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  • Happy to live in an area with geese.

    Counted a group of
    170 Greylag Geese
    119 White- fronted Geese
    22 Barnacle Geese

    And great to see them mixed together.

  • It was a grey, wet day on the 11th. of January, and I didn’t have much time. So I decided to take the car for a short trip to some sites around local lake. It felt a bit like cheating my Low Carbon Birding efforts, but I needed to get out of my rut.

    The main goal was a flooded part of land where there should be a lot of geese and hopefully something else as well. I counted about 300 Graylag geese and about 20 greater White-fronted geese. The something else today were Lapwings and Shellducks. There were no surprises at the other two sites along the lake that I visited and all in all I saw 23 birdspecies.

    More important perhaps was that I got to see how much water has gathered in the whole area. I really should go by bike there as soon as I can.

    The best find was a Mistle thrush on a golf track (pictured above). It is said that a few might stay here in mild winters. The last 7 days there were only 24 observations registered in the whole of Denmark.

    I didn’t find it a very good idea to go birding by car like this, as I didn’t move (at the end of the day at only had about 2500 steps for the whole day!) and I didn’t feel very connected with the nature I visited.

    But it was a quick and practical way of seeing some birds.

    12. Januari ’23

    The most impressive thing of the day was the video I saw about NocMic, the recording of birds flying around at night:

    I found that this lecture/ video is all I need to start Nocmigging (??), it has a wealth of information and I got rather enthusiast.

    A 15 min. recording at the end of the evening didn’t give me any bird though, and even though I now have tried a couple of times, I didn’t record any bird yet. But as the video suggest, January is also one of the worst months for NocMig recordings, as not much is flying around at that time of the year.

    But I am looking so much forward to my first night-bird, that I will try anyway as soon as there is a dry and not windy night again.

    13. January ’23

    Green finch flying over

    With yesterday’s video in mind I spent some time with the sound recordings I have so far. I had noted down in my task list to go and tjek a songbird flying over at the end of the January 8th. recording, and there I indeed found the above fragment of a Greenfinch flying over. As I doubt just about anything, I wasn’t sure “in the field” about it being a Greenfinch, so it was good having it recorded. Backyard Birding species ’23 nr. 30 it is.

  • Despite my bad conscious about driving a car to go birding, I had less trouble today driving a car to buy bird food.
    Well… my poor friends where outside waiting for me… I couldn’t let them wait…

    Comes to show that humans are creatures that can show unpredictable behaviour..

    There was not too much happening during my 30 min. backyard birding, but I did have my recorder on the whole 30 min. And I had noticed a bird flying over that I could not immediately recognise. The recording was good enough, and because I had marked the place where I had heard the bird, it was easy to find. That was also necessary, because it was a short sequence in the middle of some chatting of Tree Sparrows.

    So it felt a bit of a triumph that I had heard it nevertheless, that it was on the recording and that I could find and identify it (with the help of Birdnet).

    Backyard Birding ’23 species nr 28: Common Redpol.

  • I thought about going for a little trip with the car today as the weather was grey and rainy again, but after I brought the children to school it was still dark. To make the best use of the time waiting for light I started organizing a bit in the house.

    That’s where I found an 22 year old picture of an important part of my life and from there on I forgot all about trips, birds and what have you.

    I guess that sentimentality comes with age, doesn’t it. But I found it hard to understand that the things I remembered and thought about are still there (I googled a lot), but they are of course no longer the same and that time and situation is gone. Forever.

    I had a hard time understanding why I experienced and went through that period, as my present life is very different. Shouldn’t there be some kind of meaning with life? Did I learn from it? Do I use what I have learned?

    I had so much yearning for that experience back then, such a longing, that it felt unreal and not right that it is all gone.

    And now here I am, watching birds.

    It’s the best I can do.

  • Todays 1 hour Backyard BirdWatching gave me 5 new species for my 2023 Backyard list, bringing it to 27 species.

    1 Whooper Swan flying by, a Herring Gull doing the same, and because of the southern wind, I could hear a Great spotted woodpecker drumming, a Jay screaming and a Nuthatch “imitating an electronic car lock” (that’s how I remember it).

    The national BackYardBirding “competition” runs until July – my aim is 70+ species – so far so good.

    This video made me doubt again about my intentions for 2023. I am still in a big doubt, as I think that LowCarbon Birding is the right thing to do, but I am almost getting crazy about the feeling of being locked in, missing out and not experiencing the benefits of true nature.

    So I am thinking of using the car once in a while, for short, local quick trips, in order to see some local birds. I do not have oceans of time (nor energy) and spending time walking or cycling to a place is therefore often unrealistic, even for nearby locations

    Today I noticed that 2 birders had visited all the good spots around the lake today, a lake that starts within 1 or 2 km. from the house. I’d like to visit 1 or 2 of these places, but tomorrow will be raining, the sun is rising at 8:45 or so, and I will bring and then pick up the children at lunchtime, leaving me hardly a realistic chance to go birding around the lake.
    Unless I go by car.

    After watching the video I checked the Train and Bus homepages, and had to laugh a bit, because I hardly have an idea how it works, where and what I have to pay etc. But I found out bit by bit what to do, and noticed that prices are almost 3x the prices of the fossil fuel it would cost if I drive myself. I’ll have to walk to a busstop first, because at the one near by the bus stops only a few times a day.

    In order for me to stop contemplating (complaining), I decide that in 2023 I will concentrate on LowCarbon Birding, aiming at 100+ species in 2023, and occasionally use the car for local visits in case of rain and wind, lack of time and/or claustrophobic feelings.

  • Another grey and dark day with first rain and then fog.

    Managed though to take pictures of this female Kestrel with a very low shutterspeed (1/125) necessary because of the low light. But it gives the wings a suggestion of movement, which is nice.

    Yesterday evening I watched this video:

    Which was a nice, fluent and all around introduction. But the main thing for me was that it introduced a lot of other courses that sound very interesting. So I want to try to keep on eye on the series.

    And this one from tonight made me realize that I have about zero knowledge of owls, and that I have only seen Tawny owls in my entire life (as far as I know).

    It makes me want to go look for owls. Might be a nice winter thing to do.
    I can read in my bird book that there are 7 nesting species in Denmark, and it seems that winter is a good time. I know that there are 1 or 2 Tawny owls living rather close by, but I have never found them other than once or twice in a tree in our garden right after sunset.

  • A very rainy and windy morning. It was my chance to go birding today, but with the weather this bad I gave up. Without a camera or recorder, in dark, cold and wet weather doesn’t make too much sense.

    In stead, I started to look at the number of birds found in the various locations around the village I live in. I had collected some numbers from the Danish birding database DOFbasen when I started birding – marts 2020 – and now I could update them and have a more experienced look at it. I noticed for example that one of the key sites nearby was missing and how good it is to analyse and plan before starting a new year of birding. There are several sites that I might have underestimated, most of them being lakes.

    I am still confused about my plan for this year, because I was looking so much forward to visiting some “real nature”, some true birding sites like the beach and sea. But I still feel a bit bad about using the car to go birding. Those two things just don’t seem to match. But I think I have decided today, with the help of my location-listing today -that I will concentrate on Low Carbon Birding (on foot and bicycle -hopefully) and will keep on eye on myself and my joy of birding, as to give myself permission to carefully pick a day a few times this year and visit something else than the local forest and lake.

    This also because I do not have that much time during the day, so I can’t give myself a whole day to cycle to the beach and back.

    But I like lists, so I’ll just keep a Low Carbon Birding list – trying to reach a 100 species again. Not sure if I will make it to the 116 like last year, but it will be fun.

  • Goldcrest

    Went for a walk with the children today, through the forest to the local lake and back, 5,5 km – it took us 2 hours.

    I was allowed to record a Goldcrest in the forest – but according to the children it clearly wasn’t supposed to be a bird trip.

    I am still trying out sound related things and learning. But so far I am very pleased with the results.

    Bird sounds are here to say, I’d say. We never saw the Goldcrest – but it was clearly there.

    It was my first day trying the shotgun microphone that came with the recorder, and even though there is a lot of noise with high gain, it seems very practical – small and light – and does its job well. My main aim is to be able to identify birds, and the recordings will help.

    I was thinking that the shotgun might help me to see the birds sometimes. As I have some difference in hearing between my left and right ear, and therefore I sometimes have trouble locating a bird. With a headset and the (mono) shotgun it should be fairly easy to locate where the sound comes from.

    Backyard Birding: 22 species.
    Low Carbon Birding: 28 species.
    Motorized Birding: 1 species.