Autumn has officially arrived

A 04:00 alarm marked the beginning of what would turn out to be a long and rewarding day. This was our second session in a row, and we were looking forward to a plentiful catch with Kat who happily joined Anders in answering our endless supply or questions about moult, thanks Kat!! The first round was off to a great start with a young redstart (Rødstjert) and a few whitethroats (Tornsanger). Weirdly enough the following rounds were rather quiet with around 2/3 birds each. After a while we felt the wind change and the air became heavy. A dark cloud was approaching from the south. Since we check the weather forecast more or less hourly it came as a real surprise, fingers were crossed it wasn’t a rainstorm. To our pleasant surprise it was a mist with no rain at all, it passed as quickly as it appeared however, much to our surprise, it caused an uproar in bird activity in the area. Among the many whitethroats we also caught a young pied flycatcher (Broget fluesnapper) and an adult blackbird (Solsort) which officially marked the beginning of autumn!

As soon as we returned back to the station, after a quick lunch, Christina and I joined Kat as she set off to do some tests on the radio telemetry receiver. She also made sure to give us a quick tutorial on field repairs on the receiver so that we could carry out minor adjustments with her remote support. For us it was really exciting to find out how this amazing piece of kit works.

After that Flemming asked me to give the café a hand which and I was really happy to help. Everyone there works so hard, their days are easily longer that 12 hours! For me it was fun to see how the café runs and it also made me feel like home since I have been working in a similar café part-time for over a year and a half and I honestly missed it.

In the afternoon Christina and I made some preparations for the weekly toad tour at 23:00, which I followed up with my daily swim in Kattegat. That water had been a great temperature the previous couple of days however I feel the need to say today was noticeably colder. It took some getting used to however after a few minutes it felt amazing. Cold water has such a cleansing power on the mind and body, simply solves so many problems.

Ringing (Fyrhaven):

Tornsanger – 12

Rødstjert – 1

Sollsort – 1

Gulbug – 1

Gærdesanger – 6

Tornsanger – 12

Munk – 6

Gransanger – 3

Broget Fluesnapper – 1

Lille Gråsisken – 1

 Total: 44

Folk: Simon S Christiansen, Martin Y. Georgiev, Christina Ninou, Anders Odd Wulff Nielsen, Karen Klein, Peter Jensen, Mathilda Jensen, Oscar Jensen, Katherine Snell, Knud Pedersen, Heidi Vibe Frederiksen.