Ringmærkning:

Trækket på Odden: Another dreary day at the tip; it did not seem to get properly light until very late. The dense fog and the rain inhibited most birds from migrating, so the most common sentences spoken were in the line of: „Oh finally, another bird. A Common Scoter (Melanitta nigra, „black black duck“), wait, no, it’s landing. Of course!“ Scoters were with 145 migrants still the most numerous species today, not counting a single big flock of unidentified finches (~240 individuals!). Very underwhelming was again the migration of Common Eiders (Somateria mollissima, „very soft wool-body“). For some reason, we are missing quite a few birds this year, especially the last days yielded much less Eiders than average.

This graph shows the average hourly counts of Common Eiders of this year compared to the average. This autumn had much too few Eiders migrating past Gedser Odde, the numbers are much lower than the average of the last years. Especially now, in early November, we could still expect counts of about 1.000 Eiders a day. A stark contrast to our 90 today. Blue line: all years average, red bars: 2026. Source: Trektellen

The lack of birds is maybe even easier to see in the yearly totals: This autumn, we counted ca. 89.000 Eiders. This sounds like a lot, but it is by far the lowest number we have had since 2019. As a comparison: Last year’s about average migration had 164.000 birds, almost double of this year!

Back to nice things! Today, three Common Guillemots (Uria aalge, „auk waterbird“) could be observed on their way to their wintering grounds in the southwestern Baltic Sea. These birds look surprisingly similar to another auk species, the Razorbill (Alca torda, „auk auk“). Distinguishing these two species is one of the common challenges in seawatching. If the birds come close enough, you can tell the Guillemot’s longer feet and more prominent collar. If the birds are far away though, the chances of actually identifying your bird are very slim. This led us to leave several other auks unidentified, slightly annoying but important for data quality.

Fugle registreret i standardtiden: 748. Arter: 25. Tællingen startet 07:05, sluttet klokken 12:05.

Se alle dagens observationer på Gedser Odde i DOFbasen. 

På stationen: Alba M. Holmberg, Anne Hermanns, Henrik Jørgensen, Ole Friis Larsen, Marek Ebert