Iceland review - 2016, Page 56

54 ICELAND REVIEW
COMMUNITY
car. All smiles, she introduces herself as
Unnur Sæmundsdóttir. “I’m in the mid-
dle of painting the house,” she announc-
es. She takes the photographer and me to
Ystibær, her family’s sanctuary on Hrísey.
“To us, it’s been a summer dwelling from
the start,” Unnur says during the drive
along a bumpy gravel road. Located on
the northern end of the drop-shaped
island, it takes about 45 minutes to walk
the 5.6 km (3.5 miles) there from the vil-
lage. “My dad grew up in Svarfaðardalur
[near Dalvík on the mainland opposite
Hrísey to the west] but spent some time
with his grandparents in Ystibær as a boy.
In 1918 [known as ‘The Great Winter
of Frost’], he even walked to the island
across the ice, scared to death. After
his grandparents died, Ystibær changed
owners several times and when the farm
was abandoned in 1956, my dad felt obli-
gated to buy it.”
Sæmundur Stefánsson (1905-1996) was
a successful businessman in Reykjavík and
had met his second wife, Úlla Knudsen—
Unnur’s mother—when in 1959 they
decided to spend their summers as eider
duck farmers and plant trees on Hrísey.
“When they first came here, the land was
barren. At one point, there were as many
as 1,000 sheep on the island and they had
eaten every last straw,” says Unnur. We
pass through a gate and enter the Ystibær
estate, to which half the island accounts.
The couple fenced off their land to
keep the sheep away (the last sheep
were slaughtered in 1973) and started
planting. “They sowed lupine, which was
considered to be good for the soil at the
time. They also brought angelica, but the
chervil came on its own and is overtaking
everything. A few years back, this field
was completely blue.” The white of the
chervil, dotted with bright green angeli-
ca, dominates the flower fields to either
side of the road. In other places it’s lupine
and angelica that are most apparent—all
three plant species are considered to be
invasive.
FEATHERED FRIENDS
We arrive at the old farmhouse, where
Úlla welcomes us. Next to it stands
her late husband’s 1963-model Land
Rover, which was recently renovated
and returned to the family. All around
us are tall trees, bearing witness to her
and Sæmundur’s hard work through the
decades—the family has planted some
75,000 trees on their land. New species
keep appearing. “Willow and birch are
seeding themselves,” says Unnur. Dwarf
birch, fjalldrapi or hrís in Icelandic—after
which the island is named, as it once
covered it—has reappeared. The trees
provide shelter from the cold northern
wind, blowing in straight from the Arctic
Ocean, and when the sun comes out, it
gets hot in the clearing around the house.
It’s easy to see why the mother and
daughter are tanned, though they don’t
spend much time sunbathing. “There’s
enough to do,” says Úlla, smiling. Apart
from maintaining the house and garden,
the forest must be thinned and walking
paths mowed. “The eider nesting season
has just finished,” says Úlla. Eider down,
used by the ducks to line their nests, is a
luxury product and Úlla relies on it for
her income. Unnur, her two brothers and
their families help out with marking the
approximately 2,000 eider nests on their
land, picking the down and giving it a
rough clean.
Hrísey is a paradise for bird watchers.
The island is a bird reserve: no birds can
be hunted there and no eggs picked from
nests. The first organized bird count
took place on Hrísey in 1994 and since
then birds have been counted every ten
years. Of the 37 species that were found
to breed on the island in 2014, 15 have
only appeared since 1950. At the same
time, none of the regular species have
disappeared, although the number of
nesting pairs fluctuates. The ptarmigan
is the island’s emblem bird—numbering
91 pairs in 2014—but the Arctic tern is
the most prominent. “Its numbers have
dropped drastically,” says Úlla. “Twenty
years ago, there were 25,000 pairs of
Arctic terns on the island—25,000! The
bird counters thought they must have
gotten it wrong and counted again.”
Clockwise from top left: Unnur Sæmundsdóttir (left) with her mother, Ulla Knudsen,
at Ystibær, their Hrísey estate; Islanders prefer tractors to cars for transport, especially
the vintage kind; Hrísey has a state-of-the-art outdoor swimming pool;
Wheelbarrows are practical for transporting luggage to the ferry.