"Lagom" birds

I think Sarah, Gabriel and I were feeling slightly nervous but excited this morning as we arrived at Kabeltromlen, wondering if today would be just as busy with birds as on Monday. It was a little windier than expected but we could still have more than half of the nets open and had a "lagom" amount of birds, which we learnt from Gabriel means the perfect amount of something. There were not too many were retraps from Monday’s big day so it seems many of those birds have moved on and continued their migration perhaps. It was lovely and sunny but also the big (almost) full moon was lovely to see.

 

Fieldfare (Sjagger) - Adult male

My favourite bird of the day is definitely the Fieldfare (Sjagger), the first of the Autumn and a beautiful adult male! When I searched for a fact about Fieldfare to share with you, the following one stood out to me: When threatened by crows or birds of prey, fieldfares often mob the intruder as a flock and bomb it with droppings, as a defence strategy. They can aim quite well and their sticky poo can interfere with the predator’s feathers forcing it to retreat. How clever!

But the bird of the day overall has to be the Bullfinch (Dompap), of which we had individuals from both the Northern and Southern subspecies (Lille and Stor). It was a great learning opportunity for us comparing them side-by-side and we were all surprised by the much larger size of the Stor subspecies.

A young female Yellowhammer (Gulspurv) from this morning's ringing

The observers (Florian and Miles) also had a decent morning at World End 3, with lots of Alcids, 198 Guillemots (Lomvi)/Razorbills (Alk) in total! They spotted 5 Horned Lark (Bjerglærke) and a Grey Wagtail (Bjergvipstjert) on the beach, and had a nice group of 25 Twite (Bjergirisk) hanging around the dunes area. It was also nice to see lots of Geese flying over, mostly Pink-footed Geese (Kortnæbbet Gås), but also some Greylag (Grågås) and Brent Geese (Knortegås).

We all came home and then Sarah, Miles and I went for a quick dip in the sea where a Guillemot came swimming right past us only few metres away! Sarah and Gabriel then cooked us a lovely lunch of traditional Scottish Tatti Scones made from leftover potato mash from yesterday’s dinner, they looked smelled delicious. Fueled up by the potatoes, we all sat on the sofa and locked in for several hours of data entry. We have now finally finished entering all the ringing data from our big day on Monday (742 new birds!) and you can find the breakdown of the totals on Monday’s blog linked here.

Sunset from the lightouse before our nightcatching attempt.

We had a brilliant takeaway pizza dinner (thank you to Lars Bo!) and decided to try and go night catching again this evening. Gabriel, Sarah, Miles and I ventured out onto the dark beach but unfortunately all we could find was a Wheatear that kept running away from us, and some rabbits hopping about between the grass tufts. We then tried a marshy area near Ellekratet and spotted several Common Snipe (Dobbeltbekkasin) but they're quite flighty birds compared to Jack Snipe (Enkeltbekkasin) so we weren't successful this time. Whilst we were scanning with the thermal we did spot a creature which, at first we thought was a pig, then maybe a wolf, then maybe a racoon dog, then perhaps a hyena, and then finally settled back to thinking it was a pig. We went though a rollercoaster of emotions whilst we looked through the thermal trying to figure it out! BUT, despite our failed mission, it was a very fun evening with the team, full of laughter, and I think we're all motivated to try some nightcatching again soon.

Ringing (Kabeltromlen):

Sjagger 1

Vindrossel 3

Gulspurv 1

Gærdesmutte 24

Rødhals 9

Grønsisken 1

Kvækerfinke 4

Stor Dompap 6

Lille Dompap 1

Dompap 3

Blåmejse 7

Munk 5

Bogfinke 2

Træløber 3

Gransanger 5

Fuglekonge 22

Total new birds: 97

 

Highlights from today’s observations at Worlds End 3:

Long-tailed Duck 1

Caspian Gull 8

Pink-footed Goose 128

Hen Harrier 1

Horned Lark 5

Today’s observations from the area can be found here

People: Gabriel Axelsson, Florian Hatt, Sarah Partridge, Amira Nuseibeh, Miles Scheuering, Simon S. Christiansen, Gunnar S. Simonsen, and Lars Bo Jacobsen.