My husband is a brilliant photographer. He also love birdies. We both do. And, we’ve come to love time spent wandering around our neighbourhood in Helsinki each evening, enjoying time away from our desks and computers, leaving devices in pockets and on silent mode, and just marvelling at the woodlands, views and creatures with whom we share this habitat.

For the last several weeks, we’ve been planning on taking our proper camera [Canon 250D with 70-300 mm nano USM lens] out with us on our strolls. My schedule and weather have conspired against us until yesterday. And, what an evening stroll it was.

Over more than two hours, we saw in this order:

• a juvenile goshawk
• a fledgling great spotted woodpecker
• several goshawks both in-flight and perched
• a juvenile grey heron
• a hedgehog

We also saw multiple bunnies (wild hares) ranging from tiny to gigantic, various geese and duckies, and one very annoyed cat sat on its glassed in balcony.

The pictures below are from that stroll, and do not capture all of the lovely creatures we happened upon yesterday evening nor some of the more stunning moments they provided us. So many more moments with these beauties remain etched in our minds’ eyes, yet unpreserved by a lens. They are precious still.

Several weeks ago on our evening stroll, we turned a corner and caught sight of two goshawks flying side-by-side just above our heads, revealing their incredibly dappled underbellies. Several days ago, we witnessed the same heron we saw yesterday cautiously and painfully slowly manoeuvring itself stalking tiny fishes, which it then caught with its beak. Another day, the most gorgeous of great spotted woodpeckers landed mere feet from me on an evening run. Our neighbourhood fox has also trotted by us on multiple occasions more recently, wandering about looking for one meal of another.

This, my friends, is urban nature at its finest. This is Helsinki in summer, although we’ve seenall of these creatures in winter as well.

Evenings like this are why we love our neighbourhood so, so much. And, they restore us.

[Click on an image below to see the full versions and see the captions.]