Hovvig, Nakke, Denmark. October 23, 2022.I have a boyhood memory of seeing a couple of Redwings somewhere near my home in the south of England. I remember being quite excited because Redwings were, and still are, winter visitors and not easily seen. They were not uncommon or remarkable to a well equipped and resourceful birder, but I was neither so was impressed within my limits. It’s been decades, therefore, between that vivid, one-off sighting and my encounter with restless flocks of Redwings today.
By lucky happenstance I had been directed to Hovvig, a bird sanctuary, near the coastal village of Nakke on the Island of Zealand. Birding had been pretty thin in my Danish weeks so far and I didn’t have very high hopes; but then I had no idea what the sanctuary was like. Hardly had I arrived than I knew I’d struck visitor/birder’s gold. The sanctuary is a failed attempt at land reclamation and is now a vast wetland of open water, soggy fields, reed-beds, mudflats, scattered woodlands, scrubby margins and open rough pasture; nearly everything birds and I could wish for.
Redwings are common birds of winter in rural Denmark and I was half expecting to see some sooner or later. They are handsome members of the thrush family, superficially not unlike a young American Robin, a European Song Thrush or a Fieldfare. They breed across a very broad swath of high-latitudes northern Europe: Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, but with winter’s approach the entire population heads to continental Europe, from Denmark, south, west and east, everywhere, through to Iberia and the Balkans.
The Redwings really caught my attention, not just because I’d been hoping for them but because of the flocks’ restless behaviour. It was hard to get a fix on any single bird for very long, they always seemed to be on the move and if one did alight it would usually be somewhere deep in foliage.
As Birds of the Day, Redwings were up against some tough competition because the morning’s birding was very satisfying with many really good sightings.
My other stand-outs for the morning were: A male Bullfinch, dapper in crimson and grey; A White-tailed Eagle methodically harassing a group of ducks knowing eventually that one of them would show itself as weaker and thereby become a meal; and trio of Common Snipe, all but invisible. If one hadn’t shuffled forward and caught my attention, prompting a bit of camera-aided searching, I would not have seen them. In the photo below they are along the lower waters-edge and hard to make out.
I try not to share exhaustive lists in these pages, but partly for my own records here are some of the rest of my morning’s observations: Northern Lapwing, Northern Shoveler, Mallard, Coot, Shelduck, Teal, Gadwall, Tufted Duck, Greylag Goose, Mute Swan, Great Cormorants, Black-headed Gull, Grey Heron, Ring-necked Pheasant, Great Spotted Woodpecker, Chaffinch, Eurasian Robin, Dunnock, Blackbird, Eurasian Wren, Kestrel, Grey Heron, Rook, Jackdaw, Hooded Crow, and Blue, Great, Marsh, and Long-tailed Tits, – no doubt many more went unseen but still an embarrassment of riches.
Truly a goldmine!