What is that?

This question will be answered in a few seconds, but before that I have to tell you about yesterday evening. Isis and I went out nightcatching to Grenen. Unfortunetely, we did not find any birds. In anyway some sleeping Seals (Sæl) and a cute Yellow-necked Mouse (Halsbåndmus – Apodemus flavicollis) were nice to see. When we looked into the sky, a weak greenish shine colored the sky between the clouds: aurora (Nothern Lights)! We continued round round and I finally spotted a Woddcock (Skovsneppe) in the thermal camera. It was Isis’s first attemp with the handnet, but she nailed it so a few seconds later we hold the bird in our hand and walked back to ring it.

Such a cool bird: look at it's eyes, which can look 360 degree around.

The only bad thing about this evening was, that I lost one of the torches. Spoiler – I found it again the next day and it still works.

Finally, the question „What is that?“ will be answered! It’s the sun! When we left the station to head to World’s End 3 for the daily count, we saw a warm colored, shiny object coming out of the sea and rising at the sky. After some discussions and a look into the field guide we agreed, that it must be the sun, we have not seen for a while. What a beautiful morning!

The mystery is solved - it's the sun!

The count started busy, since there were many Razorbills (Auk) and Guillemots (Lomvie) migrating. While Magnus was focussed on getting good numbers of those, the other volunteers (including me) counted the various remaining species.

Nice view from World's End 3. In this hour Magnus focussed on the Auks in Kattegat.

It was a nice mix of songbird migration and seabirds (havfugle), quantity and quality. Since they are super hard to see back home in Germany, I really hoped to get the chance to see a Iceland Gull (Hvidvinget Måge) in Skagen. When I spotted a young gull in the size of a Common Gull (Stormmåge) with shining through white primaries I directly knew that it has to be this species. Yeah! Unfortunately, it was quite far away, so I’m still hoping there will be a roosting one soon. The second highlight of the day was much closer: A Shag (Topskarv) showed up in the best sunlight and a short distance. That was really nice to see, since it was also for Mira the first pretty one. Also a Grey Wagtail (Bjergvipstjert) attempted to migrate. Since the wind was pretty cold, we were happy to leave after the standardised four hours to have a nice breakfast in the Bird Obs.

In the afternoon, Johanna and I entered the numbers from the count in dofbasen. Afterwards Simon Sr. showed us the plans, the station has this year. There are some exciting projects and there will be many highlights, but I don’t want to look to far in the future right now, because every day here is a lot of fun right now. Then we went for a walk to Nordstrand. The beach was super pretty in the afternoon sunshine and we looked for stones, shells and other potentially interesting objects close to shore. It was a really nice walk.

When we passed Kabeltromlen on the way back, we stopped in hope to hear a Bittern (Rørdrum) but except for calling Waterrails (Vandriksen) we could not hear any birds in the wind. So I tried to immitate the deep call of a Bittern. Just one moment later a real Bittern called. How cool is that?! Let’s just believe, it really answered to me for a moment. Don’t steel me my imagination. ;-) Isis prepared a nice dinner and afterwards we started with some nice evening activities. I’m really happy to be back at the station. It is just a beautiful place and there are so many nice people around. I really enjoy to see good friends again, but it’s also great to meet new awesome people. You can see – I’m ready for a super fun exciting season!

Today’s observations in Dofbasen from observers in the area.

People: Johanna Veentjer, Mira Kieckbusch, Isis Khalil, Magnus Houen Lauritsen, Simon Kiesé, Simon S. Christiansen.