It started so well

A 1am visit to the loo prompted a glance out of the window-and yes, no mistake the Northern Lights were showing for us as last year! Unfortunately there is quite a bit of ambient light in the village so it wan't exactly spectacular, but the team was impress anyway.
The fact that we saw the lights indicates that the sky was clear--which led to a pretty cold start to proceedings. However, the sun quickly got up and things warmed up nicely. Meadow Pipit migration started almost aL once and birds dropped out of the sky--along with decent numbers of Lapland Buntings. Sadly, once again the passage was short lived--and the appearance of birds in the main netting area was the worst since we have been here. It's really difficult to understand why one day there are Redpoll everywhere, yet today we hardly had any.
We did have a visit from the school at Varangerbotn, and fortunately we did have a few birds for them to experience--things seems to go well and their teachers were pleased with what we had top offer.
As the birds dried up we decided to call a halt at 11am, have some lunch and take a drive to Vardo to see the sights and visit Tormod. he very kindly gave us some frozen fish which we shall have for dinner tomorrow, and a chat with some local crab fishermen resulted in the giving us a couple of King Crabs which Stu and Colin H are in the process of cooking as I write with a view to a slap-up crab lunch tomorrow.
Final scores on the doors were a fairly meagre 182 new birds, of which Mipits made up slightly more than half. A couple of `redstarts were welcome, as were a handful of waders, although the Ruff which stood in front of one of the nets before flying off in the opposite direction would have easily been bird of the day.

Doctor Colin doing his bit for international relations--the kids really enjoyed getting up close and personal with a few birds. They all learned something about the birds in their locality and about where they migrate to.

This is one of a number of very interesting wall art pictures on display in Vardo. The artist here has scraped away the top coat of render to reveal an image by exposing the contrasting dark layer beneath-pretty cool.

Sara is examining the enormous King Crabs which had just been landed--very grateful to the skipper who gave us enough legs for a good lunch.

Another piece of art --two buccaneers sword fighting on a section of wall which would be very easy to miss.

Further information http://birdringers.blogspot.co.uk