Our penultimate day with a puffball

Given yesterday's birdy-ness and the fact that the weather was still quite calm we decided to exercise a bit of caution this morning and only opened around a third of the nets. As expected as the morning progressed there were plenty of birds every net round and we were kept quite busy all morning. Todays total though not as high as yesterday was a pretty respectable 100 birds exactly!

Species wise things were pretty similar to yesterday with goldcrests (fuglekonge) making up most of the catch, but also a few bullfinch (dompap) and robins (rødhals). Some pretty significant migration going overhead today as well. A large flock of about 200 blackbirds (solsort) skimmed over the garden at around midmorning which almost hit the top of one of the high nets.

As an aside from the bird news; yesterday we noticed a rather large mushroom in the garden not far from the apple trees. After doing some research we established that it was a giant puffball (Calvatia gigantea) and as you can see it was as big as my head. This species is edible while they're still young and not producing spores so we decided to incorporate it into this evenings meal! While it didn't have an incredibly strong flavour the texture was fantastic.

Giant puffball mushroom (Calvatia gigantea)

Things aren't looking too promising for the last day of the season with strong winds forecast. With any luck though the goldcrests will stick around and we'll be able to find a few nets out of the wind to open.

Joe