Birdmigration-countings

 Sand Martin
One of the best parts of birdwatching is birdmigration.
Watching the sun rise, hear and see the birds fly over. The only things you need is a chair to sit on, binoculars and coffee.

The purpose of this activity: It's nice to do;
The purpose of this site: to give you an idea of how many of what birds migrate when and how much can you see of it on an arbitrary location in the Netherlands.

Since the early eighties, I have been conting on different locations in the Netherlands depending of the place I live. In the autumn of 1994, when I moved to Meppel, I start counting on a location in  "De Wieden" and in 1999 I started to put the countings day by day, on the internet. Daily countingsresults were put on this site.
In the autumn of 2002, I moved again and continued counting on an observationpost in Zutphen.

The observationpost in Zutphen

Inland counting of birdmigration in the Netherlands is standarized. There are four different type of counts depending of the time of day.
  1. Early morningcounting (2,5 hours, starting half an hour before sunrise)
  2. Late morningcounting (2,5 hours, following after previous count)
  3. Daycounting (rest of the day until the next counting:)
  4. Eveningcounting (2,5 hours starting two hours before sunset)
Countings start half an hour before sunrise and last 10 kwarters of an hour (so two and a half hour).
I only counted birds which are visible with the naked eye, so I'm not tracing the horizon with my binoculars.
Undetermined birds are not counted. Only heard birds are counted as one.		 Red Kite

Migration of Meadow Pipits "De Wieden 1994 - 2000" (an example)

Michel Klemann

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