Welcome back to Skagen

So I’ve returned to Skagen for another spring season, eager to see what birds I’ll see and what great experiences I’ll have.

I arrived 2 nights ago, and spent the majority of yesterday settling in, remembering names of birding areas, catching up with all the staff at Grå Fyr, seeing what birds were around. Today it was back to normal. Simon led a guided tour of 30 people, the largest we’ve had so far this year. It was a hands on experience, with children and adults helping Simon feed the birds in the garden, and moved on to the lab when we caught a female yellowhammer (gulspurv). Everyone seemed to have a good time.

After this Simon and I spent some time going through some changes in DofBasen on the station computer before he had a meeting at 4’o’clock with Lena and Kurt from the board to discuss the upcoming fuglefestival. I continued to work on the computer with some personal voluntary tasks after this point before cooking a quick dinner for myself.

At 7 Kurt gave a talk in the birders club which was well attended and very enjoyable. Before the talk started I had a chance to catch up with many of the locals I haven’t seen for over half a year which was very nice, still a lot more to catch up with but I’m only two days in! After the meeting Knud Pederson came up to the apartment and we discussed some changes to the reporting of birds on DofBasen and in particular some changes in the reporting of raptors (rovfugle). Simon is off abroad at the weekend, so we spent the rest of the evening going through upcoming tasks and opportunities, and having a quick tournament of shuffleball! I’m looking forward to getting some birding and ringing in over the next few days, and as I’ve not been at Skagen in winter before I’m eager to see how different the bird activity is.