Tall Jan

The sun burst out at about ten thirty, when I was doing some indoor transferring-VCR-to-DVD kind of job. Two bags of old VCR tapes are now on their way to oblivion, the valuable bits have been digitalised.

I had a quick lunch to be able to get out into the sun as quickly as possible and decided to go to a place where there surely wouldn't be anything shading me from the sun. I went to the southernmost tip of the island, with a lighthouse, called "Långe Jan", say it like 'longer yawn', without the 'r' in longer, and you'll almost sound swedish. As you can see there isn't much else but sky and ground and lots of seabirds. Next to the lighthouse is a birdwatchers Mecca, called Ottenby bird station where they keep a close check on what species are coming in and when. This place is the firs land the birds reach after having crossed the Baltic sea from Poland and Lithuania. The season for that is towards the end of February to March and into April. At that time it's hectic here. Hundreds of  ornithologists and thousands of birds. It's actually quite spectacular to sit on the beach and look to the sky. A long way off shore you can easily see little black clouds of birds approaching together. I've seen several such clouds at the same time aiming for the rest and feed here, before continuing their journey towards the mainland and the rest of Sweden. Many of them get caught in nets here and are brought to rows of young people weighing the birds, measuring them making notes of the date,  the species and finally putting a ring on its leg before letting it loose. It only takes minutes.

The second extra shows that sunshades, in the form of trees are scarce around here. The third extra, I took thirty something photos, is from the very tip of the island. You can see the water coming from both sides, maybe depending on winds and currents. There wasn't much wind today so the effect is rather clear. I stayed out for three hours and feel really weather beaten and sun-kissed this evening, a nice feeling.