Fasterbo and Malmo

Leo had read about the bird festival happening in Fasterbo, at the extreme SW end of Sweden.  Birders found that the lighthouse garden here was a haven for migrating songbirds in the spring and fall because it's the first point of land the reach after crossing the Baltic Sea.  After the lighthouse was automated it became the Fasterbo Ornithological Station. Songbirds are captured in mist nets, banded and released.  It's also a good place to monitor the number of raptors passing over as they migrate.

 We drove out to the Falsterbo lighthouse on Saturday morning.  There was a big crowd of birders with scopes,

but not much happening, although there was a fellow from the bird banding station with a bag full of songbirds that had been captured in their mist nets.

He'd pull them out and identify them in Swedish, which meant nothing to us.  So we headed to the birdfest headquarters where we drowned our sorrows with a kanelsnaeka. 

 Otherwise, there weren't many birds around, so drove down to the narrow isthmus of the peninsula, where it started to rain, hard.  Fortunately, Anna's bageri was close by, so we ducked in there for our second kanelsnaeka of the day.

On Sunday we returned to the Fasterbo lighthouse.  We followed the crowd way out to the point where we found out you had to have a membership to get into the reserve, but we charmed the gatekeeper by telling him we'd come all the way from Canada.  It then proceeded to rain and blow really hard, but at least our downwind sides were dry, we said.  We saw swans and greylag geese and a large seal, but then we turned around and soaked our front sides. There was nothing else to do but return to headquarters, change into dry clothes, and have a Kanelsnaeka.

In the afternoon we checked out downtown Malmo.

It seemed a pleasant city, not too busy on a Sunday, on two rivers.  Like most European cities it has a pedestrian mall, but the many of the stores were closed
so no Bjorn (pronounced Borye, we've learned) underwear for us.

 Then we checked out the tallest building in Sweden ,



the turning torso,

and finished up the day in the city park,

 where we saw our first barnacle geese, begging for food.