Despite Unhelpful Winds

Because of the stronger northwesterly winds today, we thought about whether or not to go ringing in the morning, but then decided to try at least. It was Alix and me at Kabeltromlen, and in the beginning the conditions weren’t too bad, so we could open 19 out of the 26 nets which was even better than expected. (Later on we had to reduce to 13 nets.) These nets however stayed mostly empty over the course of the following hours as we only caught four birds in total this morning.

One of the three Chiffchaffs (Gransanger) we've ringed today. This one we found interesting because of its rather pale legs.

But we did have a really good highlight nevertheless: One of the two Black-winged Kites (Blå Glente) that arrived in the area yesterday turned up pretty close to Kabeltromlen and was spotted first by a very young and keen birder. For a while we had the great opportunity to observe the bird gliding and hovering as it was looking for prey in the heathlands and dunes. At 08:30 we had to close all nets earlier than usual since the winds had increased.

Black-winged Kite (Blå Glente). Photo by Erik Christophersen.

János, Dylan, Saxe, Anne and Alvin were observing and counting from Grenen today, where the cold northerlies blew straight into their faces. Although they didn’t have that many birds either and only very few passerines moved because of the weather conditions, there were some nice sightings, and especially Anne enjoyed watching the seabird migration (and the sea by its self). For example they had several Fulmars (Mallemuk), the first Whimbrel (Småspove) of the spring, one Great Skua (Storkjove) and a group of White-beaked Dolphins (Hvidnæse) very close.
After coming home again, we all needed some rest, many of us haven’t had a nap in days. Since I wanted to do some data entry first, I was the last of us to go for a nap, from which I was woken up by Simon an hour later, who wanted to give us a session about skull ossification in birds. This refers to the development of the skull in juvenile birds, which can be a way of ageing them mainly in autumn. We’ve also had the opportunity to take a look at some examples in the lab, which we all found highly interesting. With the feeling of having learned a lot we then opened the moth trap just to discover another highlight of the day: A Conformist (Rødelugle, Lithophane furcifera), a small, bark-coloured moth of which we couldn’t find any former records for Skagen.

Lithophane furcifera in neutral and natural environment.

Anne and Bjarne spent their afternoon mainly with biking around the area and enjoying the landscape on their last day here. They also went out to the tip at Grenen, where Anne met a former colleague by a funny coincidence. At the station after our evening meeting, we celebrated the great sightings yesterday with some champaign brought by Simon. Skål! To many more amazing observations! Then Anne and Bjarne said goodbye to us, they’ll be leaving tomorrow morning. We hope they had a pleasant and interesting stay rich of fascinating birds!

People: Alvin Johansson, János Schadl, Alix Bortolussi, Julian Helbig, Dylan Daunt, Simon S. Christiansen, Saxe Lind Christiansen, Anne & Bjarne