My name is Bjørn Penk, and I am a Norwegian (and half-American) designer, artist and birder residing in Reykjavík, the capital of Iceland.

After graduating from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design with a Master’s Degree, strong southeasterly winds pushed me to the distant shores of this new country with promises of opportunity and love. Arriving late at night, my first encounter with an Icelandic bird species was a Red-throated Diver (Gavia stellata) calling outside my bedroom window the following morning of my arrival. Best alarm clock ever. Birding, bird photography and bird recording became my way of learning Iceland and its birds, and now I want to share it with others as a birding guide.

My interest in birds goes way back, and started with a single event, like for many of us. Many years ago, on a Saturday during early spring, I was kindly asked if I wanted to join my mother and younger brother, as they were headed to a local and public birding event just outside of Oslo in Norway. Tawny owls and chicks were going to be ringed, and being the unruly and irritable teenager I was, some convincing was needed. After some bargaining, I eventually decided to participate.

Little did I know when joining the Tawny Owl event, that it would be the first moment of what later became a complete attention-shift towards the world of birds, coincidentally taking me across the world in search of them.

Today, birdlife is represented in many ways in my life. I am the columnist for the Birding Column in newspaper The Reykjavik Grapevine, I am project manager in the cross-disciplinary bird-project Migrational Practices, I find ways to involve birds in my artistic works, and I use the competencies I’ve learned in education to actively experiment with creating new ways of connecting birds and people.

Excerpt from A Field Guide to Hardcore Birding, featured in The Reykjavík Grapevine, autumn 2025

“I’ve been lucky enough to find my place amongst the “daginns”, the WhatsApp notifications, and the twinkling eyes of my new friends in the Icelandic portion of the global birding community. And trust me, as a newcomer, there’s no greater incentive to learn the language than when Icelandic hardcore birders whisper the location of a rarity in their mother tongue while we’re all peering at the same small brown bird in a big green hedgerow. There’s a reason my first words in Icelandic were prepositions.”