Rainy day is picture day!

Vejr: direction - SV; speed - 8 to 12 m/s; cloud cover - 8/8; temperature - 15.0 °C

Due to the very wet morning today, we neither counted, nor ringed birds. The whole day was very unstable, it basically showed every facette from nice and sunny to doomsday. Even the weather forecast had problems getting it right, we checked several times and were surprised by the complete opposite not only once. In the evening, we received a nice visit by Torbjørn and Peter and had some interesting talks about nature and conservation. Furthermore, the bad weather offered us an opportunity to look through some of the pictures from yesterday. We would like to show you two pictures of species, which we hope you can, despite their frequency, still enjoy as much as we did.

This one shows a juvenile, dark-morph Arctic Skua, Stercorarius parasiticus, just before unsuccessfully chasing a Sandwich Tern. We have very low numbers of Arctic Skuas in Austria (skuas in general actually), so this bird was nice ID-practise for us. 

This picture shows a juvenile Sanderling, Calidris alba, a scarse bird to us aswell, as a lot fewer birds travel across mainland in Europa than those migrating along the coast. 

Let's hope, we can report from ringing and migration counting tomorrow, fingers crossed,

Sandra & Christian