A calm but exciting day

My first full day on the birdstation, what would it bring? Let’s start with an introduction, I am Michael, 19 years old and I come from the Netherlands. I am a intern at the Blåvand fuglestation and I will be busy with ringing and reading rings, counting and my own project with red-backed shrikes, of which more later.

Today the day started slow, there was almost no arrival and we had 8 birds after 1,5 hours. We had one striking willow warbler, it was greyer than usual, which might indicate it was a northern willow warbler. After the 1,5 hours of ringing, we had to close the nets because of the rain, not promising. After a few hours the rain stopped, and we opened the nets in the garden again. The first round was nothing, so we went to Henrik who was already counting again, but due to the low numbers of birds, we went back again. From the parking area I at least saw one bird in the net, nice. This appeared to be a wryneck, awesome!

After ringing the wryneck, I went in to the dunes with a spotting scope. The beach was windy and there where probably windy, so we figured it might be fun to sit on a dune and scan for raptors. This resulted in one white-tailed eagle, a red kite, a marsh harrier, a buzzard, 3 raven and 2 kestrels. After one hour, I decided to go to the beach anyways, to look for ringed birds or other exciting sightings. One of the first things I saw was a metal ringed herring gull. He was a little shy, so it took half an hour to read the ring, but I managed to do so with the spotting scope, just in time, 5 minutes later it flew away never to be seen again. It was probably a Danish bird. When I was reading the ring, Morten mentioned he had seen a montagus harrier. Shoot, I missed it, too bad…

As I walked further I heard gulls alarming. I looked up and saw a few gulls bullying another gull. But wait, that is not a gull, it is an osprey! Click click click and gone it was.

I went further on the beach and I read 3 more colour ringed little terns, but that wasn’t easy, because the wind was getting stronger every minute. I decided to call it a day and went back to the station. I tried to read some rings of the tree sparrows, but it unfortunately didn’t work out, I just saw half the ring when it flew away.