A new Nordstrand record

Dear blog readers,

The more productive the day, the shorter the blog. And that is exactly what happened today. This morning we finally started to see big amounts of passerines migrating along Nordstrand. The first hours, I was clicking all the individual birds which started to hurt my fingers. Luckily, Eric had the wise idea to click for every ten birds. This saved my fingers from hurting more because we ended up with more than 10.000 birds, mainly siskens "grønsisken", chaffinches "bogfinke", wood pigeons "ringdue", hooded crows "råkrage", and jackdaws "allike". I got good help from Alice too who assisted me with the bigger land birds. Hanelie took care of the seabirds but except for the swans, it was not worth it.

Already early in the morning, the first woodlarks "Hedelærke" entertained us with their lyric flight call. Eric told us that the Nordstrand record was around 25 and this motivated us to set a new record. In no time, we reached more than 20 woodlarks but they didn’t stop flying. I counted one hour extra to set the ultimate record and we ticked the clock off with no less than 109 individuals!

When I got back to the station, the girls were already cleaning the whole station for which I was very thankful. ;) We had a nice lunch with leftovers of some good meals of the last week and the afternoon started with two challenges: uploading the observations and analyzing flight calls of this successful morning. After the last meeting we had with Simon and after I read the book “The sound approach to birding”, we were quite ready to see what the different flight calls look like. It was really interesting and informative. I focused on the calls of the crossbills. Although we only found red crossbills "Lille korsnæb" on the recorder, we found two different call types of this species. After this intensive birding morning and noon, I started to clean too, while Marion and Hanelie were sleeping. Alice gave the woodlarks a special place in her sketchbook and when she was ready, we tried to see the golden eagle again. Unfortunately, luck was not on our side. A curious coal tit "sortmejse" came to see what we were doing and sang his song at the top of his lungs. We returned in the evening sun to the station to welcome our two new guests. Now Marion is in a hurry to prepare a delicious meal because later this evening, Simon arrives. He’ll bring us to Nordstrand because we might see the Northern light this evening. Tomorrow, you will find out if we saw it. It’s going to be a good migration day again so maybe; we can break our new record again!

People: Erik Christophersen,  Robbe Cool, Hanelie Sidhu, Alice Scalzo, Marion L'Huillier-Hunsinger

Sum of the Raptors in the area based on observations typed into Dofbasen the same day

Today’s observations in Dofbasen from observers in the area