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Green woodpecker(19.04.2012 Western Saaremaa).

 

Early in the morning I searched for several hours for green woodpeckers in the Valjala monitoring area (10 × 10 km). After checking nearly 20 spots I finally managed to see this species this year. In one old territory the male appeared and started to call loudly. But to my great surprise I found one more green woodpecker on the western coast of Saaremaa instead where I wasn’t expecting this creature at all. I was looking by telescope at the ducks busy in the bay and suddenly a woodpecker started to call shrilly behind my back. I found the bird, and it was a green woodpecker once more. As of now 6 green woodpecker territories have been found on Saaremaa this year. So this species hasn’t disappeared from Estonia yet. The green woodpecker is the 170th bird species on my 2012 year list and with this I have now seen all the woodpecker species in Estonia.

All afternoon was spent in checking the shores and juniper stands around Karala. Now is the right time to look for the ring ouzel and precisely this area should be the best for finding it. Lots of birds had landed from migration, in the bushes and on roads hundreds or even thousands of passerines were busy – chaffinches, robins, song thrushes, redwings, mistle thrushes, linnets, dunnocks, meadow pipits and others. As new arrivals I saw quite many tree pipits. But although thrushes were everywhere no ring ouzel turned up.

Just in case I looked over the e-mails arrived during the day before I turned in for the night, and found out that a ring ouzel had been seen at noon in Kuressaare. Since the bird had been in the same place already yesterday it was reasonable to assume that maybe it would be there in the evening too. I raced to Kuressaare and as a pleasant surprise the ring ouzel was there – flew around at the edge of the juniper stand. A photo taken earlier in the day of the bird is in the e-Biodiversity data base. My 2012 list now has 172 bird species.