Look up!
The birds are everywhere over the large cities
Most people know that it is possible to see blackbirds in Tøndermarsken and that there are plenty of photogenic geese and shorebirds in Western Jutland. In other words, birds are mainly something you can see and experience in the peripheral parts of Denmark. However, nothing is more wrong! Both in Aarhus and in Copenhagen, there are great opportunities to see large amounts of fascinating birds within the city’s borders. It is even enough to sit on a terrace during spring and autumn and merely look up! And this can be done from a comfortable chair.
Both Copenhagen and Aarhus are located on the coast, and this is where birds assemble when small and large birds immigrate to and from their breeding spaces in Scandinavia. On warm spring days, it is already possible in mid-March to experience buzzards in the hundreds, which in large formations slowly make their way north. Later in the season, red kites and ospreys follow before the sky in the middle of May is filled with sympathetic honey buzzards that live off wasps, which they dig up.
During the autumn, this all repeats itself - but only in reverse order, and on the best days, a steady stream of raptors fly over the rooftops. Above Copenhagen, a large amount of cranes will also travel through during March-April and again in September-October, when the giant birds in large V-formations draw across between Rügen and Sweden. Not to mention the pigeons, finches, geese and all the others who are on their way to or from their winter quarters.
Now it may indeed seem like a daunting task getting started with bird watching from the terrace, but if you join forces with the thousands of users on the website fugleognatur.dk, it is possible to get help with everything from identification of the birds to planning tomorrow’s bird watching tour. Should you go to the Eastern Harbour to look for sooty shearwater, which after a summer in the northern latitudes are returning to the Falklands to breed? Or should you sit down with a cold beer and look at the buzzard rows? And maybe invite the neighbours for a look? There are many opportunities in the city. It's all about seizing them!