Languages

Some Varanger Residents Capitalizing on Area Bird-Watching Growth

Birds have been an attraction in Varanger among serious birders for many years, but the area's global reputation is growing.

Residents in the Varanger area from outside the tourism industry are beginning to notice Varanger’s growing global reputation as a bird-watching hub and capitalizing on the growing interest in the peninsula’s ecology.

Location

When Frode Fjerdingøy took over the Vadsø Fjordhotell a few years ago, he expected the hotel to be used mostly for business conferences .

But by the middle of 2013, he was marketing the Vadsø hotel as a base camp for watching area birds like the Arctic eider and had himself become a bird enthusiast.

Like Fjerdingøy, other nearby residents from outside the tourism industry are beginning to notice Varanger’s growing global reputation as a bird-watching hub and capitalizing on the growing interest in the peninsula’s ecology.

Hilde Bjørkli, director for tourism and trade for Finnmark with the Northern Norway Tourist Board, said while the tourism in the area is still developing, she thinks it will become more attractive to locals as a means of business because it is lucrative and enables them to interact with tourists.

She said many residents in the area have even begun earning money by opening up guestrooms in their homes to tourists.

Bjørkli said she expects this to continue because towns like Vadsø, which are used to professional birders, still need more development to prepare for an influx of amateurs.

But birds are not the only ecological attraction in the area.

Edgar Olsen, a fisherman in Nesseby, said he began taking tourists on summer crabbing and fishing expeditions about three years ago and now takes between 50 and 100 trips each year.

He said many of his tourists are excited when they help catch a king crab because of how exotic the animal is to them.

“It’s fun to see, but a little bit strange for me as a fisherman,” Olsen said.

He said most of the increase in the area’s ecotourism comes from the growing popularity of birding and that many visitors come from as far as China.

Ørjan Hansen, a former fisherman who created the tourism company Arctic Tourist in 2007 in Båtsfjord, said that though he takes tourists on king crabbing safaris and other fishing trips, about 80 percent of his customers are birders.

Hansen said he expects to work with between 500 and 600 visitors during the summer season. He also rents his boat to tourists during the winter as a photography base.

The bird-watching on the Varanger peninsula was a long-held secret among enthusiasts from around the world until recent years.

Much of the new growth came from online marketing by Biotope, an architecture company which plans structures for bird-watching and natural areas, Bjørkli said.

Biotope moved to Varanger about five years ago and used blogging and social media to showcase some of the area’s birds to the international birding community, said Tormod Amundsen, the company’s CEO.

While there are no definitive statistics, Amundsen said he estimates that about 8,000 birders visit the area each year. He said the tourism has more than doubled since Biotope began.

Fjerdingøy said this growth is partly because the birding community is well-connected and some birders will quickly fly to Varanger if social media notes that a rare bird is in the area.

“It’s a society where 60 year-old guys Tweet,” he said.

Bjørkli said the growth of birding and other forms of ecotourism are a part of a global trend of tourists being more active in the natural world.

“Tourists tend to be more interested in activities now than they used to be previously when they were just merely observers,” she said.