January 29th 1956 - thermometer pointed -37 �C when leaving from lodging-house Sillankorva in J�ms� and how I made it just to Korpilahti, before twenty spokes sprung out from the rear wheel at once due to shrinking of steel. And I remember a winter from the sixties, when there was no thaw between the beginning of December and late March.

But there were mild winters as well. In 1973 - or was it 1972 - we rowed to greet Arvo and Brita Turtiainen in the out-of-the-way corner of P�ij�nne's deep bay in January 4th - and the middle of Tehinselk�'s offing finally closed up in February 13th. Every day through the winter of 1948/49 I was nervous about an overwintering woodlark, although not in Tavastia but the bulwarks of Helsinki's Kaivopuisto. And it did go through the whole blurry winter, not once was there enough snow to cover it's low new grass.

During those years I researched the survival of wintering birds in the whole Helsinki region and twiddled around with far older books about the subject. So weather statistics starting from the twenties have stuck permanently in my mind, like the extremely gentle winters of 1924/45 and 1928/29 - or spring in 1921, when boat traffic from H�meenlinna to Vanajanselk� began around April 20th and it kept the title of the earliest spring of the century for almost 70 years.

A magnificent conclusion and noble farewell to the past came to pass in 1987, when Vanajanselk� was covered by 80 cm of pure steel ice and when January-March was the coldest one of the century. Besides, that year, all months with the exception of October were colder than average; winter months by about ten, others by two or three degrees. After which meteorologists, with a calculation which ingenuity was never revealed to me, managed to have a deviation of just a few tenths in the mean temperature of the year compared to a normal one.

Even my own genius did suffer a alight bump in the same year; it seems that even the wisest make mistakes once in twentyfive years. In autumn 1962 I deduced that a baby girl six months old will surely endure the measly ten hours with me that a fishing trip requires, when it adjusts to it every day since summer. But at late October, the child began to die in my arms and I was forced to go ashore. In January 1987 I concluded that a face that has born and grinned for all it's life in Northern climate can't get frostbitten in the very same climate. But when thermometer indicated minus 37 degrees Celsius in shadow, quite a head-wind blew from the north at the nose of the sleign when returning from the lake and gelding sped up without encouragement, the accursed face did freeze so that only a little strip old skin was left on the other cheek near nose.

Yes, one accustomed to recognize even steep deviations from the average as normal fluctuation in the good old times. They were then mostly occasional bumps amidst completely different years, seldom two years in a row and extremely rarely three years in a row - like the cold winters of war of 1940-42. At the end of the sixties there were four consecutive cold winters and at the beginning of the seventies, four successive warm winters, but they didn't differ very dramatically from the mean values.

The last six winterless winters have been something altogether else. Six years is a long time in human life and it's a long period in climate, too. It feels particularly lengthy when one persistently believes in normal alternation. One waits, autumn after autumn, that according to statistics it must be the turn of a real winter now. But no - again we have a hopelessly watery and icy winter halfway up in Finland and in the northeastern part of the second half, it is insanely snowy - and everywhere an inordinately stormy fake winter. I won't talk about storms anymore this time, it is an other matter, said Kipling - or something like that.

It appears to be decisive that does the winter of Southern Finland warm up three or five degrees from previous and how evenly thaw is divided. In all of my early life - life number 1 before the year 1988 and also in temperate winters - the pattern was that there were periods of thaw only a few days long amid the frost. Snow sunk and roads might have softened for a day but didn't get soggy or reach ice fields before the next cold and snowfall. In life number two it's the opposite. Brief periods of frost and rare falls of dry snow are not enough to curb the diabolical ice on tracked and grooved roads and yards.

I want to forget the adventures of a professional fisherman on permanently uncovered and slippery ice, I can't bare to think about the winter of these days on both ground and sea at the same time. I'll just state from on the ground that for forty winters, I was accustomed to transporting belongings and making trips via a bicycle, up to a thousand kilometres. Only pulpy snow has been a problem sometimes. The icy period when a thick layer of ice covers the ground, lasted for two weeks in November, at best. But there has been progress. Of the months of the previous winter, October was the harshest and the most snowy, and then it was an oldfashioned weather of frozen snow. In the whole watery November-April, during half a year, there were overall three weeks when a two-wheeled vehicle could be controlled by a regular driver. Pedestrians weren't too well off either, as the two hundred meters to mailbox across a neighbor's yard was accomplished only just by crawling there. Icespike gadgets either break up or won't fit on the large felt-lined rubber boots, needed by toes frostbitten long ago.

The conservation of heating energy on a warm winter is surely a good thing, but the warm winter of living verges on the edges of tolerance. It is distressing to note that the countryside, and especially unmotorized economy, suffer the greatest losses. A vehicle with four wheels manages to fairly stagger onwards, but bicycle, moped, skis and kick sled are not included for various reasons. Public transport has disappeared. Soon one must be prepared to lug sugar, salt, butter and flour - everything that is needed in a self-sufficient home in addition to fish, root vegetables and vegetables, berries and mushrooms - to cottage in September, because the next time one will get shopping is after May Day. Indeed, "life is objectively miserable at the countryside" - I read that statement from somewhere a while ago.

Precisely because of the decisive change in day to day life, I have made it a habit to rectify conversations about the climate change. The question isn't about the previous climate at all, but of a completely new one. I call it Atlantic climate, although I'm not pleased to let the despicable name of the Atlantic, that sends its low pressures, slip over my lips.

The most bitter thing about this is that - like I have understood from what I've read - the climate change may be an achievement of human, this robber and bungler.

1993

In the aftermath of affirming the new hunting regulation, I desire to examine the changes that have taken place in the attitudes and practice of conservation and hunting. During the nearly fifty years that my perspective covers, they have been enormous. But the country's fauna, condition and environment, and the richness and species of its animals have also changed tremendously. After all, Finland has turned upside-down in less than fifty years.

When I was a very young and fanatical conservationist and unlike my father, not much a committed devotee of plants but rather of animals and especially birds, hunters represented the greatest danger to me. My first public appearance for protection of nature was a speech or presentation at the school's student body's festivity at the end of the forties, and it was directed against duck-hunters. On the verge of hunting season, I had seen an interview of two shotgunners in a paper where they anxiously pondered, "I wonder how many ducks there are this year" and I was filled with contempt. My own ornithologist's career had begun with the water birds of Tavastia; I had observed ducks since their spring migrations, counting the numbers of nesting couples, eggs and broods, and received an award at the winter festivities of Luontoliitto for a paper titled "Of Water- and Coastal Birds at some Tavastian Lakes." So I was shocked that those jerks didn't know anything about ducks before they went shooting them on August 20th. Now that I think about it, official follow-up on the duck population was probably almost non-existent at the time. The foundation for preservation of game, afterwards Riistanhoitos��ti�, was just taking its first steps.

However, during those times I, like the whole brotherhood of naturalists, was worried the most about predators. Beasts of prey down to marten were slaughtered to the verge of extinction. Predatory birds had suffered ever since the end of the last century, but managed to recover during the years of war, when guns were reserved for other tasks. Soon after the war, guns began blazing more furiously than ever throughout the country, and hawks and owls were stuffed and moved as ornaments onto houses' bureaus.

In the 1950s, birds of prey suffered greatly in Finland. During those years, an ornithologist had to keep even an osprey's nest strictly secret even in enlightened Tavastia; otherwise, a punishment expedition set out from some village's corner. It is an exciting blessing of fate that the forest road - a road that doesn't lead to a house - had not been invented even in rangers' fantasies. Journeys miles long through rugged forest terrain and the disadvantageous ratio of investment to profit gave the birds the minimal protection. When the network of forest roads was created and every tree with a nest could be driven to with a car, environmental education had already accomplished what it sought. Had there been such roads in the forties and fifties, many extinctions would have been witnessed.

When young, I was an energetic and temperamental person, and so I began pestering the state's conservation official in order to quell the persecution of birds of prey by the ten most famous taxidermists in the country. In fact, most of the birds were protected by law even before the wars; it was just that respect for law was nonexistent. Through their permissions for arsenic, taxidermists were registered. On the other hand, the conservation official Reino Kalliola was a jovial and calm old-fashioned gentleman, who rewarded rather than punished, and believed in the efficiency of his splendid, literarily fabulous - and still unbeaten - nature books. Perhaps his zeal was also chilled by the fact that his one-man office took care of all the matters in the country that nowadays are being handled by the environmental ministry, water- and environment administration, the conservation offices of provinces and committees and secretaries of counties.

A little perseverance was needed, but Kalliola did place police officers to investigate and authorized whom else but me as an expert for the inspection. While writing this at the beginning of September, I notice that it has been, almost to the day, 40 years since that. I remember it from driving after the trip - with a bicycle, of course - to my observation areas in Tyrv�nt� and S��ksm�ki, and ringing the last fledglings of stock doves in the aspen woods of Haukila as an epilogue to the great bird summer of 1953. Over the course of the decades, 28 nest holes of large birds and countless little crevices of starlings and tits had accumulated in those giant aspens.

The preparators' storages and their records were beyond all expectations. Honey buzzards, common buzzards, long-eared owls, marsh harriers - dozens, hundreds. The policemen didn't show any extra keenness. When we were stumbling through presumably the only freezing room of the capital, in a large taxidermist's warehouse at S�rn�inen, the old officer Jalonen was yawning as much as he could in the cold until he suddenly noticed with his detective's eye a squirrel in summer fur: it had been killed during closed game season! I also remember his reply: "That's right!" After all, squirrel was a useful fur animal back then, and that reply also included an opinion of my honey buzzards and owls.

The police of V��ksy were more compassionate, and as the trip back from the preparator of Uraj�rvi stretched far beyond the evening hours and as I didn't have a tent with me then or for years to come - I slept in haybarns - I asked for, and was granted, a night's stay in a lock-up. Oddly enough, it was the only night in jail for me ever since, and I couldn't even take advantage of that. Surprisingly, during the morning hours a mate from the next cell started conversing through the wall; he was quite kind and loyal and said that he knew a great workplace for me, too. Only during the recent years, when the foreplays and low-cost imports by the European Commission have ruined my fisherman's economy, I have come to regret that I didn't inquire further about the job and perhaps missed my fortune.

But then things developed towards the direction pointed at Kalliola and Yrj� Kokko. Their successors, those skillful and diligent educators about nature: Suominen, Korkolainen, Paulin, Montonen, Hild�n, Hautala et al, took action and charged onward with literature, newspaper articles, photographs and films. And in a quarter century, the people of Finland were brainwashed to tolerate, or even love, not only their lynxes and bears but also hawks and eagles. Only a few sullen geezers somewhere in the backwoods remained shaking their fists and placing eagle traps.

My relationship with hunters got healthier after the persecution of birds of prey died out. The event was surely sped up because of the recruiting of biologists from a strongly conservationist fraternity, which had received its basic education in environmental circles and Luontoliitto, to positions in hunting organizations and game research. The pivotal magazine of the organizations, Mets�st�j�, has almost rivaled Suomen Luonto in favoring conservation for the longest time. Of course, the deep masses of hunters are not nearly as exemplary as their leaders are; in fact, duck hunting is still the parade of the trash of hunters, where many obscenities take place. The fate of water birds is still altogether merciless and similar to fowl, the protection of ducks isn't even discussed. Nevertheless, it is an exceedingly enticing thought that one year, water fowl will be wholly protected, and then we'd see what level their numbers would settle.

However, the peace with hunters was first and foremost compulsory. The country had the patience to prosper; industrialization and an efficient economy came with a horrendous cost on nature, and in the 1960s the focus of environmentalism shifted sharply and inevitably from preventing straight-out killing of animals and plants to saving their environment. The primeval aspen woods of Haukila that I reflected upon have been absent of trees for a long, long time, just like other aspen woods of the 1950s. The stock dove faced extinction long ago in Tavastia, my home, although not because of hunters but weed killers and foresters. When the fauna of Finland got into rigorous retraining where few survived and many were suppressed, environmentalists and hunters often noticed that they were in the same front against a common enemy. It was senseless to protect a bird lake from hunting if agriculture's nutrient effluents and industry's nitrogen fallouts caused it to become completely overrun by vegetation.

1993

In the last survey of mine, naturalists and hunters of Finland ended up declaring peace, albeit a forced one, and the beasts of Finland survived the worst ordeal. Long past were those times when - according to a mournful anecdote told by Reino Kalliola - lynx was attempted to get protected for the first time and the amendment was introduced to the president. "Isn't the lynx a beast?" Paasikivi asked skeptically. The presenter in question had not made himself familiar with the arguments of conservation and perplexed, he admitted the case being so. "Dismissed", said Paasikivi, and lynx still had to wait for many years.

But what should be noted from the current condition of Finland's fauna? To a great misfortune, life hasn't taught me much of the so called lower groups of animals: invertebrates. Within them, many examples of environmental damage, ruin and doom can be seen. Luckily, a growing number of researchers have got acquainted with the matters of these smallest brothers and sisters of ours, and are charting and creating conservation programs for the direst need. My point of view equals that of a layman: I see warmblooded animals before all others.

I'd say that the most remarkable of changes in near history is that animal populations are less stable than in my youth. There are unbelievably sudden peaks and lows in them: one never knows, which spring is silent for which species. Environmental changes caused by man do not always provide explanation, although often they do: the fauna of modern times is fully at the mercy of the man. Till my youth or at least childhood, zoologists traced the causes for varying in prevalence almost always to climate changes.

As strange as it is, instability is sometimes apparent even at individual level. In my youth, when I started to ring not only fledgelings at the nests of tawny owls, but also mothers, then at the next spring seven out of eight mothers were alive and nested in the same hole. Nowadays, it seems like almost half of owl mothers change annually. Presumably the young, just born age classes are so numerous in the abundant and high quality bird-houses of this welfare state that mortality has to rise analogously and old owls are being prematurely displaced by the younger ones. Not a pleasant outcome of research to an aged ornithologist, at any rate.

Another characteristic is the renaissance of large animals - a very stunning surprise that nobody could have thought of predicting during the first 60 years of this century. Again, I'm thinking mostly about birds here but of course bear, lynx and most importantly, moose, are included. When the pioneer of conservation, Rolf Palmgren, painted menaces of extinction at the 1920s grounded on the development by then, the moose shared the top place with the swan in the list. Now we can see the glorious triumph of swans, both in the mainland of whooper swans and coasts of mute swans. Crane population is well and growing. In fact, the crane is an unique example of an animal that has been able to swap its lost environment to a new one: to replace dried marshlands with coastal flood meadows and even with tillage, or at least with the compound biotopes of scarce woodland hollows and low-lying cultivated fields. However, it can be assumed that the crane would have nested at damp fields and beach meadows before as well, if the masters of past generations - who were scrupulous of their lands - had not fended harmful birds harshly, without negotiations.

When straightout killings come to an end, it apparently leads to the march of the largest and strongest animals surprisingly quickly - if the environment can bear it. These animals reside at the top places of the food chain, and many aren't preyed by anything else than the man - if not by the wolf or bear. Who knows: will bear snatch a molting goose or a crane fledgling? At least the eagle will not outmatch a crane. I was once observing with binoculars in Kesonsuo of Ilomantsi how a crane drove a golden eagle away from ground to air and chased it far, trying to poke it with its beak alternately from both sides - one of the most terrific bird observations of my life.

The population of the bean goose has amended, even more so for the greylag goose, and the eagle owl has performed an explosive return. Every summer, we can read protectors' triumphing announcements of the white-tailed eagle's success over just the last few years. The giant of gulls, the great black-backed gull, is in more favourable a wind than any other species of the genus. In my youth, the mightiest of crow birds, the raven, was extremely rare in Southern Finland, the miracle of the deepest heartlands - and now it has spread to the whole country. The ghostly cousins grey heron and bittern are the freshest newcomers of avifauna (and the white stork is being waited for!).

The golden eagle who has problems both with the atavistic use of guns in the North and dwindling populations of prey is somewhat of an exception among large birds, but even it hasn't suffered the worst in the last few years. That also snowmobiles are being counted as one of the problems of the golden eagle gives an idea why wood must be knocked on when discussing all large animals: the current moment is fine, future holds nothing but clouds in it. Researchers of the white-tailed eagle always remember to note that when holiday population broke over a certain limit at an archipelago, it meant the beginning of a decline.

The third epochal change is the severe growth of predatory animal population. The situation has turned completely upside-down from the 1950s I described before - predators are heavily emphasized in our fauna, even so that it would be good even for a conservationist to examine his ideas. Large predators are of course still scarce but they all have risen from the worst depression, except for maybe the wolverine. Bear is a significant ecological factor near the eastern border, and lynx is correspondingly so here and there in Savo and Tavastia. By the way, how the fair success of large mammals can be explained although wooded terrain has been raped and bared, and tiled with car roads? I presume that one major reason is the same that, on the reverse, has caused a great loss in avifauna: the dense thickets of nurseries growing on clear felled areas. The man has nothing to gain from that wretchedness, not berry or mushroom picker, hunter or hiker; bears lynxes and wolves, too, can lie down there unbothered - nevertheless that they have to seek prey from more productive hunting grounds.

The weasel, of which my only own observations from the 1950s are from the Viena primeval forests of Kuhmo's Jonkerinj�rvi, has grown to be a remarkable factor all around in Finland's forests. It is now an exciting example of a new predator at foreign areas. Be it produced in foreign continents or like weasel, a son of the land who has returned from emigration, first it expands greatly and strikes an unnaturally deep gap into prey populations before the relations between it and the prey settle to somewhat tolerable levels. At the moment, the weasel roams about in biotopes that are wholly different from its former history at vast woodlands; where it even steps on the toes of the polecat and mink (or European mink, if we stick to the good old patterns). I have myself seen a weasel that V�ino Ahde caught from a small rocky island at L�ngelm�vesi, and another that was trapped in the barn of Juhani Kartano's yard. When the ornithologists of Valkeakoski checked out a tawny owl's nest of theirs in a narrow row of birches between Vanajanvesi and a large open field, a weasel leapt out of it. It appears that it's a long way to a reasonable state of affairs with the mink and raccoon dog, as well. They are altogether new predators that storm upon their prey as additional strain in great numbers - simultaneously with the old beast, fox, who has retained its place.

Of predatory birds, the peregrine falcon has caused the most grief as nothing could've saved it between the 1950s and 60s: it was one of the quickest known far-reaching extinctions. However, for an unfathomable reason, a fragmentary population was preserved in Lapland. In addition to that, only the merlin and kestrel are in a downward spiral, as well. The kestrel gives a very poor image of Finnish agriculture because it has survived reasonably elsewhere in Europe. On the other hand, the hobby has been erroneously offered to be marked as endangered; it has more like grown in numbers during my time. When I last rowed my long trips along great lakes in Eastern and Northeastern Finland, I found 18 nests of predatory birds from the strands and islands, and they all were hobby's.

Hen harriers have greatly improved their positions in their heart region Ostrobothnia, and a bit elsewhere as well. Marsh harriers were the first to spring up to my mind when I wrote that man isn't always accountable for changes in populace. It is thoroughly mystical why they abandoned the splendid grasses of ocean coasts at the gulf of Finland and moved to the measly patches of reeds of inland lakes and ponds. The most grand victor is the sparrowhawk, a bit similar case to the weasel. There was a deep buckle in its numbers, too, likely because of environmental toxins as it didn't happen at the time of game wardens' hostility towards predators, but later during the 1960s and 70s. But it was followed by prosperity unlike anything seen before. When I spent three weeks in August-September in the 1980s at a workplace of my youth - a bird station at Signilsk�r - after a 20 years break, sparrowhawk was the bird species greatest in numbers during the whole period. It indeed triumphed over even the willow warbler, flycatchers, redstart and tree pipit in populace, which were in their main moving season at the time. I wouldn't ever have expected to witness such a display. Banding little birds with a net was nearly impossible: sparrowhawks struck them dead before banders could reach them.

Owls still live in lightier times, or what metaphor should I use. In any case, the tengmalm's, tawny and ural owls rejoice because of the nationwide network of birdhouses. There are all too much of birdhouses at a multitude of places, and the lumber used for houses destined to be empty would be better used elsewhere. However, when saying this I get shivers: what is the situation after a few years if the absence among the youngest generations of ornithologists, noted on many occasions, continues? What will happen if there soon won't be any diligent crafters of birdhouses? The populace of the black woodpecker is agreaably even surprisingly strong at the moment, but it may be a temporary phenomenon brought by consecutive overly mild winters. And besides, the whittlings of this master carpenter do not benefit anyone but tengmalm's owls. Owls are in the same position as the osprey that will face utterly grievous times if the coming generations of naturalists will not maintain and renew birdhouses.

When I was young - once again this starting -, eagle owl was at the verge of extinction. In the fifteen villages in Tavastia that I had roamed throughout there were three or four birds left, and through the whole 1950s I couldn't reach a nest or fledglings at a single territory, even though I was the most relentless researcher of birds of prey of the time. Of all the bird photographs of my life, I imagine perhaps V�r F�gerv�rld's monochrome photograph the strongest, where an eagle owl descends on a grand rocky cliff. An eagle owl at its nest was the utmost dream of mine for many years. When welfare-Finland was born explosively sudden and its municipal junkyards fattened by squandering offered food for thousands of rats, eagle owls first conquered these joyous fields and then with the fat broods spawned there, the whole of Tavastia. Their manners among their lesser were shocking, and my relations to the giant owl chilled to below zero.

At the other end of the owl league, the piercing-eyed devil, pygmy owl, went through the same. It was an exclusive rarity of the great heartlands during my active years of 1950s and 60s, but the next decade its population grew up to at least five times of what it was. Nowadays, I encounter pygmy owl nests and broods more often than in my youth although I spend maybe one per cent of the time in woods I spent back then. There likely aren't many geographical positions in Tavastia, where one wouldn't hear pygmy owl's falsetto shrieking from somewhere at an autumnal daybreak.

I hold the eagle owl as a mistake of the Creator and I can't stand its storages in my birdhouses that are regularly left uneaten and rot at spring: beneath a layer of bullfinches, then a pretty row of siskins, topped by five glinting blue tits. I can not understand such a sanctimonious nature worshipper who thinks that everything in nature is fabulous and indisputable. If we criticize man and his crimes, we can criticize other parts of nature as well. Evolution isn't perfect nor infallible. If evolution only had continued on and there wouldn't be a black tunnel of ecocatastrophy ahead of us, in time it surely would have stripped the eagle owl of its unneeded welfare supplies.

1993

A hundred years ago birdbooks divided birds of prey to "clawing" and "extremely clawing". The old statistics about blood money and its victims were impressive. I stated earlier that predatory animals and birds were going through miserable times still at the 1950s. The period of time, when hunters recognized predators as the main cause for both the fluctuation and constant diminishing in game population, was long. Analogously a fisherman who came upon an empty fish trap, first laid the blame on gulls, ospreys and black-throated divers. Actually, a kind of an ancient idea prevailed, which was that - exaggerating a little - the Creator had given a certain amount of game and fish at the beginning of time, which were slowly being devoured away by predators - and of course when according to fishermen, by the other fishermen.

A clear image of the renewal and production of game and fish populations, the share of young age classes and how much each step in the food chain can be taxed: it is a historically new phenomenon in the consciousness of the average man. Only after my youth have zoologists been able to carve out a natural law that predators actually can't permanently cull their prey populations, as they would destroy themselves then. This is about the predominating truth, at least when researchers speak to the public.

Now that the Finnish terrain is swarming with predators on top of and beside each other, it is time to revamp the question of predatory animals. Maybe the ponderings of old game wardens had something worth the while in them. That article of faith about the balance between beast and prey surely holds when the predator uses only a single species of prey, but it has likings like we all do. The eagle owl can first eat off all the smaller owls, common buzzards, goshawks and ospreys from its territory, which it often does. After that, it moves on living in leisure and taking a toll on moles and rats that are abundant, and can't be all found and have their population decimated. The mink swims from islands of razorbills and black guillemots to another killing their offspring to the last cub, and then easily begins eating three-spined sticklebacks and the young of perches at shoals.

Here, we arrive at the dilemma of nature's balance. No matter how vigorously Yrj� Haila denies the concept of balance in nature it still exists, even though relative and always changing. And the disruptions caused by man in this harmony are reality. I have already told about the abnormally numerous broods of the eagle owl at junkyards. Another unnaturality, which is accountable for that there are suddenly more eagle owls than ever before in Finland's woodlands of the past, is clear felling of forests. It has multiplied the spacious hunting areas suitable for eagle owls, and their chances to spot and catch common buzzards from the edges of openings and ospreys from their nests in the dim that can be seen from miles away. The other well-performing beast, goshawk, is at a totally opposite position in this matter: it nests in old, grand woods, hunts in dense woodland terrain and stalks upon medium sized prey animals, that are diminishing in numbers: it loses at everything.

When I would like to say - and I do - that the full protection of the eagle owl was an obvious mistake, I state a resigning implication to the sentence. Our nature is so disrupted, its harmony so flickering because of the intensifying, quickening and varying actions of man that a measure of conservation or discipline would often require a speedy rectification and for that, a correction - research and especially the legislation could not keep up.

We will arrive at the greatest disaster, however, if man's own doings are not even attempted to be amended. We will be left far away from the largest sum of life, which is the highest goal of all environmental protection. The new hunting law and particularly the naturalists' discussion of it do not stand merely for progression in this respect. Those who were aiming to protect all or nearly all animals (except game) were gravely mistaken. I read a proposition from ornithologist's own magazine that the crow should be protected by law as well: it isn't harmful to humans, is it.

This point of view is altogether fresh. It wholly denies caretaking of nature and leaves animals to mete it out with each other - relations that the man is constantly manipulating and stirring up by favouring one and putting the other in an unfortunate position. It is not the triumph of conservation or understanding of nature that I see here, but estranging from nature. How did an aphorism by Sylvi Kekkonen go - it is a short way from tolerance to ignorance. I think they are often synonymes.

The definitions "harmful animal" and "harmful bird" express concern for nature, and impossibilities have surely been reached sometimes. There was a time when the red-backed shrike was an outlaw throughout the country because it ate little birds, lizards and bumble bees. There was no other flaw in the argument except that the bird doesn't benefit from the economy, rubbish-heaps, etc. of the man. Although it benefits from the man-made half-culture landscape in which it lives, its prey does too.

The environmental principle, which has been followed in the earlier legislation, is very clear. An animal that lives off man through the critical part of the year by using the waste of man's economy, and eats its lesser, fledglings or eggs for a part of the year, is a harmful animal that must be averted. It is then a part of the death sowed by man, which has to be prevented by man, as well. The fox, crow, magpie, jay and herring gull are typical harmful animals like that. When the wintry parasite of rubbish piles, the jay, moves on to - starting from crossbills - to a diet consisting solely of blackbirds' and little birds' eggs and fledglings at springtime, it's all the same if man would eat them himself.

Setting the jay as protected was an apparent mistake, and protecting the raven, which has prospered well because of the slaughter waste of elks and carrions for feeding eagles, is dubious as well. The major reason for protecting colonies of herring gulls was to shield other birds of the archipelago from unacquainted game wardens: the herring gull itself deserves anything but protection. It is questionable if the balance of this protection ends up positive. Anyhow, the diminishing of game wardens' springly crow hunts and contests of harmful birds is regrettable.

In the last number I presented an assumption that by mending - rejuvenating - environments we could achieve millions of more birds in the country, as long as the winter-time milieus could bear this increase. Perhaps another one would be in place: I feel that predators; our own and the ones imported from elsewhere, are actually so plentiful at the moment that they permanently stifle our bird populations. One who follows how bird nests do during summertime, can state anywhere that very few of them survive, except for birds nesting in holes. I have estimated that only the success of just the last re-run broods of late summer will save many little birds from complete ruin, even though only a small part of the population takes part in nesting then. It appears that some graceful hand of destiny controls the yearly rhythm of such professionals like the jay and magpie so that they easen up in sweeping the nests at July.

If I think about, for example, my own altogether typical South Finnish yard and its surroundings, I see that the chances of wagtails, the chaffinch, spotted flycatcher, blackbirds, yellowhammer and swallow to get their fledglings up on wings are nearly non-existant. There are almost no safe spots in the crossfire of crows, magpies and jays, cats cruise through the lot every day, the squirrel as their companion scours every log and corner of buildings, and the sparrowhawk flits every now and then. The tawny owl stalks and the sharp-nosed raccoon dogs and badgers sniff around at night.

At my home, a spared bird nest was a sensation that required utmost ingenuity. A robin managed to get a brood out to the world in last summer from a nest that was located inside the porch of the stable, in a fold of a canvas loosely hanging from a beam supporting the ceiling. No predator could descend unto it from above or jump from beneath, and the flapping canvas could not withstand the grip of the magpie or great spotted woodpecker. The robin tricked even me, and the nest would have remained unfound without a series of coincidences. The acute bird woman Anu Murto - known by many radio listeners - came to S��ksm�ki to make a program about Joel Lehtonen's "Lintukoto", and was to stay in my sauna meant for nets for the night. Fortunately - in regards to this story - I wasn't home then and the sauna was locked and Anu slept like the baby Jesus in the hays of the stable, and discovered the robin.

I ask most humbly to be allowed to note that when predators do not undermine their prey populations even in long term, it is very fundamental in respect to the sum and richness of life how death is timed. It is an entirely different matter when a young bird dies in throes of a predator in its nest of birth on June than to hunger, cold, snow and ice only until the food competition within the species on February.

I have been estimating the numbers of nest thieving birds very attentively on my bicycling trips in many European countries. Concerning the crow, magpie and as well as jay, Finland holds the top positions. Only Estonia, which has unbelievably many crows, wins in regards to them. On the basis of an uncertain feeling, I'd say that there aren't as many little birds in Estonia's terrain of settlements and fields' edges as the magnificent environment there would imply. Germany, that wondrous and precise country of order, makes an unparalleled exception. Not anywhere in my life have I seen as few crows and magpies as I did in the last summer's cycling trip in Eastern Germany - even jackdaws were pinched down to a few individuals in two cathedrals at the cities' centres. All those three species added together, plus jays, were easily outnumbered by common buzzards. Correspondingly, there were more birds at yards and gardens; more serins, finches, icterine warblers and woodpigeons nesting in yard limes than anywhere else.

Unscrupulously stern rules must be applied to foreign predators, both imported and immigrated. We can probably tolerate forging the fauna and flora and planting of alien species as long as they do not harm the original ones. But if some domestic species' existence is threatened by securing the plantings - goshawk because of pheasants, lynx because of white-tailed deers -, the verdict of the environmentalist is absolute.

The sentence is absolute for beasts of prey that do not belong to Finnish nature: the mink and raccoon dog, an unbearable burden in addition to the domestic beasts. Recently, even they have received defenders; definitions are then finally upside down. When they are being stood for in the name of environmentalism - and likely also those escaped caged foxes that some year devastated the whole bird conservation area of Krunn at Bothnian bay -, then the animal protector is obviously an enemy of conservation and the game warden his ally. Years ago, some half-mad granny called the whole nation to arms to wipe every single viper off the face of earth in letters to the editor. I'd propose an efficient war against the mink and raccoon dog.

1993

I have presented reflections, thoughts and opinions about "classic conservation": the relationship between man, animal and environment. This time I have overlooked the worldwide environmental problems. I have attempted to point out how man has caused troubles in nature, even tragic ones, on a much more mundane level and closer matters than by causing dispersion of ozone layer, climate change and erosion. I have told greatly about the relations between beast and prey and lastly about the tragedy of predators that man has transported from the other side of the world into Finnish nature. The worst still remains. The worst beast in Finland is a domestic animal, the angel of death imported from Egypt: the cat.

I already criticized the animal protection movement for defending the mink and raccoon dog. But when the movement clearly stands for the cat and against the animals and nature of Finland, animal preservation changes into a truly jet-black and grievous enemy of conservation - although the same movement earns the warm support of every friend of nature when fighting elsewhere against the anguish of fur animals and power breeding of cattle.

But god forbid, not only fanatic animal protectors are friends of the cat, but half of the people. Man's relationship with nature is in no case as deranged, reckless and hypocritical as it is with the cat and many environmentalists are never as squirming and deceitful as they are when defending the cat. I am talking about the Northern, Finnish man, who pretends to love - and loves with the other half of his heart - nature, animals and especially birds. Then again, mediterranean people stomp over all wild animals, unashamed.

The relationship with the cat is so sensitive in Finland even to environmentalism and its popularity within the people so large that its being kept quiet about. And still, the cat has a central impact in nature, its easily the most numerous of the country's beasts and its victims can be estimated to be in millions every year - only within the prospect of birds. An animal protector that fervently charges against hunting would do well to know that the cat may kill as many birds in Finland as all the hunters of the country, and mammals it slays many times more. One would think that the cat would be a permanent topic even in the magazine "Suomen Kuvalehti", and that reports, reviews and statistics of cat's victims would be default material. But there hasn't been much about it.

And what about the thousands of mawkish pictures of cats in magazines? How come you never see pictures where the cat is at its most typical according to my half a century of experience - dragging the mother of a green sandpiper brood into a crevice of cowshed's cornerstone or lugging a redstart from its wing into the rose bushes of some single-family house? Or guarding the red-breasted robin and squirrel's tail it has killed on cottage's stairs, by a wintry bird table?

The new hunting regulation's introductory discussion's most horrid features were the efforts to improve the legal protection of the cat and sadly, there was some slight change to the wrong direction. The attempt to differentiate between wild and domestic cat is insane. Certainly, there is a handful of cats living in apartment houses and which are taken outside harnessed: conservationist doesn't have anything to say about them. All other cats, excluding some very rare individuals, are top-notch predators. At least during the early hours every cat from countryside, villa districts and suburbs is out hunting - that makes 95 per cent of Finland's cats. That is exactly the function of cat as a domestic animal, and that is why it has been imported up here to the North, and consciously, or at least subconsciously, its role is still accepted. That is the deep rupture in Finnish love for nature.

In fact, the cat is an extension to the hunter. All that small game down to the shrew, which cannot be managed with either shotgun or rifle, is handed for the cat to work with. Of course, there will be some overlap in this division of labor in regards to medium game. The snipe disappeared from the game species due to a new legislation but when a snipe couple settled at my overgrown home bay, it was still part of them. That couple romped about the gulf until midsummer. Then the neighbour's cat brought the other one to me as a gift in front of the stairs; whole, shimmering, flood meadow's beads glinting on its feathers - I don't know why it was brought to me instead of home. Earlier there was also a mixed-breed dog and another cat in the same house. The miserable dog, slow and dullwitted, managed to track a brown hare and develop a real, albeit a slow-paced one, chase. The cat observed for two rounds across a yard field, made its conclusions, set into ambush and killed the brown hare unaffectedly and quietly. The dog gave up immediately, overpowered.

The selection of animals that I have added in the list of cat's triumphs over the years is grand. I find one springly couple of goldeneyes as the best in the early morning's exhibition at the door by one, quite a familiar cat. They too were beautiful and undamaged, covered by drops of water like the snipe, the male in an astounding full dress. The goldeneye, especially a male one, never touches ground as far as I know, it even sleeps on lake's rocks or a reef. I can't comprehend if they were caught by swimming to a rock or were they snatched with a single, or two separate attacks. That cat, either, was not some half-hungry farm cat incited into a rat chaser but a pet in the most definite sense of the word: a furry and fluffy, bred angora cat that receives as much food from its owners as it can stomach.

In August, when the fledgling flocks of little birds move low in bushes and grassy banks, I have been following how a female cat carried a little bird to its autumnal cubs every half an hour past my birdnest work-place - a less encouraging message regarding my work. The sparrowhawk and hobby are amateurs compared to the cat.

A certain garden district of the capitol city has become so familiar to me that I've had the possibility of making ecological summaries there. Sumptuous gardens rich with trees would imply maximal density of birds and thick bush walls offer places for nests like in the bird parks of Berlepsch, that my generation remembers from the classic book "Yleinen lintusuojelus". Actually, there aren't even frogs, butterflies, large beetles or mice, for the matter. A small number of birds arrive at spring to try out but during summer they strangely disappear. The only population permanent and strong is that of cats - one or two in every house, large, shimmering, combed.

The best time of observing the strategy of those city cats was during a few weeks between summer and autumn. When a spotted flycatcher on it's way to migrate has arrived at night, it appears to stay all day at a couple of yards in a temporary territory. Some cat sets at its position under a leafy bush, away from sight, and stalks there for even five hours, unflinched. The bird sparsely catches flies from around yards; when from air, when from ground, courtyard and road, with a quick sweep. Ultimately it will spot a fly at a road two or three meters away from the ambush shrub with a statistical certainty. I can't say if cat's lightning strike takes a tenth or a hundreth of second, but I have yet to witness a failed one. It takes two more seconds before the cat with its kill has slipped into another thicket with its well-known enthralling agility: into rhododendrons or phloxes, and the stage is empty.

I saw such a strangeness at that particular yard that when a wandering blue tit appeared in an apple tree, a cat instantly blazed high up the tree. It didn't have a chance as the tit flew away, unfrightened. I was puzzled for a moment: why this silliness? However, soon after I realized that the cat was only slightly late, as it hadn't yet moved on to the autumn schedule. It is this method it uses to pick tit fledglings at summer - before which it couldn't reach them from birdhouses with small entrances - when they have just left their nests, and foolishly stand out on branches.

Everyone has heard the claim in defence of the cat, which states that in the end, they mostly hunt only harmful mice and moles. What should one say about this? At least when heard from the mouth of someone who proclaims himself as a friend of nature, it slashes ears. Small rodents and shrews are basic fauna of Finnish nature and a bountiful and significant part of it, which has as substantial a right to live as any other group of animals. Talks of general harmfulness are simply rubbish. Even though we include only the individuals living in settled areas, one of a hundred causes intolerable damage in buildings or gardens. And if a share of them is fated to be pulled into the food chain at some phase of their life, they belong to the domestic beasts: owls, ermines and weasels.

Though, at one case I feel a little less pity towards a field or bank vole than a little bird in the claws of cat. The breeding of rodents is multiple in a time unit, sometimes even tens of times, when compared to birds. Extremely scarce progeny and correspondingly, long age, are characteristic to birds as an animal group. Only a few species of birds in Finland manage to have more than one descendant on wings per bird - hardly others than hole-nesting birds, some ducks and in excellent years. fowls. When a cat succeeds in catching a chaffinch at a springly wood's edge, the victim might be a more remarkable creature than a layman would have ever thought. It may well be a nearly ten year old bird that has seen hundreds of close calls with sparrowhawks, merlins or earth-dwelling predators, soon twenty risky crossings of the Baltic Sea, thousands of evaded electric wires and cars - and perhaps succeeded in breeding at only one summer and two offsprings taken care of until autumn.

It appears there are no calculations of the country's cat population. As they haven't been ever taxed, they haven't been registered or listed. In any case, the amount of cats is many hundreds of thousands - practically, the number seems infinite. There where a friend of nature has seriously begun battling the nightmare, the end is rarely visible. A friend of mine from P�lk�ne, of whose ortolan bunting's and yellow wagtail's nests by the ditches of his field none ever survived, was finally infuriated and purveyed a cat trap. He set it into his barn at midday and had silenced seven cats by evening; I can't remember the following statistics. I have myself lived at many localities and at all my yards the parade of cats of various colours has been endless; a cat of the same colour at different times is more of an exception than a rule. I know from the powderly white of springly snow fields that there isn't a heartland large enough in Tavastia, that lines of cat tracks wouldn't be the most common of patterns there. And the same pawprints cross over leagues of Vanajanselk�'s main at spring mornings.

The cat problem grows all the more desolate now that authorities of animal protection have adopted an insane stance: that putting a cat down by drowning is illegal. The domestic cat's pattern of breeding has wholly broken out of natural order: a twenty-year life-span, two large broods per year, fertile under even a year of age, no natural enemies. There are no equations even reminiscent of this in nature. I can't count how many years it would take for cats to cover the face of Earth, but it wouldn't take many decades. Through ages, it has been an unavoidable method of defence to drown kittens and other excess cats. It is a humane act if anything when we are aware that death by drowning is the easiest and most blissful for humans, too. Guns are scarce in this country: Finland isn't the United States. And someone who is even slightly familiar with the Finnish reality and the fares of veterinarians knows that their anesthetizing needles won't stop the cat catastrophy. I don't know what will become of this, as it feels hopeless.

At the moment, the hordes of cats of luxury-Finland severely water down all preservation of birds, protection by law, conservation areas and birdhouse campaigns. It would be the minimum demand that cats were registered and kept tightly leashed when outside, and that the owner would stand trial if a cat was found out slaughtering a protected animal. But this is pure utopia - like all efforts of standing by nature when the truly powerful desires of people are against it.

1993

Hannele Luukkainen and Sari Ulvinen have specified the distinctions between the outlooks of conservation and protection of (domestic) animals. The border cracks open. Tremble nature, tremble wild animals. I'd wish that those who are interested in the cat disaster would repeat my survey from the previous articles, where I clarify the position of the wrong predators in Finnish nature. They bear the answers to cat peoples' points.

A word about the relationship between the cat and man - although we're straying from conservation. The cat has been imported to Finland to exterminate rodents and harmful birds that eat seeds, crops and berries. Roughly estimating, still a half of our cats are occupied with this outdated task. They aren't being feeded when the soil is unfrozen, excluding perhaps the symbolical drop of milk.

The explanation for cat's popularity as a recent social animal is the ease of owning one: it needs only a fraction of the care demanded by dog. However, there are many facile pets from mice to guineapigs and turtles. But the cat is superior to all of them: it acquires its own food except in January-February.

Nevertheless, unassuming frugality and ability spell doom not only to wild animals (like I have described), but end up being a dire problem for the cat as well. Abandonments of cats that then end up starving at the heart of winter are possible because the cat sparks no attention within the environment. They hardly ever know in villages which cat belongs to who. And besides, the cat can be on a hunting trip spanning many days and nowhere to be found when leaving from a cottage to city. If a dog is left in a similar manner, it will truly howl and tell the entire village of its plight.

Because of this, the cat is wholly impossible to plant in northern lands: a grievance to be rooted out. It does have firm traditions, but so does spitting on the floor and tobacco. Regardless, they must be gotten rid of. It is my opinion that the only positive invention of mankind was the domestication of animals (especially the horse, cow and dog). Why in the name of heavens does Hannele Luukkainen hang on to precisely that sole pest?

Speaking of drowning cats, a naturalist's abridged lecture: an alteration of life's joy and mirth (long-term) and (short-term) pain and agony prevails in nature. When a sparrowhawk has already eaten the flesh from the chest of a starling or woodpecker, the prey still screams in agony. The cat also plays with its prey for a long time before killing it. When animal protection morbidly interested in slaughterings ponders upon the matter if the period of dying takes one or three minutes in the life of a ten or twenty year old animal, it deserves no understanding.

1994

I'm eager to slightly complement Iiris Tukiainen's good review of WWF's communal efforts on traditional landscapes.

The conceptual side of that kind of bee might confuse an acute reader. Already at the second row of the review the word "conservation" is mentioned. Isn't overgrowing of man-made landscapes; pasture fields and copse meadows precisely recovering of the natural state at those islands? Isn't clearing junipers, bushes and trees directly opposed to environmentalism?

It is obvious that a consistent and firm conservationist would rather if the traditional sceneries were let to grow over if only they are released from the clutches of man. However, I find myself siding with WWF and Iiris Tukiainen in respect to this matter. But an explanation is in order.

I recall how Teuvo Suominen at one time characterized well the history of interaction between Finnish nature and agriculture. In the scope of the time, very opulent communities of animals and plants were born on cultivated lands and yards - of the minute species of seashores or flood meadows, if not of species from faraway steppes. The common Finnish nature almost received its second species of birds, if exaggerating a little, plant species (especially large, brightly coloured flowers), likewise insects (also these had particularly vividly coloured butterflies among them).

Correspondingly, woodland organisms were lost from cultivated areas - especially the clearing of groves, which upheld the most profuse of life, into fields yielded large losses. Even so, it can be asserted in quite a sensible sight that man has really enriched nature, at least widening its spectrum - particularly when all species of the woods still had plenty of living space. When crops were cleared to more rugged types of forest, the bird population may have grown in that area, for example.

Most of that flora and fauna required mosaic-like cultural landscape, however: small openings, lots of edge, bank, ditch, uncleared islands of rocks and bushes - and cattle.

Then arrived powerfarming, whose most woeful aspects surely aren't the negative health effects the plant preserving chemicals and fertilizer pose for humans. The fate of cultural scenery's plants and animals is more sorrowful. As an ornithologist I know that the avifauna of fields has plummeted the most during the last decades - worse than those of woods, not to mention the birds of water systems, which have survived the best.

When field patterns have been spread out, edges straightened, piles of rocks swept away, banks condensed nonexistant; cultural animals and plants have suffered greatly. They haven't been able to keep up with the morphing scenery - and won't adjust to an extraordinarily poor and monotonous environment, either. The pioneer of field conservation Karttu Mikkola has also remembered to emphasize the utter disaster of drainage.

The disappearance or moving of flocks of sheep, cattle and horses to field pastures if not straight out into heartless all-year feeding inside, has then taken pastures, meadows and fields away with their flowers, butterflies, northern wheatears and wrynecks. Teuvo Suominen did state then that the historical period when man enriched nature is over: modern field cultivation is a form of economy that heavily impoverishes nature.

Still a summary of genuine nature and cultural landscape. Whether the variety of nature becomes poorer or richer is, of course, dependant case-by-case on what kind of natural area is cleared and what it is transformed into. But authentic nature does not nearly always "strive" towards the broadest spectrum of animal and plant species, nor all the time towards the largest number of individuals, either.

The situation in traditional landscapes is further complicated by the fact that actually the current carbon balance of Earth would require the afforesting of every patch of land as abundant with trees as possible. Despite even that, field bees of small areas like those of Nauvo's Bosk�r are surely welcome even in my regards. We do know that many of the thousands of islands and islets at Saaristomeri revert back to the natural state in any case, and perhaps most of them have always remained as such.

And no matter how strange it may seem to an inland dweller that in Iiris Tukiainen's caption the juniper is branded as the worst enemy - that lovable species of tree that is under distress throughout the inner Finland and almost endangered in some areas -, at Saaristomeri that scoundrel is a true creator of monoculture, an impoverisher of nature's variety!

1997

Pekka Rintam�ki from Uppsala has philosophized of the essence of evolution and the nature of life in an exciting manner. As an culmination of the writing, the sentence "the cornerstone of the ecological world could be generally characterized by words 'anarchy' and 'panic'" is ground-breaking and amusing, as well.

Rintam�ki's reminder that how revolutionary the new research results of Amazonas are is likely indisputable: they are truly an example of quickened evolution. It is, however, questionable if the example can be applied elsewhere. Doubtfully, as such fervent and constant change in environment hasn't appeared anywhere else but in that area, which represents per milles of Earth's surface.

The old perception of biology that evolution demands vast amounts of time likely holds water elsewhere on the globe - like Dawkins asserts in his "The Blind Watchmaker" (as slowly and patiently as the matter at hand is slow and patient).

Indeed, we constantly get evidence that the recent change in the environment caused by man is too rapid, at any case, so that the evolution of organisms could respond to it. Those animals, plants and fungi will not adapt, but answer the challenge with an avalanche of extinctions. And speciation, the forming of new species and shapes, is so despairingly tardy that the balance remains vastly within negative.

Rintam�ki draws his funny hypothesis of life's panicking essence down to the level of individual animals by using lifespans in the domestic realm of avifauna as example. Now he collides with my, entirely different, conception of the same birds. I have lived my own life literally surrounded by birds, identifying myself with them and without contacts to members of my own species for long periods of time. Birds are surely lively, at least for a part of year and day, and energetic, absurdly and fascinatingly serious from human perspective. But only the lives of fledglings (and their parents, then) and young birds are dramatic and critical, thick with danger, beasts and death, sometimes diseases. After that it is marked by fine management of life, which is supported by the high mean age after youth as indicated by banding research. One enviously wonders at how much there is rest, pleasantry and "beautiful idleness" in the lives of birds.

1998

The relationship with nature is absolutely essential in constructing everyone's worldview. General knowledge of nature and the life of animals and plants has always been scarce in the head of the arrogant human. Nowadays, even that little bit is vanishing to the winds as the interest of the quickly urbanizing man is being concentrated exclusively to mischief between men.

We have a shocking contemporary example with strikes to fur farms. Even people of the highest ethical level are only able to project themselves into the rights of domestic animals (which represents the world of men). To the realm of natural animals, a system living in relative balance, they cause terrible losses and confusion as they plant Canadian beasts, mass murderers into Finnish nature.

We can lay the blame of things like this on the school system, which almost wholly neglects its most important mission. Biology, which should be incomparably the most essential of subjects, is in a pitiful position in the teaching program (for all we know, it's even worse in Finland than in most European countries). Which is why Rintam�ki's little lectures about the functioning of evolution, and the like, are more than welcome.

Evolution rarely calls attention to itself

However, Rintam�ki's offer; the basic Darwinistic conception of nature as the field of existence's battle, is obsolete if I may say so. I don't think it stands the light of day - the theory doesn't undergo observation, empirical research. Or not exactly like this, either: the battle of existence influences over long courses and terms of time, quietly at the background. Rintam�ki is correct as far is that is concerned. But in the life of an individual, it seldom actualizes.

In regards to the subject it is important to understand, among others, the different time of varying forms of life; idea of time. I have snatched a biological fragment of information from somewhere that, for example, different mammals have approximately the same amount of heartbeats in their lives (until the physiological maximum age). According to it the heart of the shrew and field vole, which live only for a year, would beat seventy times faster than human's. I have not measured it. All in all, the conception of time varies with each. In the quick-paced life of shrew a day equals human's two months and does split up into many periods of action, rest and sleep. But to return to the subject: it is extremely rare that the changes of habitat and environment are so rapid they would be significant during the life of a shrew (one human year). A new generation of shrews is born programmed into perhaps slightly changed conditions and is allowed to live placidly to old age, midst the measly controllable requirements of adaptation.

By changing the variables, it is true that alterations of the habitat are reasonable during the life of an individual, and bring no plaguing difficulties. Slowly, without notice, those ice ages have come and passed, as well. (Through ages this rule has applied to man, as well. Only during the most recent of times has the species itself messed up its affairs so bizarrely that skills of life learned in younghood go obsolete by old age - or even several times in life).

The lifestory of the common gull

Rintam�ki and I have collected our examples from the realm of birds. Let us still resume a bit, I'll elaborate what I have written before.

It is obvious that the world of birds doesn't fit a single definition even in many relations. A species of birds might have more hard time in their life than another: it lives in a more awkward ecological section. Even divergent populations of the same species are in an unequal position; for example, the "pioneers" of extreme regions live more inconveniently than those in the heart area (perfectly similar to how a cottagedweller is in a more rigid environment in the backwoods of Suomussalmi than in the centre of groves in Lohja; the Finnish population more hard-pressed than the Italians).

But the birds I know the best are surely universally applicable enough. What is the life of the common gull like at a Finnish great lake? Acquiring food takes a fraction of its span. Smelts ascend to the surface of main at convenient intervals to be picked like berries, spawning bleaks jump straight into mouth at shoreline rockeries, every once in a while some fisherman throws aside loads of roaches and little perches from his vendace nets, other leaves a pile of leftovers from cleaned fish on a strand, a befitting rain or substantial nightly dew raises hordes of earthworms and frogs to the fields - and the day's quest for food has been accomplished in half an hour.

An enormous part of the common gull's day is spent with lackadaisically sitting beside the partner and visiting neighbours; tens of times a day in clamorous welcoming rituals, in hours worth of floating over the home bay by wind's buoyancy. Sometimes an osprey or honey buzzard traveling up in the high offers joyous variation. It is recommendable to greet both, to show swiftly one can rise to the skies and make elegant plunges. This has nothing to do with functionality that the most rigid of biologists, etologists and evolutionists are always claiming to witness in nature. It is an act of pure fun for the common gull: the osprey and honey buzzard are not its predators nor do they compete it for food. Goshawk appearing a few times at summer might represent danger, but it can be spotted miles away at open beach - and the crow warns even before that.

All this applies to gulls with parents as well, because fledglings increase the amount of work only a little. Likewise they sit idle for most of the day beside their well-fed young. It's just that there are exremely few caretakers of families because child mortality is massive, as usual in the world of birds (man, on the other hand, has defeated infant mortality with catastrophical consequences: deterioration of hereditary material in addition to the population explosion).

During the last twenty years the infant mortality of common gulls has increased enormously due to the mink. And to the particular harm of Pekka Rintam�ki, not even selection works at all in regards to the mink scourge. When a mink strolls by a beach, it kills every gull nestling from kilometer's length with clockwork precision; the most pithy and wild of mothers are as defenseless as incapable ones are. It is dictated only by chance what parts of strand or isles the mink won't make it to in time. (It is indeed chance that determines the premature death of an animal - as well as human - individual, incomparably more often than the level of its fitness for life.)

Common gulls are lucky fellows, however: they have been capable of replacing child mortality with reduced adult mortality; the population endures in the same numbers year after year. By sheer luck have guns fallen silent at the coasts of the Baltic Sea and North Sea simultaneously, and trawl line fishing ceased at home waters. All the more often do common gulls reach thirties, the maximum age, which translates to nineties with humans, and even though some of my common gulls perish (for a multitude of reasons, like humans do) 23 years old, other 17- or perhaps only 8 years old, I can't perceive it being very grim: that age has already included a massive amount of experiences - and joy of life. But let's knock the wood: if the game warden-environmentalists are ultimately overwhelmed, the mink population may grow so that fledgling production falls to zero. Many other species of birds have faced downfall already because of the mink.

Actually, in respect to the theme at hand, mirth of living, the situation of a currently living common gull individual is exceptionally fortunate. High child mortality naturally brings a greater amount of that temporary agony and emptiness what losing cubs means to every animal, but removes the hazard of overpopulation. The ill-fated competition of living space and sustenance, which might come ahead at some turn, has altogether disappeared. (I warmly recommend it to the human species, too.) The autumn, winter and spring, as well, of the common gull are now sheer festivity: an airy migration flight of a couple of dozen hours to the tidal silt of the North Sea oozing with food and back. A peregrine may flash once or twice in a lifetime at the horizon...

Racket at the sea

Lets diverge a little to islands, too. What do we experience there when we watch - and truly listen - the summerly rollicking of oystercatchers throughout days? We hope that they would ease their deafening shrieking, mass congregations and group plays presented by alternating line-ups, and would concentrate to silently dig crustaceans from a layer of bladder wrack, even for five minutes, so that we could focus to flying displays of arctic terns: again and again in blazing spirals up to the clouds; by two, three, four, squalling and screeching (a bit more civilized than oystercatchers). Then a frenzied plunge down and soon again up to kilometer high, or at least half of it.

We are aware that most of them have hundreds of thousands, some have million kilometres, of traveling back and forth between the Antarctic and the North behind them - with fluff-light wings, without showing the slightest sign of fatigue. Now they have decided to stay two months in place, bound to the territory. But more kilometres must be gained - and this time they have to be taken vertically.

Of course we can, if we persistently decide so, see all this romping, every stroke of wing and screech, like Rintam�ki does: as grave, rigorous training, development of abilities; in case of the dramatic environmental change that lurks behind the corner, frantic rivalry for prey fish or charging hawk. This model of explanation is about as sensible as if we claim that man, while running and fussing from one art gallery to the next, yelling out in a choir or pasting his collection of stamps, is constantly at the battle of existence, competing for its place in the sun - or is at least preparing for it. Nevertheless, I'm sure the realistic explanation is simply the joy of life, that it is pleasant to sing in a choir, likewise to the municipal building inspector as well as the oystercatcher and common gull - that the arctic tern is enjoying itself.

The blackbird, jackdaw and Pekka

I'm still wanting to tell of a blackdaw of early spring, a kind of a representative of minority that has smoothly survived the winter here in north. I can see it with my eyes, in my memories, sitting on a bough of a dark, warmth-absorbing young spruce at the sunny side on the first brightly warm day of February-March. It is squinting its eyes, breast towards the sun, feathers opened to a slight ruffle. It has filled its belly at morning at a nearby compost or bird feeder, and now it sits still unendingly, perching and singing, babbling very quietly - "luri luri luri", for hours on end. It doesn't aim even close to noisy territorial singing, not calling for mate; all the fellows of its species are still for weeks at southern lands. It is sheer emotion, dreaming, meditating, pleasure.

Pekka T. Rintam�ki, have a look at the jackdaws of Uppsala's university's park, their incessant frolicking and games of speed and skill midst the trees and buildings of the park, and plays high above on windy days. Are they really plunging after the last crumbs of food, intestines rumbling, or escaping a goshawk?

1998

I have observed nesting birds full-time during the breeding seasons of 1948-98. Main themes have been inventing nesting populations, their variations and finding out the outcome of their nesting.

During the years 1948-49 schoolwork prevented observing in the key month May. Since my undergraduate year 1950, I have reserved at least May, June and July solely for nesting birds. Those years, I have practised work for wages in May-July only temporarily during the 1980s, for a couple of weeks overall. Unfortunately, also a large garden of useful plants has pinched a few days off the breeding season in the 1980s and 90s. Associating with relatives and others of my species has occurred purely in the context of bird hiking, and interviews of a broad network of informants have been strictly limited to complement my own material of bird observations.

Observation has covered almost the whole country (excursions in almost 250 municipalities). A dozen villages in Central Tavastia have been the annual core area (where precise annual areas and lines of comparison concentrate to). In the 1980s and 90s, I have additionally done bird surveys in eleven other European countries almost every year (3-5 weeks per year). Taken all together, I have used roughly 50000 real hours (over 90 per cent in home country, over 50 per cent in the core area) to the observation of nesting birds.

The observation work has been accomplished (also abroad) by foot, bicycle (when also all the time spent traveling is full-fledged observation) or rowing boat, and in very slight amounts on long distances, by public transportation. Only in 10 to 20 per cent of trips have there been 1-2 alternating companions with me. Since the beginning of the 1950s, the procedure has included spending the night where it falls; separate places of sleeping have accumulated to many thousands. That's how unnecessary return trips are avoided and phases of falling asleep and waking up are got into the sphere of observing.



The making of an inventory of bird populations has strived to encompass the whole avifauna in the homeland at different accuracies. The most precise material of countings have been gathered (alongside birds that nest in holes and those of prey) from water- and coastal birds. Comparative inventories elsewhere in the country, primarily on large fairway lakes, all of which I have rowed a considerable share of, and in sea archipelagoes, have been only single calculations without any repeats. The same applies to most of the two hundred, in all, examined lakes and ponds of the core area of Tavastia.

On the contrary, there are repeated countings from many years, dozens of years at the best cases, from almost fifty lakes of various proportions in Tavastia. The material is dominated by the great Vanajanselk�, the coastal length of its main and islands being about 200 km and which avifauna I have more or less throughly counted annually in 1951-1969, and then 1972, 1986, 1997 and 1998. The emphasis has elsewhere been on water- and coastal birds during the years 1948-1953, plenty of recalculations from the years 1959-1963. And then after a long period comprising of scarce control observations I took the former waters of comparison again into the program with past methods in 1997-1998.

Furthermore, there are the trips of counting broods in July-August, sometimes even over ten successive treks at the same lake, in the same year. The method has been circuit counting by feet or boat. A couple of times notes have been made of positioned counting at small ponds, which may sometimes give a tenable result of diving ducks.

I will tell of these findings in my discourse with the aid of charts. I have published an intermediate report of the development of duck populations from the 1950s to 1960s in the annual book Suomen Riista ["Finland's Game"] in 1961, and an article of the size of duck birds' broods in Suomen Riista in 1962.



During the early years, I was interested in creating and refining counting methods, and their results I have published in Ornis Fennica 1959:2. The years 1948-50 were spent in seeking a capable process, and there is no valid material to be used from those years except of only a few species.

The methods were crystallized so that the counting of gulls, grebes, divers and coots is based on counting nests - and as for perished broods; couples residing in the territory - at the right season. The process may take dozens of hours even in a densely grown little lake, but it gives an absolute result. And it has turned out that even the most interesting, in a methodical aspect, ducks can yield a basically exact finding by a single counting - which can't be said of many ground birds. Of ducks, only mallards and teals even more so, may to some extent skulk on ground unreachable by the surveyor and as far they are concerned, one must be satisfied with that the yearly comparisons are however valid. All other species are wholly observable in the open landscape of the beach, and the right timing of the counting is crucial.

The calculation is based on the male individual in that brief time (one to two weeks for each species) when the population of the species has arrived to the region and settled to the nesting strand, and when passing migrants are not disrupting anymore and the male has not yet detached from its partner and territory. A full survey of one lake implies three countings: the mallard, teal and goosander immediately after the water has thawed; the goldeneye, wigeon, shoveler, pochard etc. 2-3 weeks after that; the late breeders tufted duck and red-breasted merganser even slightly later; at delayed springs the dates for counting are a bit earlier. The last one is simultaneous with counting nests. All of them are timed to May in South- and Central Finland, the last just on the first steps of June. Many, especially older, water bird researches have dated to only June as dictated by the terms of schools and universities, and unfortunately are unworthy and useless in regards of reviewing breeding populations.

Naturally it is the most essential to know in what amount the male individual corresponds to a nesting couple; in other words, what is the population ratio of genders. For this, I collected voluminous data of the ratio of ducks' genders at springs before the beginning of breeding, which I have published in Ornis Fennica in 1960. It was proven that the ratio for most ducks of inland waters is approximately 1:1, but for the garganey it is 1,22:1 (narrow material of a sparse species), 1,38:1 for the pochard, 1,28:1 for the tufted duck and 1,47:1 for the red-breasted merganser. So, these correcting coefficients can give the number of female individuals and potential nests, if wanted.

To my displeasure I have noticed that because of some whim, the female individual has been used as the basic unit of counting in regards to the pochard and tufted duck in the nationwide calculation of water birds. This is a scientific fiasco. Female ducks are perceivable enough only long before breeding at unfrozen straits; as soon as the waters open up some already begin searching for nesting spots in the hidings of grass - invisible particularly in stationary counting. I have familiarized myself with the report of Jorma Ahola's team that took part in the national counting in 1987-89 at my own region, and the corresponding statistic of the nationwide project. The team observed 17 males and 3 females at a good tufted duck lake in 6/6 1988 (at a time when a major share of females are already sitting on eggs), and the national counting marked three couples for the lake when the actual comparative number would have been seventeen (and the amount of couples fourteen). As for ducks, the nationwide calculations have to be done wholly again should the reports of the terrain counters be left.



The water- and coastal avifauna of Tavastia has gone through severe changes during an observation period of 50 years. Generally it can be said that the populations of most species grew steeply from the 1940s and 50s to the 1960s, which I call the golden decade of the Finnish avifauna. The growth, which included also many bird species of land, can perhaps be explained with recovery from the vehement hunting and amassing of eggs of the years of war and shortage and the consecutive winters of piercing cold of the beginning of the 1940s in Northern and Central Europe. Growth seems to have halted in the 1970s and turned to a radical decline in the 1980s and derailed into a black pit in the 1990s, which I correspondingly call the decade of death. (The descend was sharp in regards to the wigeon and mallard in as brief a period as from 1997 to 1998.) Most of Tavastia's water bird populations are now fainter than ever since the 1940s, even mere tenths of the most prosperous years of the 1960s; both ducks and the slavonian grebe are at the verge of extinction. Mergansers and the goldeneye who resume their triumph signify a deviating course of progress, and likewise in a lesser manner the black-throated diver who is strenghtening its population.

A dramatic change, in a natural connection to the development of populations, is evident in the outcome of nesting. I'll mention the outcome of the common gull here even if it belongs only slightly to this relationship, because I have the largest and most accurate of materials of it. In the 1950s it was 1, in 1997-1998 lesser than 0,3 flying fledglings per a nesting couple. Also ducks' nestling production has dropped: broods of ducks, which positively swarmed bird lakes at July-August in the 1960s, exist no more. Only hatches of the goosander and goldeneye succeed moderately or well.



Both actual observations and various evidence support my hypothesis that the most prominent reason for the ruin of Tavastia's water bird populations are beasts, primarily the wild mink, which began to spread to Tavastia at the end of the 1960s. The raccoon dog and populations of fox and marten, which have grown greatly nowadays, are minute but eager assistants. Also the part of the eagle owl may be significant; the species was missing from Tavastia in the 1950s and 1960s, but is currently plentiful. The pressure has loosened somewhat only by the goshawk.

Other possible actors, like the change in habitat, dearth of sustenance or increased hunting, seem to be nonexistant at my area of observation. There have been no alarming news of the situation at areas where water birds overwinter.



Regardless of attempting, I have not been able to gather a symposium of aquatic bird's researchers from other parts of the nation. It would be immensely important to know if the development of populations is similar elsewhere in the country. For the time being, nothing points that the case isn't so. Perhaps we are witnessing a wave of indigenous fauna's extinctions by an alien predator imported by man, known from Australia and several ocean islands.

On the basis of contemporary knowledge we should most hastily muster a common effort between all people of game warding and conservation to realize efficient hunting of foreign predator populations, and most importantly the mink. We should also strive to strictly limit the indigenous beasts of prey and consider restrictions on hunting. The desperate victims of the mink, the shoveler and both ducks that dwell in lakeside grass, should be put wholly under protection by law.

On the other hand, mergansers and goldeneyes could be hunted. It must be noted that the underestimating of mergansers' meat is sheer prejudice - like nutritional beliefs often are. By myself and blind tests arranged for my acquaintances, I have been able to ascertain that the meat of mergansers and even the great crested grebe (which, however, cannot withstand drastic taxation) is almost as delicious as that of the mallard and wigeon.

1999