Blessed with a woodpecker peck

Observationer

The wind is picking up again, not much but just enought for it to get interesting. Today started with six meters per second from east-southeast. I was alone for the first half of the morning observation. In this time i had three red throated loons (rødstrubet lom) and one black blackthroated (sortstrubet lom). That was really nice and caught me a bit by surprise. What a loony start of the day! I also had some beautiful adult red knots (islandsk ryle), who really showed their spectacular red chest in the pretty morning light today! In total 27 red knots.
After the first half Bent joined me again for the hour to come. From here on we saw a lot of gannets (suler), in total we probably had around 100 fouraging and just generally resting in the area! We also had two wonderful red male bar tailed godwit (lille kobbersneppe). Red was really the theme-color today! Bent and i stayed roughly an hour after the standard time, because we saw some barn swallows (landsvale) gathering up for migration, together with three sparrowhawks that marked the end of yet another nice morning observation at Blåvandshuk:)
- SDP

Ringmærkning

The morning started of slow, but the warm nice weather made up for the last few cold days! After getting 4 new robins, things slowed down a bit but then we had a nice surprise, as we caught a bird in our helgoland trap, wich is a walk in trap that narrows towards the end, different to our usual catching methods wich are the classic mistnets. The bird we caught was no stranger to us, as it just happens to be a little female redstart that is always around the same area.

Around 09:30, as Lise and I were just in the middle of a net check, calmy chatting about, we saw our catch of the day fly into the net infront of us! It was a very fisty and angry young greater spotted woodpecker that very happily pecked on my hand as if I was a tree! After Lise got a chance to help processing and handle her first woodpecker, Sverre got the chance to release it afterwards, being the only staff member to not get pecked!

-Lua Koplin

Folk på stationen:
Bent Jakobsen, Lua Koplin, Lise Mastrup and Sverre Dahl Porsgaard