Jurmo

I arrived in Jurmo on a May morning with binoculars and a sleeping bag, which is approximately the correct equipment for the island. The ferry from Kökar ran three times a week then, and getting the schedule wrong meant an extra two days. I had timed it right, but only barely, and by the time the small boat rounded the final skerry and the dock appeared — a simple wooden structure with three herring boats tied up and a hand-lettered sign that said nothing more than JURMO — I was ready to be somewhere specific and stay there.

Jurmo is the kind of place that cartographers label with a dot and nothing else. The island has around fifteen permanent residents in summer and fewer in winter; the exact number fluctuates with births, deaths, and decisions made at the mainland. There is no hotel and no restaurant and the only accommodation is a small guesthouse run by a woman named Anna who serves breakfast at seven and expects you to sort yourself out for the rest of the day. The breakfast was excellent: dark bread, butter from somewhere nearby, Baltic herring in an honest dill marinade, strong coffee. She handed it to me with the brisk efficiency of someone who has been feeding strangers since before I was born.

The birds are the reason to come, specifically in May when the spring migration pushes through the outer archipelago in concentrated streams. Jurmo sits directly on one of the Baltic’s main raptor corridors, and on a good May morning the sky above the island holds an inventory of birds of prey that would take a dedicated birder several continents to compile otherwise: rough-legged buzzards and common buzzards and sparrowhawks and marsh harriers and, if the wind is from the right direction and you stand in the right spot, an occasional short-toed eagle or an osprey making the crossing from Africa to Scandinavia. I am not a dedicated birder, but I spent two hours watching a concentration of perhaps two hundred buzzards kettling on a thermal above the southern tip of the island, and it recalibrated something in my understanding of where I was in the world.

The island itself is all flat rock and low-growing vegetation — crowberry, lingonberry, wind-pressed juniper that grows horizontal rather than vertical, patches of reindeer lichen covering the granites in grey-white. The highest point is maybe five meters above sea level. The sea, consequently, is everywhere in the peripheral vision, present in all directions, and the sound of it is constant. I walked the entire island in an afternoon and found: one small wooden chapel painted red with a bell that had been rung by fishermen returning safely from sea for three hundred years, one storage shed, one stack of lobster pots, and the kind of emptiness that doesn’t feel empty but full — full of wind and bird calls and the light that comes off Baltic water at this latitude in May.

On my second evening, Anna cooked fish she had bought from one of the boats that came in that afternoon — pike-perch fried in butter with potatoes and a sauce made from cream and dill. The four other guests that night were all Finnish birdwatchers who had been coming to Jurmo in May for twenty years. They had notebooks with sightings dating back to the nineties. They argued quietly about whether a distant silhouette had been a black kite. I drank coffee and listened and went to bed when the sun finally went down, which was after half past ten.

When to go: May for the migration — specifically the first three weeks of May when the raptor movement is at its peak. Late June and July offer the longest days, swimming from the smooth outer rocks, and complete solitude if you time it outside the Finnish summer holidays. The island essentially closes in winter — ferry schedules reduce to almost nothing and Anna’s guesthouse shuts in October.