A goodbye present

Hi everyone!

Like all good things, also the stay of the last spring-team volunteers comes to an end. To celebrate for one last time together, we four volunteers, Mette and my family (who is visiting right now) went to watch the football match between Denmark and Germany. After a short period the game was stopped due to a thunderstorm. In the meanwhile, the weather in Skagen was great so we used the break to go on top of the lighthouse for one last time. The view was beautiful!

Afterwards the match continued. There were some close off-sides, which kept it tensioned until the german team did, what Isis and I hoped, they will do – they scored a goal! Finally, they won. The disappointment from our danish fans flew away quickly and we continued our party with some beers, music and good mood until 01:30 am.

 

While we were watching the game, Lisa had a guided tour at Sandmilen. Two adults joined with three childreen to hear, see and learn about Nightjars (Natravn). It was super succesfull – the nightjars showed up well, so they could see them flying and sitting. The highlight was one, clapping its wings. It is a great species and I am sure, this amazed not just the childreen.

After a long sleep I woke up and decided to take a shower. While undressing me, Simon Sr. called. For a second I was not sure if I should take the call or ignore it, but I took it. This was the right decision, because he told me that the Rosy Starling (Rosenstær) at Gyvelmarkerne was seen again.

Séan and I were the only volunteers awake and Lars had two seats free, so we directly left. A few minutes later we arrived at the spot and there it was: my first Rosy Starling (Rosenstær)!!! The beautiful adult bird was foraging with Common Starlings on the ground of the wet field. It was super good to see, but unfortunately it disappeared soon after. Later Lucas arrived and also got a short glimpse of the bird.

Thanks to Werner Larsson, that we can show you his great pictures of the bird here!! He also got one in flight:

Simon Sr. even managed to get a sound recording of its higher pitched call:

That’s cool, isn’t it?

At Gyvelmarkerne we met some Locals, who became good friends over the season. It was a good opportunity to say goodbye to them. Knud told us, that the Pigeon we gave to him yesterday is doing well and started feeding, after being very tired yesterday. That’s good news!

In the noon, my family and I went to Skagen Bakery, since they did not know the typical danish Strawberry Cake. They – me included – really enjoyed it. This bakery is great!

Back at the station Seán had a session about the ageing of Common Whitethroats (Tornsanger). This was very helpful. We already learned much about the species during ringing in spring, but now in summer ageing gets more difficult, since the feature are less visible due to incresingly worn feathers. It is always fun to discuss ageing of birds, because it helps you a lot to improve your skills.

Then Simon Sr. and I had my final talk. We reflected the season and thought about ways to improve the station life. In my opinon this Fuglestation is already a fantastic place and it is really nice, that it is „alive“ and open for new ideas. Since it is the last complete day for me here, I had to finish some tasks, we cleaned the apartment and Seán wrote into the Guest Book. Nice new guests arrived and we had our last evening meeting with them. We just finished a nice dinner and in twenty minutes, we bring Isis to the train station. It feels so weird to leave soon.

Isis on her way to the train on her migration to Canada with stops in Belgium and Panama. Have a really good trip!

Those are the last words, I will write here for now. My time at Skagen Fuglestation is over, but I’m sure I will be back! After 8,5 months at this place it is time to go back to normal life, to study and deal with „normal human stuff“. Looking back on this time, there are many great birds to remember. Super rare birds like Sandhill Crane (Prærietrane), Steppe Eagle (SteppeØrn) or my best ever selffound (together with Hans) – Denmark’s first ever Eastern Yellow Wagtail (Østlig Gul Vipstjert). Rare birds in the hand like Blyth’s Pipit (Mongolskpiber), Great Snipe (Tradækker) and European Stormpetrel (Lille Stormsvale). Super pretty birds like the adult male Pallid Harriers (Steppehøg) or the Citrine Wagtail (Citronenvipstjert). Nature events like Nothern lights. Pretty birds in hand like Greenish Warbler (Lundsanger) and Short-eared Owl (Mosehornugle). All those amazing memories would not be the same without one factor – the amazing (!) people at the Bird Observatory! Thanks to all the volunteers I could spend short or long time together, thanks to the locals and thanks to Simon Sr. for your great job - you make all this fun possible! Sharing those great birds and moments with you was the best! I can’t wait to see you all again, whereever that will be!

Wow, this was enough sentimentally – to end my last blog here I will share some of my humour with you: Pranks we did to Simon Sr. (and some of them he did not even notice them yet):

The Hayley-has-the-stay-in-Sweden-prank:

When coming back from Sweden, we told everyone that Hayley got arrested in Sweden, based on a misleading video. Magnus and Seán fell for it and were ready to go to Sweden to pick her up.

The Easter-prank:

For Easter Simon Sr. hid five easter sweets in the lighthouse garden – one for each of us. We found all of them, but when he asked, if we found all of them, we answered „Yeah, we’ve got all six“. Even a week later he told us, that he could not remember to put six sweets in the garden.

The Rubber-Duck-prank:

I installed a „virus“ on Magnus’s and the stations laptop, which replaces some of the pictures in the web browser with pictures of rubber ducks. When scrolling through dofbasen, facebook or instragram, there were always rubber ducks. Always! This was a big laugh and some people (Magnus) did believe that it is a real virus for longer than a week.

The Label-prank:

We labeled several things in the apartment. Including one, the stations head will never find, but the volunteers see every day. A tradition to be continued by the next volunteers.

The Can’t-come-through-the-door-prank:

One day when Simon Sr. arrived Magnus put a chair on the inside of the door, so when Simon unlocked it with the keychip, he could not open it. Due to the construction of the doorhandle you could still press it down (so you could not feel that the chair was blocking the doorhandle on the other side) but not open the door. When we took the chair away at some point, Simon finally made his way into the apartment. Instead of believing our comment „probably just the keypad did not work“, he took the conclusion „this door is definitly broken“, went to the aethic quickly, took some tools and started unscrewing the door. When we repeated this prank later, Simon noticed that the not-working doors might be caused by us – with this he was completely right!

Skifta! 

 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, Simon Kiesé, Linda and Jeppe Rørbæk, Lars Bo, Lisa Vergin and Simon S. Christiansen.