i have finally found one super-super-picture which was lost for a very long time.
it was published in the montly supply magazine of the newspaper
Helsingin Sanomat in March 2010.
it's taken by the nature photographer Jussi Murtosaari a year earlier (i.e. in March 2009)
at an eagle feeding place somewhere in SW Finland.
the magazine got lost in our house as paper sediments are piling up in the corners.
i tried to look for the picture in the internet, without success. today i finally found
the magazine and took a picture of the picture which i've posted here. it's a wretched
replica of the real printed picture which is 48 cm x 22.5 cm in size, but i hope it will
give you some idea of the situation on that opening of the marsh.
(-sorry about the size. i've already re-sized the picture down to 50%.
)
(as a compensation for borrowing the picture i think i can mention that
J. Murtosaari has published a book where there are more pictures of eagles and other creatures. they are accompanied with stories of how these pictures were taken, but alas in Finnish.
there are summaries in English, however. the publisher is Docendo http://www.docendo.fi/tuote/951-0-36084-8)
the text says that there are altogether 36 WTEs captured in this one single photograph!
they are accompanied by the usual entourage of ravens and hooded crows.
i made a re-count of the eagles and i think there are 37 of them! i think they have missed the
one that is flying in the centre back-ground. i missed that, too, on my first count.
when i saw the picture in the magazine for the first time my first thought was that the picture
was just a joke, a collage of several different pictures put together, but later i've realized that
it's a real thing, as we have seen WTEs in flocks on the winter feeding grounds, and reports of
LSEs in flocks on their winter grounds...
EDIT on May 29th 2013: this picture was published again in the monthly supplement of
Helsingin Samomat in April. in the supplement of May 2013 they told that they had studied the
raw picture files and they assured that this picture is genuine and not manipulated
(the first thought that comes in mind nowadays).
they published all the three shots which the photographer had taken of this situation.
the big picture is the middle one.
in the raw picture one can see the edges of the cover of the photography window, too.
Jussi Murtosaari tells that the white spots in the trees were not snow but white feathers.
these get released in the air "like snowing" when young eagles fight for food.
they corrected one major detail though.
the feeding place was situated on the Southern
side of Lake Pyhäjärvi in SW-Finland, and not in Quarken as they wrote in April 2013.
it's funny how two years hunting eagle rings trains ones eyes. on the first time when i saw
this picture i didn't notice that there were ringed eagles among these birds. now i saw
immediately that there are at least six ringed eagles. now i can also see that the age distribution
of these eagles corresponds to the increase on ringed eaglets in Finland: the vast majority of
these eagles are juveniles of 4 or less winters.