Observe, eat, clean, repeat

Dear birdwatchers,

As usual, Alice, Hanelie, and I woke up early again to be at Worlds end 3 before sunset. This was the first time for the team to count without Knud. But with all the training we got from him, we worked like a well-oiled machine with Hanelie and Alice focusing on the sea and me on the land. The day started again with big flocks of jackdaws “allike” but today the hooded crows “gråkrage” were present too with almost 1000 individuals migrating to Sweden. The weather was cloudier and colder than the previous days and that was clearly not appreciated by the siskins. As many siskins “Grønsisken” migrated northeast last week, they started to return today. After three hours, the migration stopped almost completely and we decided to call it a day. We took an alternative route to return to the station and visited the ringing spot where we will spend many hours next months.

In the meantime, Marion had a relaxing start of her day. She helped us with entering the data and continued working on her Masterthesis. As lunch, we first had some tasty banana bread and then an alternative version of chili sin carne with salt chips which was actually much better than nachos. Thereafter, we replaced our birding skills with cleaning skills and made the lighthouse bright and shiny again. Everyone needed some rest after this intense week and we decided to have a chill afternoon. I took a nap and then went to my cameratrap to upload the videos. It was already evening when I arrived and many water rails “vandrikse” made their last calls of the day. I had no less than 450 videos in two days! Unfortunately, the wind pretended to be an animal and triggered the trap every minute.

When I came back at the station, Esben had arrived after working a whole day for the Raptor GPS project. Because he is still here, Marion and Hanelie could go nightcatching with him. They didn’t catch anything but a fake pigeon. We had a nice dinner prepared by Alice and prepared our plans for tomorrow.

Next week, it’s going to be the four of us most of the time because Simon went to Germany for a week. Luckily, we can welcome some new guests tomorrow and Monday, a (new) friend of mine is joining the team for three days. No day is dull here!

I hope you all had a lovely Saturday with better birding weather than we had.

Observations of the day in DOFbasn from observers in the area

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

Robbe

People : Esben E. Hansen, Robbe Cool, Hanelie Sidhu, Marion L'Huillier-Hunsinger and Alice Scalzo