Water rails have fledged

This morning we went ringing as usual. The night was not quite as long as the night before, so we actually did sleep before getting up at 2.30 again. However, it was a late night nonetheless, quite unexpectedly since we were all really tired  from the long nightjar night. But at dinner Simon informed us that somebody had reported an injured Gannet (Sule) on North Beach. It was ringed and he wanted us to catch it to be able to read the ring and if necessary take the bird to a rehabilitation center.

Amandine and I went with our guests Jesper and Anne went to the beach to catch the poor bird. After a short search we found the bird. We came up with a strategy to catch it but we did not know how mobile the bird was. So at the first try we failed quite badly, since the bird managed to escape into the water between Amandine and me. It swam only for a short time and then came back to the beach, also showing that it must be in rally bad shape. The second time we were better prepared, came from deeper in the water and managed to catch it quickly. Once we had the bird we saw the damage: it had a broken lower mandible. Clearly it couldn’t feed any more. This might have happened when the bird tried to catch a fish that was caught in a fisherman’s net. The bird was full of insects and it was clear that it was not going to survive left on its own so we called wildlife rescue. Unfortunately they could only tell that an adult bird like this with a broken bill could not be fed (and we did experience how vicious it was when we needed two people to hold it), so he advised us to kill the bird to not let it suffer any longer.  Jesper was so kind and do that for us as none of the women wanted to take care of that. We did admire its long, beautiful wings, though. It is such an elegant bird which makes it even harder to see it die this way.

On the plus side: we were able to report the ring to London and hope to hear soon how old this bird was and where it was born. We will keep you updated.

On the brighter side of life we had a nice sunrise again in the morning and opened the nets to a very warm day. Compared to yesterday the ringing was quite slow but nonetheless brought us some very interesting species. The biggest surprise of the day was a nuthatch (spætmejse). Some were seen to pass through on migration – probably first-year birds on juvenile dispersal and one of them ended up in our nets. We do not normally catch this species, so we were very excited about it.

Another really nice bird was the water rail (vandrikse). We know that the species was nesting close to our nets because we heard them every morning. We also set out traps for many days specifically to catch the rails, however, it never succeeded. All the water rails we caught were caught in the nets. Today we caught a juvenile which, obviously, was already able to fly very well. The weird sounds that they make are misleading: they are actually very pretty birds.

For the rest we did not catch anything special, just the local and regional breeding birds. We are getting more and more juvenile birds in the nests now, so it is really nice for us to see every day a new species has fledged. Today we caught a juvenile chiffchaff (gransanger) and a blue tit (blåmejse) – next to the already known lesser whitehtroats (gærdesanger) and crested tits (topmejse).

In the afternoon we set up the nets at Jennes Sø so that we can do the CES ringing there tomorrow.

Ringmærkning (Kabeltromlen):

Gransanger – Chiffchaff - 2

Munk – Blackcap – 5

Gærdesanger – Lesser Whitethroat – 7

Bogfinke – Chaffinch -  1

Vandrikse – Water Rail – 1

Blåmejse – Blue Tit – 1

Spætmejse – European Nuthatch – 1

Rørsanger – Reed Warbler – 1

Tornsanger – Common Whitethroat – 2

Sangdrossel – Song Thrush – 1

Topmejse – Crested Tit – 4

Total: 25

People : Martina Hillbrand, Simon S. Christiansen, Frederik R. Johansen, Amandine Doré, Jesper and Anne Sandfeld

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