Busy day for ringing and a predator caught red handed

Ringing:

Today’s ringing session was unfortunately cut short because of sudden rain around 08:30. However, the birds did not disappoint in quantity and diversity! This day felt busy for me as I was alone, and worried about the unstable weather the whole morning. Some special birds showed up, like the first Red-Backed Shrike (Rødrygget Tornskade) of the season! A beautiful female.

Female Red-Backed Shrike 

I also had the pleasure of catching another Sedge Warbler (Sivsanger), which are pretty uncommon here.  For some reason, the Sedge Warblers I’ve caught and taken pictures of always insist on looking at the camera straight ahead, giving them a little bit of a goofy and clueless look. So cute!

Cute little forward facing Sedge Warbler

And last but not least, a visitor who is always so sweet to get in the hand, a talkative Icterine Warbler (Gulbug).

A yellow and talkative Icterine Warbler

After this short but intense session where I had to close nets in a hurry and even with some help from Jorn, I was so tired that I could not do much more for the rest of the day. Still, a good time with healthy birds, which made me feel like my efforts to take great care of the birds considering the weather were worth it.

Ringing is hard work, but oh so worth it!

Little tern project:

Today there was another observation for the Little Tern project. It was a relatively warm morning with heavy cloud cover. The observation was pretty quiet.In total I saw four little terns flying, but they didn’t land in the fence. There were, however, three common ringed plovers active in the fence for about 20 minutes before they too flew off. The Most exciting thing this morning was a big flock of around 15 Barn swallows flying over the fence which was nice to see.

Later that afternoon, Alix and I went to the beach to retrieve the 15 artificial tern nests and the trail cameras. Of the 15 nests we had set out, we found 13, one of which had not yet been predated. When we returned to the station, we checked to see if the trail cameras had captured any footage of the predators. Only one of the three cameras had some footage. It showed a fox and a crow eating the eggs at the same nest. Below is one of the photos the camera took.

A fox running away after eating the Quail eggs.

At the station: Alix Bortolussi & Jorn de Jong