OK day - orchid day

...but why is it just a OK day and not a good day? This should be answered in this blog post.

After watching football last night, I set my alarm at 6:50 am. Unexpectedly, it was not my alarm waking me up, but it was Séan, who told me that it is already 8! Half a minute later Knud called me, that he is downstairs, ready to pick us up - I just replied "We'll be there in a minute", jumped out of the bed and took on some clothes. Ten minutes later we sat in the car towards Hulsig Hede.

Our goal was counting Orchids. It was actually really fun and we counted around 2000 individuals of the three target species. Look at this beauty:

Then, the message came, that a Short-toed Eagle (Slangeørn) is over Skagen. After the first thought "why does it have to turn up the first second we leave Skagen", we realized that Hulsig is a good raptor spot, too, so we could get the bird as soon as it returns. The mood in the warm sunny weather was good:

Unfortunately, the rare Eagle returned along the Skagerak coastline, so we missed it on its way back southwest. This was a bit sad, but we still enjoyed views on some Honey Buzzards (Hvepsevåge) and even a Goshawk (Duehøg) showed up.

After finishing the work without spotting any rare raptors, we headed back to the station to eat a well earned lunch - or for me who had to hurry this morning a breakfast. Being back in Skagen did not help us to see the rare birds neither: first a Black Stork (Sort Stork) was found south of town and already returning and then Alex found a Lesser Spotted Eagle (Lille Skrigørn). Also this bird was first seen far south and heading southwest away from us, so we did not have any chance to see it. That's a bit unfortunate, but it is a good opportunity to remind yourself, that you should be happy about that, what you have and that you should never be sad about something you don't have. In anyway - even this philosophy did not really help, so I had to eat some chocolate to get into a better mood. ;-)

Congrats to Alex, who also managed to get really good pictures of the Lesser Spotted Eagle. They are so good, that he could even read its color ring!! Look at Alex Sand Frich's awesome photo here:

In the afternoon, Simon Sr. came around and we discussed the ageing of some birds, we took pictures of in the ringing recently. This is always super good to learn now stuff and improve your ageing skills. We also looked up ageing of Nightjars, since we try to catch some tonight in the area. Hopefully you will read about our sucess in Lucas's blog tomorrow.

Since the weather looks even better tomorrow, we hope that there will be some good birds again. So we will be out and hope that our "bad luck" from today turns into good luck. We take, what we get. Keep your eyes open for big raptors!

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

Sum of observations of raptors on DOFbasen from today.

People: Isis Khalil, Seán Walsh, Lucas Corneliussen, Magnus Houen Lauritsen and Simon Kiesé, Simon S. Christianen, Lars Bo Jacobsen, Knud Pedersen, Alex Sand Frich