Sparrows watch out – I am hawking through!

Morning Observations:

Levi and I went up to the observation spot without any expectations of a fantastic migration day, but we did hope it would be better than the last two days, which had been really slow. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case today either. The migration of red-throated divers “Rødstrubet lom” was okay today, and they came quite close, so we got a really good look at them. But that was probably the only highlight of the day. With only four different species over a period of time, you can’t exactly say that much else was happening. But we had a good time, and after about half an hour, David came up and joined us for a chat. So, a nice morning—even without birds.

Today's observations can be seen here.

The ringing:

Not all nets could be opened due to the wind this morning. First round just gave one bird, I saw it flying in and ran after it, it was an adult male Sparrowhawk “Spurvehøg”. Most of the team came to see the small, charming Hawk.

Sparrowhawk ad. male/ Spurvehøg ad. han. Pictures: Emma Gray

As in most raptor species of Accipitriformes, Falconiformes and Strigiformes, there is a reversed sexual size dimorphism (RSD) in Sparrowhawks which means, that the male is smaller than the female. The size of the female is a factor for a successful recruitment into the breeding population: Larger females are favored while the body size of the male does not seem to have a significant impact. There are many hypotheses for the reasons of RSD in raptors (MacDonald et al. 2004, Schoenjahn et al. 2020).

The day did not bring many more birds, in the last hour, the wind dropped, and the closing round was the round with most birds.

The moths:

As the morning was a bit windy and I had already heard the wind when I woke up one time in the night, I was not expecting many moths. I had seven different species plus one slash-species Hada plebeja “Kurvbomst-ugle” was new for the season and also Notodonta ziczac “Zigzagspinder” was new for this spring at BLF. I found Chloroclyster siterata later on the wall, this one as well is new for this year, last autumn I had it already here.

Hada plebeja “Kurvbomst-ugle”. Picture: Hanelie Sidhu

Notodonta ziczac “Zigzagspinder”

At the station: Joseph Stephan, Marit Nillissen, Levi van den Os, Emma Gray, David Manstrup and Hanelie Sidhu