Sarah Fossheim
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fossheim.bsky.social
Sarah Fossheim
@fossheim.bsky.social
720 followers 250 following 92 posts
they/them/hen 🌈 Independent web & dataviz accessibility specialist. Also bird nerd, wildlife photographer, and nature enthusiast.

Located in Vardø, an island in the Norwegian arctic 💨🌊

Work: fossheim.io
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fossheim.bsky.social
also if anyone's wondering why I've been real quiet on socials lately... been in bird banding training all summer/autumn in my spare time 🐦‍⬛💍 feels good to be contributing to science and be in research-oriented circles again 😌

pictured is a dunnock I ringed last week in Porsanger 🫶🏻
My hands holding a dunnock, a passerine with a brown/black striped back, gray/silver face with beige stripes around the eyes, red-ish eyes, and a black beak.
September 17, 2025 at 9:43 PM
fossheim.bsky.social
enrolled in bird banding training this summer, already got to band a fierce great grey shrike and a critically endangered rustic bunting.

This is along a river between Norway and Russia, so our group also got 45 Russian birds in our nets.
Great grey shrike in my hands, we have a matching outfit. The great grey shrike has a grey plumage, with black feet, black feathers that have a white horizontal band, and dark gray/lack stripe across the eyes. The tail is black and white as well. Wearing a metal ring on its left leg. I’m wearing a black and white and grey striped outfit. My hands holding a rustic bunting: it’s a small bird with beige on the tummy, copper colour on the flanks and face. White/light beige stripe above the eyes, brown on top of the head. Wearing a small metal ring. River with a wetland island in the middle, woods on the other side. On the foreground there’s a small row boat.
August 19, 2025 at 1:07 PM
fossheim.bsky.social
went out for a dog walk around town, met a cute small birdy
Big white tailed eagle sitting on lichen covered rocks, in front of the ocean. The eagle has mostly brown plumage, with white/beige feather tips. The head is mostly white with brown spots, and the tail (which is mostly hidden behind a rock) is white as well. The beak and feet are bright yellow/orange.
July 13, 2025 at 9:31 AM
fossheim.bsky.social
Summer 😌
Weekly weather forecast showing temperatures between 5°C and and 9°C, almost always cloudy, and wind up to 9m/s.
June 26, 2025 at 8:04 AM
fossheim.bsky.social
Moved to Vardø earlier this month, loving it so far ❤️
A shouting black-legged kittiwake standing on top of a statue that’s meanwhile completely covered in kittiwake poop. A red wooden building that’s falling apart, missing planks some places and paint scratched off on others, where there’s a big “make the north great again” sign, on which there’s a lot of kittiwakes nesting. There’s also a lot of kittiwake nests on the ledges of one of the boarded off windows. There’s also a poster hanging saying “fiskeridiktaturet, depresjon Finnmark” with an illustration of a mermaid pushing away two dead fish on it.
June 26, 2025 at 8:00 AM
fossheim.bsky.social
Back under the midnight sun ☀️
Screenshot of the weather app, showing it’s currently 1AM, 11°C and sunny. The hourly weather forecast between 1am and 6am shows sun, and temperatures between 10°C and 12°C. The daily weather forecast predicts mostly sunny, between 9°C and 15°C.
June 4, 2025 at 10:59 PM
fossheim.bsky.social
in 2014 after I started working in tech designers started saying that one day in the next few years design tools would publish websites and front-end devs would become obsolete.

11 years later, code by figma sites:
code screenshot from the inspector: div with the link role, tabindex 0, and href, inside of it 4 nested divs. The lowest nested div has an aria-label "contact us", and text "contact u" with a span containing the s. Something like code sample: <div role="link" tabindex="0" href="..."><div><div><div><div aria-label="CONTACT us">CONTACT u<span>s</span></div></div></div></div></div>
May 10, 2025 at 4:28 PM
fossheim.bsky.social
Male and female gulls look identical, but it’s possible to tell the difference based on the size of the head and bill 🤓

That’s how we learned that balcony gull Gloria, who recently got measured & ringed, is actually a boy!

Blog:
fossheim.photography/blog/2025-01...

#ornithology #birdPhotography
High-contrast picture of an adult herring gull in winter plummage. He has bright white feathers with brown/gray stripes on the head and neck, and an orange beak. Portrait photo from the chest upwards of an adult European Herring Gull just moulting into winter plumage, with light brown stripes on the head. She's looking towards the camera, and around her right eye her feathers are standing upwards and have blood on them.
January 25, 2025 at 9:44 AM
fossheim.bsky.social
A white-tailed eagle started scouting the area for prey, which caused the auks to flee their cliff in a panic. But not this one bridled individual, who bravely and proudly made their way back to the nest with their own fresh meal 🎣

#birdPhotography #wildlife #birds
Common murre flying from right to left of the frame, with a fish in its beak. In the backgrpound are 5 other murres flying in the opposite direction, left to right.
January 17, 2025 at 11:58 AM
fossheim.bsky.social
Meet the Arctic Tern, a bird that breeds in the arctic and overwinters in the antarctic, completing a distance similar to 3+ roundtrips to the moon in its lifetime. And if you ever met one, you probably understand why I call them Arctic Terrors instead 😰

#birdPhotography #birds #photography
Arctic tern in flight, against a bright blue background. It's a white gull-like seabird, with light gray wings, a black top of the head, and very sharp red beak.
January 16, 2025 at 6:06 PM
fossheim.bsky.social
How birds and other species are doing globally can be checked on the website of the IUCN redlist:
www.iucnredlist.org

Looking at the seabird stats on a global scale, over 30% are threatened or extinct. Biggest threats: hunting, invasive species, climate change, disturbances, housing, and industry.
Screenshot of the IUCN statistics, data filtered on Charadriiformes order (shorebirds), global scope. Showing a donut chart with red list categories and bar chart with threats. 69.5% are least concern, 12.4% near threatened, 9% vulnerable, 4.1% endangered, 2.8% critically endangered, 1.8% extinct. The threats are (in order from large to small): intentional hunting and trapping, invasive species, climate change & severe weather, disturbances from recreational activities, habitat loss from housing & urban areas, industrial development, oil spills, farming, unintentional side effects from fishing, and problematic native species.
January 15, 2025 at 12:25 PM
fossheim.bsky.social
Bird of the day: the razorbill, closest living relative to the extinct Great Auk.

Razorbills are also vulnerable, having seen a >30% population reduction in Norway the last 50 years. Over half of Norway's seabirds are threatened, and 80% have disappeared from bird cliffs.

#photography #ornithology
Two razorbills cuddling together in the snow, with a bright aqua sea in the background. The background is out of focus with a lot of bokeh, and the snow in the foreground creates a white haze. The razorbills are small black and white auks, and have a white vertical and horizontal line on their beak.
January 15, 2025 at 12:05 PM
fossheim.bsky.social
Black-legged kittiwake chick, photographed at a "kittiwake hotel" last summer. The kittiwakes have started breeding inside towns, and in order to prevent them nesting on people's houses, hotels were built for them.

fossheim.photography/photos/catal...

#birdPhotography #wildlife #photography
A kittiwake chick on the nest, having its beak wide open, exposing the pink inside of its mouth. It's a sunny day, and the picture is well lid with a lot of detail. The young kittiwake still has fluffy down and is very tiny, colored white ans gray, with a white beak.
January 12, 2025 at 4:18 PM
fossheim.bsky.social
Today's bird is a Common Murre (Uria aalge), a seabird that only comes on land to breed on steep cliffs. This is the bridled variant, with white "glasses", which becomes more common the further north you go.

More info: fossheim.photography/photos/catal...

#birdPhotography #birds #photography
Portrait of a bridled common murre standing in front of a teal/blue blurry background (out of focus ocean), photographed from the chest up. The belly is white, the back and head are very dark brown (but look black), medium-sized sharp gray beak. Around its eye is a white circle and line, resembling glsses. The bird eye is in focus, along with tiny water droplets on top of the head.
January 11, 2025 at 1:28 PM
fossheim.bsky.social
I was trying to take a picture of a family of common murres standing at the edge of the cliff, with the surrounding mountains in the background, when a european shag decided to crash land in the snow right front of me.

#birdPhotography #birds #photography
Three common guillemots posing in front of a white snowed in mountain, with more murres/guillemots flying in the background. It almost looks peaceful, except in the foreground a european shag is crash landing into the snow, in the most dramatic way possible: head pointed towards the sky, open beak exposing the yellow inside the mouth, and snow flying upwards.
January 10, 2025 at 12:14 PM
fossheim.bsky.social
We're moving away soon, and I will truly miss these two beasts and their daily visits.

I know they'll be fine, they've been here long before us, they adapt easily, and since they recognise faces they'll be skeptical enough of the new owners to not get in trouble. But I will miss them 💔

5/5

#birds
Portrait of a European Herring Gull in a snow storm. The picture is zoomed in on his face, the background is an out of focus hazy dark purple/gray, and there's snow falling around the gull. He's in adult winter plumage, white body with gray stripes on the head and around the eyes.
January 9, 2025 at 4:52 PM
fossheim.bsky.social
Here's another one of last year's favorites: our rooftop herring gull Josefine 🪿 She and her partner have been living in our street and on our roof for longer than we have lived here, they're truly our landlords.

fossheim.photography/photos/catal...

1/5

#birdPhotography #birds #photography
Adult herring gull looking straight at the camera, with a stern look on her face. Another gull is standing out of focus in front of her, and the background is a blue-ish out of focus color.
January 9, 2025 at 4:52 PM
fossheim.bsky.social
I want to share my photography more often on here, so let's start with one of my favorite shots from last year: a European Shag carrying the skeleton of one of his peers back to the nest, to use it as nesting material.

fossheim.photography/photos/catal...

#birdPhotography #birds #photography
European shag walking around with the skeleton of another european shag in its beak. He's walking right to left in the frame, and between grassy terrain.
January 9, 2025 at 1:03 PM
fossheim.bsky.social
New e-reader for Christmas, moving away from Amazon 💪🏻
Kobo libra color, a white e-reader about the size of an average book, with color display and two buttons to move pages. On the screen is the cover of a book called “The Witch’s Heart” by Genevieve Gornichec, and a bookmark saying the book is 63% read and has 2 hours ago
December 25, 2024 at 3:24 PM
fossheim.bsky.social
corvids >>> covids
Portrait of a hooded crow sitting in green grass, in front of a red building. The crow has a grey body and black wings and head, and is looking straight at the camera. The foreground is out of focus grass, the background a red out of focus building. The crow is in focus.
December 14, 2024 at 11:42 PM
fossheim.bsky.social
Customisability = accessibility ❤️

Have had a bad migraine for two days straight, haven't been able to do much more than rest and be bored.

Black/white text is too high contrast atm and hurts my head, so using a plugin to overwrite css so I can read articles in a red low-contrast color scheme 🥰
Research article about "Morphological changes in hooded crows (Corvus cornix) related to urbanization" on frontiers (frontiersin.org). The background of the page is dark faded blue, almost black (but less intense), and the text is dark pink/red-ish. The text and background don't have much contrast, but the text size is really big, zoomed in to 200%. Stylebot plugin for chrome, showing custom css. The body background is set to #151522 and the color of the text to #9a3650. Images are grayscale and low opacity, and the opacity is increased to 100% on hover, with a 0.25s transition.
December 12, 2024 at 10:10 PM
fossheim.bsky.social
woke up with the worst headache today, have not managed to do much more than napping so far, so here’s a bird pic for good luck 😌🤞🏻
Black and white photograph of 3 hooded crows in an urban park. One crow is standing is standing in the middle of the frame, and is in focus, looking at the camera with a stern expression. There's a crow on his left and right, in the background and a bit out of focus, facing the camera as well. It looks as if the one in the front/middle is about to beat up the photographer, with two crows being his bodyguard in the background.
December 11, 2024 at 6:05 PM
fossheim.bsky.social
Last summer while on an evening walk we discovered a beach where thousands of gulls were spending the night. On one of the pictures around 2000 were visible (I counted), and there were even more on other parts of the beach 🤯

And this will be our backyard soon 🥰

fossheim.photography/blog/2024-08...
Wide angle picture of a rocky coastline with thousands of herring gulls on them, a small red dot is placed on each of the gulls Zoomed in picture of a rocky beach with mountains on either side, and thousands of herring gulls and great black-backed gulls (mostly juveniles/below 4yo, but also some adults) all over the beach, showing up as little white dots against the gray rocks.
December 8, 2024 at 1:56 PM
fossheim.bsky.social
haven't been showing my photography here yet, so here's a puffin, who'll be my (literal) neighbor after our move ❤️

more photos:
fossheim.photography
Portrait of an Atlantic Puffin, hiding behind an out of focus grass hill on a sunny day. Only the top of the head (up until the eyes) is popping up from behind the hill in the foreground, everything below the beak is below the terrain. In the background there's more green vegetation that's out of focus, and the colors of the entire picture are quite bright and saturated.
December 7, 2024 at 2:31 PM
fossheim.bsky.social
But at the same time, the alt text on their map did not communicate any of the results.

This type of issue I encounter offer when reviewing charts and websites: people add alt text because automated checks warn them when there's no alt, but the text doesn't explain the image well enough.
Map of the US with election results: each state has a hexagon color coded in red or blue, and sized according to how many electoral votes they hold. The alt text read by VoiceOver is (in Norwegian, translated to English): "Map of the USA, showing the amount of electoral college votes per state"
December 2, 2024 at 9:19 PM