As sweet as the volunteers

And with this blog title it should be obvious, what the daily blog should be related to: cake!

If there is one thing, we volunteers love even more than birds, it is cake!

Strawberry cake, chocolate cake, we are very tolerant for all the variety of cake, but if you want to do us a favor, you know how to do it now. 

Finally, it should be a good day for cake migration. At the cake count at pie end 1 there were not many birds at all, but a Great Nothern Cake - ehm Diver - (Islom) in breeding plumage (with whip creme) passed by and gave nice views. Still hungry we continued the count at Kabeltromlen, because a rare cake was caught in the nets. Jørgen Hulbæk visited us and brought a good cake, this made the low numbers in the count very acceptable. In the meanwhile, the ringers - ehm bakers - were following the recipie and doing net checks. There were more birds than yesterday including one Spotted Flycatcher (Grå Fluesnapper) and a very pretty Marsh Warbler (Kærsanger). 

The cherry on the cake should follow soon: a Red-breasted Flycatcher (Lille Fluesnapper). Look at this cuty:

It is already the second one, we could ring this year. The white pattern and the small size are very characteristis in this species. A fun thing was that is had a pronounced brood patch. Not because it's breeding but brood patch is among some species developed homonally when the breeding period comes.

Brood Patch on the Red-breasted Flycatcher 

After taking a nap, the afternoon started the same for everyone of us: doing data entry and getting up to date with all the administrative tasks, so we do not have to do them on the hopefully more busy next days. I worked on the quality check of our entered data. This is a very important task and it gives you a nice overview about the data we collect in the counts.

Then it was time to celebrate - the Lesser Kestrel (Lille Tårnfalk), Isis birthday and maybe even Jørgen Hulbæks birthday again?

For this Simon Sr. brought Champagne and the typical danish Strawberry Cake (it is amazing!!). It was very nice and the mood is like always - in contrast to our amount of sleep - on a high level. 

From Sweden we recived a picture from the Chairman of the Board of our Bird Observatory; Niels Eriksen. He is right now on Öland visiting our friends at Ottenby Bird Observatory. We hope you have a nice trip there!

Niels Eriksen at Ottenby Bird Observatory on the southern point of Öland, Sweden.

Ringing (Kabeltromlekrattet):

Total: 19

A link to today's observations from volunteers and local observers.

Sum of observations of raptors on DOFbasen from today.

People: Seán Walsh, Hayley Land, Isis Khalil, Magnus Houen Lauritsen, Simon Kiesé, Simon S. Christiansen, Jørgen Hulbæk, Jørn and Marianne.