Kampen’s birds: feathered guests and natives

There are many of them. And not all – far from it – are real islanders. Birds are also only people and why they like “holidaying” in Sylt is clear: the island is one of the most beautiful service areas for travellers.

The chatter of grey geese, the busy high-speed running about of beachcombers, always along the tide’s edge, the first larks, the last terns: Kampen’s birds are fun and set an example. The picture shows two male pheasants fighting.
They come in the opposite direction from the big tourist crowds. They travel relatively inconspicuously, not all crowded together but in big groups. Compared to their big groups the human summer delegation from North Rhine Westphalia is a modest troop: for tens of thousands of migratory birds Sylt is the most beautiful service area along the entire route. On the way to Arctic summer resorts, in autumn on the way south. Some feathered guests winter here, others stay on in spring when they should be pushing on northwards. A unique Kampen sound is the loud, sympathetic jabbering the thousand of geese like keeping up in the mudflats. Sadly, they suddenly all rise up at the same time if something or someone startles them. Around 300 different types of bird have been counted on the island. Nearly 100 of them breed on the island. Gannets, eiders, oystercatchers, skylarks, purple sandpipers, huge swarms of knots which swirl like clouds over the mudflats, Brent geese, sandpipers, ringed plovers, Arctic terns, but also pheasants and snipe – nearly all Sylt nature conservation associations offer guided tours and information events on the subject. Represented are the innumerable types of gull that romp around the island. Formerly, gulls eggs were a firm favourite on the islanders’ menu. It was mostly youngsters who went poaching through meadows and along the cliff searching for adventure and gulls’ nests to plunder. At any time at the beginning of the previous century this plundering was still allowed, but today it is essentially prohibited, which in any case no Sylt would really be annoyed by: as the gulls are ever more inventive and brutal in hunting for the more or less edible rubbish produced by our civilisation, their eggs have become highly contaminated by all kinds of pollutants.

Info and guided tour:

Kampen bird decoy: duck trap from the 18th century. Permanent exhibition on the cultural history of the place and on the island’s ornithology, on the street between Kampen and List on the right. Tel. 0 46 51 / 87 10 77 www.sylter-verein.de/kampener_vogelkoje.htm

Jordsand Association for the Protection of Sea Birds and Nature, Eidum bird decoy, Info at Tel. 0 46 51 / 58 12 or on the internet at www.jordsand.de/rantum

Info also from the Braderup Nature Centre at the Sylt Nature Conservation Community, M.-T.-Buchholz-Stig 3 Tel. 0 46 51 / 4 44 21 www.naturschutz-sylt.de