Grønspætte

Even though we were able to find some other great birds during our ringing and surveys today, we were all shocked to find a Eurasian Green Woodpecker (Grønspætte) during our ringing surveys today! Besides that, the observation team was greated with great numbers of skua (Kjove), including the first Great Skua (Storkjove) of the year!

Suprisingly enough, we actually spotted the Green Woodpecker (Grønspætte) before catching it in the net.  While waiting in the station, Henrik pointed out a large sized bird flying near the bunker at the lighthouse before it landed slightly to the left of it.  Henrik was able to ID it as a Green Woodpecker (Grønspætte), which is less than annual in around the station.

Besides everything else that went into this, it's hard to emphasize how insane the initial spotting from Henrik was.  This digiscope I took to help get the exact location where it landed shows just how far away it was.  

Eventually we saw it fly off in the direction of the Heligoland trap, and we were all crossing our fingers we would be able to ring it.  We waited another 10 minutes before our next net run (this was still during our standard ringing so we were still following standard protocols) and headed out to the lighthouse garden.  We ended up catching a few birds in the first nets (although they were all recaptures), including and Icterine Warbler (Gulbug) and a Lesser Whitethroat (Gærdesanger).  We headed towards the Heligoland trap, where it appeared that there were no birds, until Henrik noticed that there seemed to be something large already in the box and promptly shut it.  All of use were very pleasently suprised to find the Green Woodpecker (Gronspætte) we were hoping for already inside the trap!

After processing the other captures, we had to head back to the station since the Green Woodpecker (Gronspætte) actually needs steel rings instead of the standard aluminum.  We began to process it and it was clearly a first year bird. Besides that, it was incredible to see a whole different set of equipment used to take our normal data due to it's size.  

We even had to use a completely different set of pliers because it was a steel band! 

After we finished processing the bird, we took it outside to take a few photos to document as much as possible for this rare capture (the bird wasn't showing signs of exhaustion or much stress and when we released it it flew was perfectly fine).  We ened up finding that this was the fifth record in nearly 60 years of ringing at Blåvand! 

It definitely took a few hours for us to understand how lucky we were to actually have been able to ring this guy!