SEPTEMBER IN DENMARK

I just finished a week in Denmark, and in between visits with friends and a workshop for TV news producers in Copenhagen, I squeezed in some birding.  Best area I visited was the sand dunes and wind swept hillocks of northern Denmark.  The night sky there was unclouded and unpolluted.  As one writer said of the sky in Mongolia, "The Milky Way is not the whitish haze seen in Western skies, but like a phosphorescent shower of myriad spots of light."

A full day in the Skagen (pronounced "skayn") region at the northern tip of Denmark produced a decent and interesting list for the Point Reyes Bird Observatory's Denmark Team:

• Horned Grebe, one in the ocean at Grenen
• Northern Fulmar
• Northern Gannet, >50 diving for fish like Brown Pelicans
• Cormorant [Phalacrocorax carbo]
• Mute Swan
• Mallard
• Common Eider, >100 at Grenen
• Black (Common) Scoter, 1
• Red-breasted Merganser, 1
• Common Kestrel
• Northern Lapwing
• Dunlin
• Sanderling
• Parasitic Jaeger (Arctic Skua), 1 at Grenen
• Black-legged Kittiwake
• Greater Black-backed Gull
• Common (Mew) Gull
• Herring Gull, >500
• Black-headed Gull, >1000
• Sandwich Tern, 1
• Common Tern, >60
• Arctic Tern, 2 at Grenen
• Woodpigeon
• Skylark
• Barn Swallow on migration
• House Martin on migration
• Meadow Pipit
• Pied Wagtail
• Eurasian Robin
• Blackbird [Turdus merula]
• Pied Flycatcher, 1
• Jackdaw
• Carrion Crow, Hooded variety
• Eurasian Jay, 6
• Magpie [Pica pica], abundant everywhere except on the beach
• Common Redpoll, aspen & birch forest
• Great Tit in every tree
• Crested Tit, answered my first pish in the pines - and to think how we struggled to find this great little titmouse-like character in Scotland!
• Yellowhammer, parking lot bird at Grenen
• Linnet
• Corn Bunting
• Chaffinch
• Greenfinch
• Twite, Grenen dunes
• House Sparrow, Skagen parking lots

Grenen is the furthest northern point of the Danish mainland.

September 23 2004: 43 species

Other species seen in Denmark:

• Great-crested Grebe, lake in Copenhagen
• Moorhen, Copenhagen
• Tufted Duck: lake in Copenhagen
• Golden Plover [Pluvialis apricaria], hundreds in plowed field in central Jutland
• Common Buzzard, regular in rural farmland
• Collared Dove, town in southern Denmark
• Common Swift, few on migration
• Rook
• Eurasian Starling, flock in one field
• Black Redstart on roof of Hamlet's Castle at Helsingor
• Winter Wren
• Blue Tit
• Chiffchaff

Literary bird note: Isak Dinesen ["Out of Africa", "Babette's Feast" et al.] left her house to posterity and had her farm on the coast turned into a bird sanctuary. Apparently there are breeding Wryneck there but I did not find them, or even the Nuthatches and Treecreepers.

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