Island keepers Daan Vreugdenhil and Mirte Kruit are stuck on the Marker Wadden

Daan Vreugdenhil and Mirte Kruit are literally stuck on the Marker Wadden island: “We have food with us for three weeks.” The island keepers can’t leave now that the Markermeer lake has frozen over for the most part.

“It’s deathly quiet. Couldn’t be better really,” Daan tells Omroep Flevoland on February 11th. “It’s nice and cold, and everything around us is frozen solid.”
Tuesday morning the pair stepped onto the boat to the island. “It is very special to be in the middle of the Netherlands while it’s deathly quiet. The wind died down completely this morning and we only occasionally hear a bird, a breath of wind, or the crackling of the ice.”

Bird research
They’re researching which bird species are currently residing on the Marker Wadden and keep the small hamlet with around 20 small homes running. They don’t know when they’ll get off the island again: “We have brought three weeks worth of food with us and we’ll see what happens. The ice won’t be fully gone when the thaw sets in. Depending on the wind it can start drifting a lot and if the harbour is filled with ice it can take an extra week before we get picked up again.”

More background information, beautiful photos, film images and a spoken explanation can be found on the website of Vroege Vogels, BNNVARA.