When strong winds come from the south

There are two places that I combine directly with Skagen. One is called Kabeltrommlen, or in short: KAB, where we are doing scientific bird ringing every day, except when there is rain or very strong wind. Also today, it was very much on the edge of whether we could go out ringing, but it was still okay...

With strong wind, of course, we can’t open all the nets. Some of the nets are just not sheltered enough from the wind, but these nets are then good when we don’t have wind. So there are advantages and disadvantages to them...

But back to the ringing: They didn’t catch many birds today, but they still had some nice ones. Jule always enjoys ringing Blackbirds (Solsort), so she, but also the others, were happy to see this bird. The second highlight must have been the Garden Warbler (Havesanger). This long-distance migrant could already be one of the last ones for the season, because most of them are already on their long way south.

And there is the second place, which comes directly to my mind when I’m thinking about Skagen: It’s Worlds End 3, the place where we are doing the migration count every day. And with the autumn migration, it’s becoming more and more interesting up here. I have to mention quickly our awesome observation of the Sabine’s Gull (Sabinemåge) yesterday again. It was one of the species I’ve wished to see and it already worked! So hopefully there are more of these nice birds coming over the next few days.

One of the now somehow everyday good birds is definitely the Long-tailed Skua (Lille Kjove), of which we got five again today. Almost all of these birds were more or less stationary today, which allowed Alfred and Knud to get some pictures down at the beach.

1K intermediate Long-tailed Skua. Picture by Alfred Godsk Geckler

As Alfred searched for the Skuas at the beach, he just found a very close swimming Red-throated Diver (Rødstrubet Lom). He then started taking pictures of that bird, and while doing so, he noticed that the bird had a yellow colour ring! How awesome!

There aren’t many colour-ringing projects for this species, and that bird, which was ringed in a Finnish project, is only one of around 200 birds! And then, what a coincidence that it worked to read that ring on a diver while it was swimming.

Here you can see how he managed to read the ring:

Adult Red-throated Diver (Rødstrubet Lom) close to the shore (you can already see the yellow ring on the right under the water).

And here is the ring with the code!

And now I hope that you all remembered from my last blog post what DLN means, what we are doing after the count and ringing. Yes! You remembered right! It’s Data entry, Lunch and Napping!

But today was also picture archive day, so all of us also spent a bit of time archiving pictures we had taken in the field. But with all these data-entry tasks, you can really feel that your feet are sending you a signal to go out again.

And Jule took this signal seriously and went out to Batteriskoven to look for some passerines. But with the wind, the birds didn’t want to move or call either, so there wasn’t a lot happening.

In the evening, we had our proper evening meeting, and Pauline prepared us a delicious dinner and made cinnamon rolls again for dessert!

And for now, with dinner and cinnamon rolls in our stomachs, it got quieter and quieter at the station. The only thing you can hear here now, apart from the waves outside, is me writing the last sentence of this blog post...

tip, tipp, tipp...

Ringing Kabeltrommlen:

Total: 8

Ringing Jennes Sø (Michael Ancher):

Blåmejse 1
Rødhals 1
Lille Gråsisken 26
Musvit 1
Gransanger 2
Jernspurv 1

Highlights from the Observations:

Long-tailed Skua (Lille Kjove)-4

colour ringed Red-throated Diver (Rødstrubet Lom)-1