Sister Cities: The Cape May of Scandinavia 

The wind is blowing, birds are flying, and with the lighthouse at your back, you can see a ridge of land across the water. 

That water is the Baltic Sea, and the land is Denmark, not the Delaware Bay or the beach towns of Delaware. The lighthouse is on the edge of Falsterbo, Sweden, a quaint resort town that is in many ways the Cape May of Scandinavia. 

Cape Island and Sweden’s Falsterbo Peninsula have a lot in common. Both are geographically important for bird migration. And both are world famous for serious ornithological research and as destinations for birdwatching.  

One of West Cape May birder David LaPuma’s first major assignments as the new director of the Cape May Bird Observatory was to visit Falsterbo in 2014, representing Cape May at the first ever International Bird Observatory Conference. 

“I was struck,” said LaPuma, recalling an early conversation with his Swedish counterparts. “You’re on a peninsula. We’re on a peninsula. It’s this resort town that everyone from Scandinavia goes to in the summer. That’s the same as Cape May. It clears out at the end of the summer, and in the fall all the birders descend on it. This is like a twin city in Scandinavia.”  

A talk he gave on the twin peninsulas later the next year was the inspiration behind two Cape May birders’ visit to Sweden last fall. Once there, they found that it was clear that Cape May has a legendary status in the international birding community, just as Falsterbo does—and there really is a camaraderie that links birdwatchers worldwide. 

“For me, it was the similarities to Cape May even though we were nearly 4,000 miles away,” said Barb Bassett of Cape May Point. As in Cape May, she said, local birdwatchers were happy to share their knowledge and time.  

“It just goes to show you, the birding community transcends international borders. To me, that was the neatest thing. Birders are birders no matter where you are in the world,” said Bassett, who volunteers at the Cape May Bird Observatory and is president of the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club. “Overlaying this were the readily apparent similarities to Cape May, even though we were halfway around the world.” 

For birders, the most striking similarity between the most southern tip of Sweden and the most southern point of New Jersey are the spectacles of masses of birds traveling in migration. Migrating birds in both places take off from a narrow point of land, cross a stretch of water, then continue their journey southward.  

That late September day, the wind in Falsterbo was strong and the air had that first chill that teases the oncoming winter. At the tip of the Falsterbo peninsula, Swedish birders and visitors were positioned before dawn at a place called Nabben, at the edge of the water and within view of the lighthouse. 

There was no disappointment under the brightening sky. Hundreds of songbirds shot by, like so many tiny rockets. A bird called the Blue Tit, quite like a North American chickadee, flew low in clusters. Little flocks would descend onto reeds just before the water crossing, their tiny feet grasping bending phragmites for just seconds before they lifted off again. 

Hundreds of Chaffinches went barreling by alongside and above them. This European finch is about the size of a house sparrow, but more slender with a rusty red body and white wing bars, the most visible marking as they soared by. 

LaPuma’s visit to Falsterbo was the beginning of a nearly decade-long friendship between Falsterbo Fågelstationand the Cape May Bird Observatory. Magnus Grylle has been long associated with the Falsterbo Fågelstation and has been manager since last year.  

“The whole setting is very similar. Locally, it’s the end of the world. The whole habitat, the whole ecology, and water, wind, the lighthouse,” said Grylle. “Everything is very similar in that sense. Then in addition to that, how humans have been dealing with the place is also quite similar. We have a canal, you have a canal. At least in our case, it was dug by hand. It was done during the war [WWII] and yours was as well.” 

During the fall, Cape May is less busy than at its summer peak, but it still welcomes many visitors, with enough warm days to satisfy beach goers into October. Tourism in Falsterbo peaks with an annual horse show in July. There are still crowds of visitors in August, but by September there are far fewer tourists. But there are plenty of birders—and golfers. In fact, birdwatchers must walk or bike across an active golf course before reaching the lighthouse. 

Falsterbo is smaller than Cape May, with far fewer hotels and restaurants and no boardwalk or big commercial zone. There are hotels and rentals available in the area in autumn. The train from Copenhagen is about 90 minutes and driving from the Danish city takes less than an hour.  

Falsterbo in the fall has the feeling of the Cape May area decades ago, when it was much quieter off season. In late September, Falsterbo seems to be catching its breath after a flood of summer tourists but is still open for business at a much-reduced pace. 

The signs of the recent summer crowds are everywhere, and dozens of tiny beach huts, used as dressing rooms, were already shuttered and deserted along the top of the dunes.

Friends group grows  

The friendship between Falsterbo and Cape May soon became part of a bigger network. 

Around the time he was visiting Falsterbo, LaPuma heard from a third and then a fourth bird observatory. Spurn Bird Observatory in Yorkshire, United Kingdom, was the next to announce that it too belonged in a circle of observatories all located on a peninsula with rich migration. 

“Curiously, they emailed right around the same time I was visiting Falsterbo and pitched the idea of creating a ‘twin bird observatory,’” he noted. 

He said the Spurn Bird Observatory pointed out similarities, including both being on a south-facing peninsula, and having an active lighthouse.  

Not long after, a fourth bird observatory found the group—Long Point Bird Observatory in Ontario, Canada.  

Brett Ewald, director of Cape May Bird Observatory, now manages the four-party relationship from his office in the Northwood Center in Cape May Point. He has regular quarterly calls with the group and speaks fondly of the international bird observatory partners. Before Covid, the partners started a swap of young professionals, and Ewald would like to restart the program. 

Falsterbo and Cape May Bird Observatory both conduct research and provide outreach to the public. But Cape May has more extensive educational programs and more bird walks. Both bird observatories count migrating birds, providing important data on how specific species are faring. Falsterbo counts birds crossing over at Nabben. In the fall, Cape May Bird Observatory counts songbirds and others at Higbee Wildlife Management Area; hawks and other birds on the hawk watch platform at Cape May Point State Park, and seabirds at the seawatch in Avalon. 

Cape May’s hawk watch was started by Pete Dunne, the first director of the Cape May Bird Observatory, in the 1970s. Falsterbo has been counting birds at Nabben since the 1940s.  

Grylle said the bird counters are spotting important changes in bird behavior that even casual observers can notice. Some bird species are changing their range and moving north. While it might be climate related, it could also be due to food supply or other factors. 

One of those species is the Great Egret, which was not seen at all in Falsterbo 20 years ago. Now it is a regular. Ewald said that’s similar to the sudden appearance of the White Ibis in a rookery in northern Cape May County. There was one breeding pair in Ocean City in 2020. “Now there were over 400 nests in 2023 in just one location,” Ewald said. 

In Sweden, on September 25, 2023, the counters at Nabben recorded 157,000 Chaffinches, by far the most common bird, and 1,330 Blue Tits. Other top birds were 4,320 European siskins and 1,570 barn swallows. 

As the Swedish counters recorded sightings near the Falsterbo lighthouse that morning, a Dutch visitor stared at the sky without bothering to use binoculars to watch the stream of songbirds go by. 

“You love this, don’t you?” she whispered to the Cape May visitors, as she watched the intense movement of birds in the whipping wind near a gazebo that serves as Falsterbo’s counting station.  

International visitors in Falsterbo that day were from Denmark, Belgium, and the U.K., in addition to Cape May Point. 

Cape May also shares an international appeal. “There are always groups coming here from Scandinavia, whether it’s Finland or Sweden. There are always people coming from the U.K. In that respect, it’s very similar. When I was walking around Falsterbo, I would find out there were people that had been to Cape May,” said La Puma. 

Indeed, last September, an English-speaking tour group in Falsterbo included a couple from New York, who had been to the Cape May Bird Observatory’s spring weekend. Bassett had also met two birders from Falsterbo at the Cape May hawk watch in the weeks before she traveled to Sweden. 

Both the Cape May hawk watch and the Falsterbo counting station are ideally situated to watch bird migration, and both are magnets for birdwatchers visiting the area. There is a difference, however, that Cape May visitors immediately noticed. 

In Cape May, interpretive naturalists work on the hawk watch platform near the hawk counter, welcoming visitors and calling out birds in flight. There are often crowds on the platform, particularly on weekends or on strong migration days.  

“Up at the hawk watch every day, it’s a cacophony,” said Ewald. Cape May Bird Observatory’s mission includes education, so the naturalists are there to provide information while the counter works. One of the charming features of the Cape May hawk watch platforms are birders spotting other birders, some friends that appear in the area only during migration. 

In Falsterbo, the counters are quiet and so are the birders standing nearby. An excited whoop or cheer might be heard in the sometimes noisy, birding-out-loud Cape May, but Swedish birders near the counters were speaking in hushed tones, a noticeable cultural difference. 

Grylle recalls the difference from his visit to Cape May, and he pointed to an area in front of the lighthouse, far from the counters at Nabben. “This is the talking area,” he said.  

By afternoon in Falsterbo, many of the birders move from watching the morning flight to Ljungen, a field known as the heath, to watch for raptors. 

People are migrants too 

For humans, there can be a strong pull to the places where migratory bird spectacles occur. Large bird flights in migration are as natural as leaves changing in the fall, but to stand amidst them feels like a privileged pass inside one of the most mystifying life cycles on the planet. 

Hans Wulffsberg was watching hawks fly over Ljungen on that September Sunday afternoon. He’d been there many times before. In fact, the Danish psychiatrist first visited Falsterbo as a six-year-old after asking his parents to take him there. 

“I love migration places,” said Wulffsberg. In fact, that interest took him to Cape May a decade ago when he was visiting relatives in New York. 

“I don’t know that much about the U.S., but it’s the first place you go to. The Monarchs are fantastic. You don’t get that in Europe,” he said. 

Cape May and Falsterbo both attract birding celebrities. Danish birder Klaus Malling Olsen was visiting Falsterbo, his favorite birding place, last September. Olsen is a well-known expert on gulls and the author of Gulls of the World. 

Seated at the edge of the Ljungen heath, Olsen said he visited Cape May twice and he remembered the visits for record sightings of Ospreys and Peregrines, birds that were not common in Sweden or Denmark. 

Tony Leukering was counting hawks in October 1989 on the Cape May hawk watch when Olsen made his first visit to Cape May. He remembers one day when there was a large Peregrine flight and meeting the Danish birdwatcher there. “He was hanging around for a week. We had 157 Peregrines that day. The previous record was 140,” said Leukering, who was visiting Cape May this past October from Ohio. 

Olsen said he adapted some of the things he picked up in Cape May to Denmark and Sweden. He began doing birding education that combined lectures and guided days in the field. He also recalled meeting local Cape May birders and American ornithology legend, the late Roger Tory Peterson, whose field guides were the bible for bird identification for decades. 

Olsen said there may be more dramatic flights of some raptors, like honey buzzards in Falsterbo for instance, but Cape May has more of other types of birds, like falcons and osprey. 

What Olsen loves about the Falsterbo area and surroundings is that each day can be different, and sometimes the next day is even better. “Some of my best experiences with birds have been here…Skane, the southern area of Sweden, is probably one of the most diverse areas for watching birds in the world,” he said. “If you have strong winds or hurricanes, you move to the northwest for the seabird migration. If you have fine autumn weather, you can see raptors. On easterly winds, you’ve got the seabird migration from the Baltics, and in southerly winds or if there’s a haze all over, you maybe have small passerines come down for resting. The winds are amazing as well all times of year.” 

On that September Sunday, the Ljungen heath was busy. Birders lined up with spotting scopes and cameras and looked at the skies over a vast field. Cows milled around nearby, sometimes between the birdwatchers.  

Grylle was there, identifying the raptors for his Cape May guests. Bassett likened the heath to the Cape May hawk watch without a platform. She said the early flight at the Nabben area by the lighthouse is much more like the morning flight of songbirds, or passerines, at Higbee Wildlife Management Area.  

There can be lulls in the sky, just as there are in Cape May, as birdwatchers wait for the next surge. By mid-afternoon, the slightly noisier crowd at the heath saw a small squadron of raptors and a White-tailed Eagle making their way across the sky. There was a murmur across the group. A Marsh Hen, Red Kite, and European Kestrel came into view. Then there was a flurry of Sparrow Hawks, similar to the Sharp-shinned Hawks that migrate through Cape May. 

Grylle said large waves of birds in migration begin earlier in Falsterbo than in Cape May, and the peak comes in early October.  

Grylle also took visitors to watch the observatory’s highly organized “ringing” or banding as it’s known in the U.S.—the process of safely capturing birds in mist nets and attaching a small metal ring to their legs so scientists can identify them if found in other parts of the world. 

This process reveals migratory patterns and other information about the movement, life span, and distribution of individual birds. Falsterbo bands 20,000 to 25,000 birds a year on average, and recoveries have been made throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Bird banding plays a bigger role in the research of the friendship partner bird observatories than it does in Cape May.  

Cape May Bird Observatory has a banding project in the South Cape May Meadow. In 2022, 7,600 songbirds representing 96 species were banded. The observatory also tracks birds using transmitter technology developed by Cellular Tracking Technologies, where LaPuma now works as director of Global Market Development. Ewald said the technology is used in the Cape May meadows, and northern waterthrush and red-eyed vireo are among the species tracked. 

“The main focus of that banding in the meadows is all about determining habitat use and how long the birds are staying,” Ewald said. 

The fact that bird observatories are collecting data on migration has provided powerful insights into the rise and decline in numbers of species. For birdwatchers, there is an important personal mental checklist of which species appear to do better and worse each year. There is also the thrill of just watching them.  

“Witnessing migration in another country just ties the world together,” said Bassett. “It’s a truly amazing natural phenomenon. To see it in another part of the world is really special.” 

Especially when that place looks so much like home.