Today was a day for thermal underwear. We woke up to a clear sky, crisp frosty grass and a definite bite to the air. We opened the nets not really knowing what to expect, but soon realised that we weren’t going to be ringing many birds – the garden was almost completely devoid of birds! Over the course of the morning we managed to catch a good handful of solsort (blackbirds), skovspurv (tree sparrows) and stillits (goldfinches), and it was nice to have time to study together the birds that we had.

After standard time finished we played krognæb (pine grosbeak) and gråsisken (redpoll) songs on the speakers, with zero success...but if you don’t try…! We know that krognæb have been seen elsewhere in southern Sweden and northern Denmark over the last few days, so we are desperately hoping that they will make their way here!

We decided to call it a day around 2.40pm, giving us time for some net maintenance and other odd jobs. Now we are enjoying the woodburning stove in between rounds of the very chilly garden as our quest for owls continues. Tonight we are playing perleugle (Tengmalm’s owl) calls in the hope of luring some into the nets.

Data below as always!

Cheers,

Gail