I am on my way back to Belgium after a very intense but successful field campaign in the high north.

Long-tailed skua on the look-out

We managed to do everything we planned: setting up a new experiment around Abisko, revisiting last year’s experiment and collecting over a hundred loggers with a year of soil temperature data from Sweden and Norway, resulting in the build-up of the best dataset I could ever imagine.

“What are you looking at”

It is always a pity to leave the midnight sun behind, but it sweetens the goodbye to know that everything went as planned. And there is one fellow who is not at all sad to see me go: this very angry skua with its nest close to our plots.

It had been attacking us with all its power to get us out of here and leave it alone, so who am I to resist?

Attacking low

More pictures and stories will follow soon, as soon as I start recovering from the trip!

Getting low in fear of an attack