The wind is blowing and the waves growing.

Today was one of those typical autumn days with strong winds, rain and low temperatures. With these conditions, bird ringing is not possible, and the majority of the team was forced to remain indoors. Being indoors gave us a great opportunity for desk-based tasks. I spent half of the afternoon arranging and classifying the pictures taken in the field from the last 4 days. 

Some birds are very difficult to age or even distinguish to other similar species, that is why taking pictures from different parts of the bird helps us to learn and share this knowledge with others. Also, these pictures produce a great database that in the future could be used for research, showing for example how moult limit varies between different countries or over time.
Christina used the time to work on her presentation for the next week and kindly volunteered to wash the bird bags. Keeping the bird bags clean is a very important task because helps to minimize the transmission of infections between birds. She also did some administrative task like printing new ringing sheets and laminating others to protect them from the rain. She also delighted us with amazing home-made cookies. 

Chris has been doing a lot of literature review about neotropical birds from the Amazon where we works and together we also worked on a couple of grants applications for my PhD project.
Martin was the only one brave enough to go out for seabird counting. Two little auks (Søkongen) passed very close to him. The numbers of razorbills (Alk) are decreasing but still, he counted 2800 individuals, on the other hand, common guillemot (Lomvien) numbers are getting higher and today were counted 300 also 638 kittiwakes (Ride). Knud and Martin played this game in guessing how many guillemots (Lomvien) were in a single flock but Knud is always the winner. In the afternoon Martin tried to spot some petrels (Stormsvale) from the lighthouse with luck.

Simon and Amelie were back today from their training on blackbird tagging, they will be sharing all the information the following days.

Night cathing wasn’t very productive last night but the weather and temperatures were very pleasant.

Klik her for at se dagens observationer indtastet i Dofbasen af observatører i området