Heldagsringmærkning

Vejr: mest skyet med byger. Jævn til frisk vind fra omkring vest, og temp. omkring 11 grader. God sigt.

Morgenen begyndte tør, men halvvejs igennem måtte vi (Thyge og jeg) afbryde da en vedvarende byge fra vest besværliggjorde observationen for meget idet vi fik regnen lige i hovedet, og sigten blev forringet betydeligt. Inden afbrydelsen havde vi dog enkelte alkefugle, lommer og sortænder. 3 havlitter kom trækkende i revet, og en toppet lappedykker kom trækkende i brændingen. Der trak lidt finker og pibere, og ca. 300 stære var på trækforsøg.

Bent og Svend Aage var på besøg. Rose er atter taget til København, denne gang indtil i næste uge.

Om eftermiddagen gik jeg en kort tur på stranden for at se måger osv. Der var mange ude på revlerne og i vandet, omkring 1500, men ingen på stranden grundet de utallige turister. En del sortænder rastede ud for Hukket, vel over 5000.

I morgen skal vi have en frisk vind fra omkring vest, og der kan komme enkelte byger.

Folk: Bent, Svend Aage, Thyge, Rose, Daniel, Luke, Michael.

After windy past days, today the weather allowed us to open the nets again for a new ringing day. Although the wind was fine for ringing, we had to close the nets during a longer shower. We had a quiet ringing morning with just a few new birds but still several recaptures of Goldcrests (Fuglekonge) mainly ringed during the last weeks. However, we also caught another Blackbird (Solsort) during the morning which we could tag with one of the ICARUS tags we created the harnesses for yesterday.

During the rain shower we had time to do a second breakfast with the fresh bread Svend brought for him, us and Bent. After that we finally put up our base-station for the Blackbird ICARUS project. Here we are slightly out of range of the international space station, which is where the ICARUS tags send their location. So instead the base station can collect this information for nearby birds. We found a good place on the eave of our station building. Now the antenna should be high enough up that we can get information on the location of Blackbirds around Blåvandshuk. We are very excited to see now the locations of tagged Blackbirds, especially because they still work on the animal tracker app, so that the GPS location of the tagged birds become public.

Putting up the base station on an old, but luckily functioning ladder (Photo: Luke)

After lunch we had a zoom meeting with Jesko from the ICARUS project. He explained to us how we can download data from the base-station on our tablet. Now we are finally ready to start observing the location of our newly tagged Blackbirds. Motivated from the success of the now complete activation of base-station we opened the nets again in the afternoon and ringed until sunset. We caught four Blackbirds. Unfortunately, two of them were too small for an ICARUS tag. Moreover, one of the birds already had a GPS-tag on what was a great opportunity to test the base-station if it´s getting signal from all our birds in the surroundings. Luckily, we could also put another tag on one of the four Blackbirds this evening. A beautiful adult male bird I caught in the Helgoland-trap.

Male 2k+ Blackbird with a new ICARUS tag on (Photo: Luke)

All in all, it was a long ringing day with just a few birds, however with some success in the ICARUS project: Two new tagged birds and an installed base-station. And even though we didn´t catch many birds we reached more than 1000 birds for this October!