Well here am I in Lund on the evening of my second day, let me elaborate on day 1 and 2.
Day 1 wasn’t that exciting, Rob and I met at Utrecht Central Station and travelled together to Venlo where Manu, Juan and Paula were waiting for us. The big surprise was that Juan and I have met before, last year in Falsterbo. We drove to Puttgarden in Germany to take the ferry to Rødby Denmark and end up in Lund 2 hours later. The initial idea was to camp somewhere in Denmark but thankfully our Spanish companions had a friend in Lund who was kind enough to let us sleep in the house she is living in.
We slept in the next day and ended up having breakfast at about 10. There was very little of bird activity in the garden but a smart male Redstart is always nice, they are quite common actually since we heard a couple in Lund, even from the car. Because Rob and I have to make a spring trap to catch Skuas on their nests we had to buy suitable materials, we didn’t quite succeed but gonna try with what we got anyway. At 1 PM we had an appointment with Martin Green to discuss permits, rings and payments, but since he had other students we waited in the garden and saw a Sparrowhawk flying past and Swifts nesting in the University building. In the meantime we met up with Johannes, a German student who is going to do a lot of nest searching in Ammarnäs and is supposed to be extremely good at it so I’m very curious on working with him. The talk with Martin went smoothly and in the end he asked me and Rob to do some butterfly searching later in the season in Ammarnäs. Apparently there was an annual barbecue at the University that same afternoon but only for PhD students, Rob and I ‘snuck’ in anyway and had a good time chatting up with lots of different people and having a nice meal. At the end of the barbecue there was a ‘Biology Quiz’ for the students, it consisted of 11 multiple choice questions ranging from ‘What is wrong with the introduced White Stork population in Sweden?’ and ‘What animal wouldn’t you want to encounter in the wild in Sweden?’ to ‘What is the hottest part of the sun?’ and ‘What wouldn’t you find in a cell?’. Against all odds our team, cleverly called ‘The masters of mystery’ by Rob and me, won! The price were t-shirts and since the Spanish team already gave us a t-shirt of the ‘Ammarnäs Team 2011’ this was actually the 2nd t-shirt we got today. After this victory we chatted some more before going to the shops to buy food for in the morning. After some internetting, hot chocolate milk and discussing the words ‘enclosure’ and ‘exclosure’ we went to bed. Tomorrow we’ll be driving north towards Ammarnäs but stopping halfway (nobody still knows where exactly). Johannes has a car of his own and I’ll be accompanying him on the way north, could be very funny in a Ford Ka ;). We’ll probably stop a couple of times on the way to watch birds but only Rob and I seem to be avid birders, the rest seems more passive and only keen on surveys and research, but I can’t really tell at this point.
‘’What will you be doing those two months?’’
Is the (justifiable) question I get asked a lot, well here is my best explanation.
Rob has been doing field work on Long-tailed Skua’s in Ammarnäs since 2007. Long-tailed Skuas are the size of a small gull and if you just threw up in your mouth a bit reading the word ‘gull’, this is the only definite similarity that you will hear from me besides that the word ‘predator gull’ would be a good way to describe skuas in general to my non birding friends. Long-tailed Skuas are extremely elegant creatures and part of an amazingly interesting family (Stercoridae) which have elaborate moult strategies that are still very poorly understood. Long-tailed Skuas have a dark hood which stops just below the eye, yellowish cheeks and head sides and a very soft grayish lower breast darkening towards the belly. The most stunning thing about them is the tail, from the 12 tail feathers which are usually about the same size in birds the middle pair is strongly elongated, this means that the central tail feather pair is about 10 times as long as the rest of the tail feathers! This makes them even more elegant.
This year is Robs (the) ‘big moment’, we’re going to attach geologgers to the birds. These devices record light and time, so calculating the amount of daylight tells you on what latitude you are, calculating moment of sunset and sunrise will tell you the longitude. Combining these two numbers gives you a position (with an error of 200km) somewhere on planet earth. All these positions together will give you a map of the winter area of the bird and a track of the migration. That is when they get caught again next year! These devices are fancy but to ask of them to have a direct link to a satellite would be too much. We have to catch 25 Long-tailed Skuas because we have 25 geologgers and want them all up and running! Apparantly Long-tailed Skuas have an extremely high location fidelity so chances are very high that next year there will be some interesting data to recover!
What the three Spanish people are gonna do is still a bit of a mystery to me and they’re not to blame, I am, I can’t speak a word Spanish! From the bits I picked up when they occasionally talk English is that it seems that the entire migration of Golden Plovers is their main point of interest and trapping and banding them will be their primary occupation. They are also keen on catching the insects that Golden Plovers eat, which we are gonna catch using buried drinking cups.
Day 1 wasn’t that exciting, Rob and I met at Utrecht Central Station and travelled together to Venlo where Manu, Juan and Paula were waiting for us. The big surprise was that Juan and I have met before, last year in Falsterbo. We drove to Puttgarden in Germany to take the ferry to Rødby Denmark and end up in Lund 2 hours later. The initial idea was to camp somewhere in Denmark but thankfully our Spanish companions had a friend in Lund who was kind enough to let us sleep in the house she is living in.
We slept in the next day and ended up having breakfast at about 10. There was very little of bird activity in the garden but a smart male Redstart is always nice, they are quite common actually since we heard a couple in Lund, even from the car. Because Rob and I have to make a spring trap to catch Skuas on their nests we had to buy suitable materials, we didn’t quite succeed but gonna try with what we got anyway. At 1 PM we had an appointment with Martin Green to discuss permits, rings and payments, but since he had other students we waited in the garden and saw a Sparrowhawk flying past and Swifts nesting in the University building. In the meantime we met up with Johannes, a German student who is going to do a lot of nest searching in Ammarnäs and is supposed to be extremely good at it so I’m very curious on working with him. The talk with Martin went smoothly and in the end he asked me and Rob to do some butterfly searching later in the season in Ammarnäs. Apparently there was an annual barbecue at the University that same afternoon but only for PhD students, Rob and I ‘snuck’ in anyway and had a good time chatting up with lots of different people and having a nice meal. At the end of the barbecue there was a ‘Biology Quiz’ for the students, it consisted of 11 multiple choice questions ranging from ‘What is wrong with the introduced White Stork population in Sweden?’ and ‘What animal wouldn’t you want to encounter in the wild in Sweden?’ to ‘What is the hottest part of the sun?’ and ‘What wouldn’t you find in a cell?’. Against all odds our team, cleverly called ‘The masters of mystery’ by Rob and me, won! The price were t-shirts and since the Spanish team already gave us a t-shirt of the ‘Ammarnäs Team 2011’ this was actually the 2nd t-shirt we got today. After this victory we chatted some more before going to the shops to buy food for in the morning. After some internetting, hot chocolate milk and discussing the words ‘enclosure’ and ‘exclosure’ we went to bed. Tomorrow we’ll be driving north towards Ammarnäs but stopping halfway (nobody still knows where exactly). Johannes has a car of his own and I’ll be accompanying him on the way north, could be very funny in a Ford Ka ;). We’ll probably stop a couple of times on the way to watch birds but only Rob and I seem to be avid birders, the rest seems more passive and only keen on surveys and research, but I can’t really tell at this point.
‘’What will you be doing those two months?’’
Is the (justifiable) question I get asked a lot, well here is my best explanation.
Rob has been doing field work on Long-tailed Skua’s in Ammarnäs since 2007. Long-tailed Skuas are the size of a small gull and if you just threw up in your mouth a bit reading the word ‘gull’, this is the only definite similarity that you will hear from me besides that the word ‘predator gull’ would be a good way to describe skuas in general to my non birding friends. Long-tailed Skuas are extremely elegant creatures and part of an amazingly interesting family (Stercoridae) which have elaborate moult strategies that are still very poorly understood. Long-tailed Skuas have a dark hood which stops just below the eye, yellowish cheeks and head sides and a very soft grayish lower breast darkening towards the belly. The most stunning thing about them is the tail, from the 12 tail feathers which are usually about the same size in birds the middle pair is strongly elongated, this means that the central tail feather pair is about 10 times as long as the rest of the tail feathers! This makes them even more elegant.
This year is Robs (the) ‘big moment’, we’re going to attach geologgers to the birds. These devices record light and time, so calculating the amount of daylight tells you on what latitude you are, calculating moment of sunset and sunrise will tell you the longitude. Combining these two numbers gives you a position (with an error of 200km) somewhere on planet earth. All these positions together will give you a map of the winter area of the bird and a track of the migration. That is when they get caught again next year! These devices are fancy but to ask of them to have a direct link to a satellite would be too much. We have to catch 25 Long-tailed Skuas because we have 25 geologgers and want them all up and running! Apparantly Long-tailed Skuas have an extremely high location fidelity so chances are very high that next year there will be some interesting data to recover!
What the three Spanish people are gonna do is still a bit of a mystery to me and they’re not to blame, I am, I can’t speak a word Spanish! From the bits I picked up when they occasionally talk English is that it seems that the entire migration of Golden Plovers is their main point of interest and trapping and banding them will be their primary occupation. They are also keen on catching the insects that Golden Plovers eat, which we are gonna catch using buried drinking cups.
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