13 July 2025

This spring, for the eighth year in a row, Finland was rated the happiest country in the world by the World Happiness Report. Unfortunately the U.S. lost ground and fell to #23, our lowest ever position on the happiness scale since the report began in 2012.

Today my husband and I are flying to Finland with a one night stopover in the 3rd happiest country, Iceland. This is our third visit to Finnish friends whom we’ve known since Erkki was a foreign exchange student at our high school. I’m looking forward to lots of happiness.

The map below shows our locations: Pittsburgh (P), Iceland (orange) and Finland (red). On Icelandair we only have to change planes once, in Reykjavik.

While in Helsinki we will stay across the street from Töölönlahti bay.

Even from afar we will be able to see Helsinki Lutheran Cathedral, one of the most famous buildings in Finland. The steps to its plaza look like a wall in this photo.

After a couple of days in the city we will visit the countryside at Erkki and Helena’s summer cottage at Lake Rikkavesi and their son’s cottage on a peninsula near the Baltic Sea. Lake Rikkavesi is pictured at the top of this article, the guest cottage below. In 2017 it glowed at 3:30am, just after sunrise on 2 July.

Summer cottage life is one of the things that makes Finland such a happy place.

The Nordic lifestyle is closely linked to nature and the highly anticipated but short lived summer season. The most popular and ideal way to spend the summer months in Finland is in a lakeside cottage surrounded by nature. This tradition is grounded in traditional culture and lifestyle and forms an important part of the Finnish national landscape. Many Finns consider the cottage to balance out city life.

— Cottage Culture in Finland: Development and Perspectives

There are 5 million people in Finland and 500,000 rural cottages, called mökki. About 50% of the Finnish population visits a cottage on a regular basis.

Most of the cottages are modest in size as shown in these Finnish summer cottage facts from Mökkibarometri 2025:

• The average cottage is 91 kilometers (56 miles) from home and 70 square meters in size. (753 sq ft, about the size of a one bedroom apartment.)
• 75% of cottages are connected to the electricity grid.
• Solar panels are in use at 19% of cottages and heat pumps at 34%.
• Fixed broadband is installed in 12%. (Cell coverage is so good in Finland that I never needed WiFi at the cottage.)
• 55% of owners bring their drinking water to their cottage.
• Most cottages are owned by older people. 55% of owners are retired.
• Shared ownership has increased. This is the case, for example, with cottages owned by heirs.

Even though it sounds like a lot of cottages, the lakes seem remote. Buildings do not crowd the edges of lakes as they do in the U.S. and the lights of other cottages do not shine across the water at night.

On walks in the area with my husband Rick, Erkki, and his wife Helena in 2017 we saw lots of trees …

… and cows at this dairy farm, but we did not encounter other people.

I’ve marked this map of Finland with blue “X”s at the four places we will visit.

We’ll relax, enjoy time with friends, and be happy in the land of the midnight sun.

There will be birds, too. More on that later.

21 July 2017

Two weeks ago my husband and I returned from a visit with friends in Finland.  Today I’ll share some of the beautiful scenery and tell you a bit about the country.

Finland is a Nordic country located between Scandinavia and Russia.  For centuries it was alternately ruled by its two powerful neighbors, Sweden and Russia.  This year Finland celebrates 100 years of independence, released by Russia in 1917 after the Bolshevik Revolution.

Though it’s the eighth largest country in Europe, Finland is the most sparsely populated in the European Union.  One quarter of its 5.5 million people live in metro Helsinki with the rest spread out among towns and country, mostly in the south.

We stayed with our friends Erkki and Helena at their summer cottage on Lake Rikkavesi (very sparsely populated; located at blue arrow) and at their home in Joensuu, a town of 58,000.

Their summer cottage consists of three buildings — sleeping space, living space, and an outhouse.  It’s semi-rugged with electricity, a wood burning sauna (everyone has a sauna in Finland!), lake water for washing not drinking, and a composting toilet.  Middle of the night bathroom visits required walking outdoors, but no problem. It is never dark in July.

Most of my photos below were taken at Lake Rikkavesi (check the captions for more information).  Click on any photo to see a larger version of the slideshow.

 

Beautiful Finland. The land of 188,000 lakes.

 

(photos by Kate St. John)

During my recent trip to England and Finland I was happy to see lots of new Life Birds but was amazed at how many birds were the same at home and abroad.

Some are on both continents because they were introduced — rock pigeons, house sparrows, starlings, ring-necked pheasants and mute swans. But many in the duck, gull and tern families occur in both places because they flew there on their own. There are usually different subspecies on each continent(*) but in a few cases the exact same species is everywhere.

Here are four such birds, easily found in North America and Europe. There are no subspecies so if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.

Above, I saw northern shovelers (Anas clypeata) in England where they’re simply called “shovelers.” I was amazed to learn they’re the same bird everywhere though I should have known. They breed across northern America and Eurasia.

 

Red-breasted mergansers (Mergus serrator) breed in northern America and Eurasia and travel far on migration (for a merganser). They spend the winter at both salt and fresh water so it’s no wonder they can change continents.

 

Caspian terns (Hydroprogne caspia) are the largest tern on earth and found on every continent except Antarctica, though their distribution is scattered on coasts and in the interior. In western Pennsylvania they’re at Presque Isle in the spring.

 

And finally, great black-backed gulls (Larus marinus) are coastal and Great Lakes birds found on both sides of the North Atlantic. As the largest member of the gull family this bird is so powerful that it eats smaller gulls, even adults!

When you see a great black-backed gull at the beach this summer, consider this:  It’s the same bird everywhere.

 

(Great black-backed gull photo by shellgame on Flickr, Creative Commons license; click on the image to see the original. All other photos by Steve Gosser)

(*) p.s. A few examples of different subspecies between North America and Europe: green-winged teal, sandwich tern, barn swallow, barn owl, peregrine falcon.

UPDATE in 2022: Northern goshawks were split in 2022 into two species within a new genus. This one is now the Eurasian goshawk (Astur gentilis formerly Accipiter gentilis). In North America we have the American goshawk (Astur atricapillus).

10 July 2017

My recent interest in the Birds of Europe field guide was inspired by a two week trip my husband and I made to England and Finland.  Here’s one of my favorite sightings in Finland illustrated with my very bad photos.

Last Thursday afternoon I took a walk along the paved pedestrian trail in Helsinki’s Töölönlahti Park.  I was enjoying close looks at arctic terns, great crested grebes, Eurasian coots, and barnacle geese when a huge flock of mew and black-headed gulls swirled above me in alarm.

The gulls were the pursuing a bird of prey that quickly landed next to the sidewalk and stood on its prey the way our red-tailed hawks do in public.  The hawk was holding a wood pigeon and panting as it watched people, dogs and bicycles go by.  It was an adult male goshawk!

In North America, goshawks avoid cities and people so I was stunned and pleased to see one so close.  However the bird’s appearance confused me a bit.  In North America, juvenile goshawks have yellow eyes while adults have red eyes.  In Europe this bird’s bright yellow-orange eyes indicate he’s an adult.

His size fooled me, too.  He’s so large that I thought he was female.  The next day I learned from my bird guide, Jari Laitasalo, that male and female adult goshawks have different head plumage in Finland.  Females have very pale heads so this bird’s dark head indicates he’s male.

Goshawks eat birds but their favorite prey in northern Europe is the wood pigeon.  Jari explained that the abundance of prey in Helsinki’s city parks has drawn goshawks and eagle owls to nest in the city center.

Not wanting to disturb this awesome bird I stood far back to take these photos with my cellphone and binoculars.  After 15 minutes he was still on the prey so I gave up and walked back to the hotel. Goshawks have more stamina that I do.

p.s. The Finnish word for goshawk is kanahaukka:  kana=chicken, haukka=hawk.