Erratic weather...

Vejr: direction - N (11); speed - 6 m/s; cloud cover - 7/8; visibility - 18 km; temperature - 11.7°C

Aaarg.. today, we could not even finish the count due to the... sorry, I have to say it again... the weather! We expected a little bad weather and did not expect much from the seamigration counting, although we were interested in seeing how the north wind will influence the number of passerines. At sea, we counted for about 1.5 hours but at some point, low visibility and rain, as well as the absence of birds forced us to stop the count, no big highlights at all. A bird that definitely needs an honorable mention was a Peregrine Falcon that took a wader (looked like a Sanderling). Very exciting to see it taking of with its prey.

Unfortunately, we did not ring in the morning despite a good amount of passerines to the garden and the counting station as well as nice weather in the early morning. As Henrik and me headed back to the station (due to the rain at around 8 o'clock), we had some good talks about rare birds and their appearances at different weather conditions. This made me really eager to ring again (and the weather for the upcoming days looks promising too), which, for some reason, Jonas must have felt. He spontanteously showed up and coincidently, the weather got better that moment. He decided to open the nets for two hours. By then, quite some birds were in the garden still, but of course, as we opened up the nets, most of them had already disappeared. Summarising, weather changed very often and in the end, it was just enough to catch a hand full of birds, amongst them, a beautiful male Common Redstart. However, the big numbers of birds in the garden in the early morning was gone by then (we assumed they must have left as soon as the rain stopped again). 

Ringmærkning: Common Redstart (1), Song Thrush (1), Blackcap (1), Lesser Whitethroat (1, Ringed in 2015 by Henrik as a 2k+).



See you tomorrow, Christian