Looduskalender

borje wrote:Urmas,
You are absolutely right. It is a honey buzzard- Size, black back and striped bellow.
Sorry for us all that we missed the Cucko, but a honey buzzard we don´t see so often either.
Börje

But The Eurasian Cuckoo is very similar exept for the beak

June 19th
good morning!

this morning the catch is somewhat meager: only in three Pontu pictures there's a bird whose tail has the profile of a cuckoo's tail, a round tip (at 4.51)

http://pontu.eenet.ee/saunja/2012-06-19 ... -04-51.jpg
in the picture at 4.49 the posture of the bird is i think a typical calling posture.


i think it was really a cuckoo because on the video recorded at the same time a cuckoo calls (he is rather lazy this time) and after that there's a rustle&schwoozz! at about the proper time, that is when the bird disappears from P-pictures. - i hope Mr and Mrs Cuckoo don't have plans about the nest of Mr and Mrs Hawfinch.
so this time the picture and "soundtrack" are separate.
gif maker


birds don't move much on these windy and cloudy and rainy mornings. if there were any other birds this morning they were so small that they weren't caught in the Pontu net.

macdoum wrote: But The Eurasian Cuckoo is very similar exept for the beak

i know birds of prey soo poorly that i take Urmas' word for this.
(regarding to most birds almost anyone else's word is better than mine... )

i think vainamoinen knows birds of prey better than Little Grey Birds. i wish that he would take a look at the Saturday's bird. too.
it's here: viewtopic.php?p=145153#p145153

i checked the Pontu pictures from yesterday evening and found this at 22.30 - 22.37:
gif maker

there's a creepycrawler, some big black insect clibing up on the left side of the treetrunk in the middle!
it's beginning its journey here.

it's almost impossible to spot it in the video if you don't know where to look. it looked like a big butterfly caterpillar. there are two black spots side by side in the beginning and the caterpillar is the one on the right. -this is a perfect video for those who also like to watch grass growing or paint drying.

ame wrote:i checked the Pontu pictures from yesterday evening and found this at 22.30 - 22.37:
gif maker

there's a creepycrawler, some big black insect clibing up on the left side of the treetrunk in the middle!
it's beginning its journey here.

it's almost impossible to spot it in the video if you don't know where to look. it looked like a big butterfly caterpillar. there are two black spots side by side in the beginning and the caterpillar is the one on the right. -this is a perfect video for those who also like to watch grass growing or paint drying.

ame,you now have a duty to identify the caterpillar,else we will be wondering forevermore which one it was

http://www.discoverlife.org/20/q?guide=Caterpillars

June 20th
good morning!
the first bird in the Pontu net was the cuckoo again.

it came at 3.50 to the upmost branches up-right (out of live cam view), then changed place to the back of the middle trunk, invisible again, and then finally it came to the back branch.
online gif animator
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_1XaZnth4k

there it sat for nearly 20 minutes doing very little: it just sat and looked around and preened a little. (i'll give only the links to these videos because there isn't much more to see than is already in the gifs. but you can watch the cuckoo and enjoy the beautiful morning concert of other birds of course.)
online gif animator
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eko9DoZ6F1E

then finally it made it little trip to a lower branch, returned to the back and began to cuckoo loud. here one can see how it is really pumping out the voice with all its power.
here it also makes a few coc's without the koo's, the voices which have given name to the bird in Finnish: khak! => käki.

here are some portraits of the cuckoo, cut out of Pontu pictures at 4.05 and 4.08:
..

at 4.10 the looong tail and (with little imagination) also the nearly equally long wing can be seen.


here's the link to the Pontu pictures: http://pontu.eenet.ee/saunja/2012-06-20 ... -03-54.jpg
change the time to see other pictures.

in 6.54 Pontu picture there was a little bird on the right branch.
http://pontu.eenet.ee/saunja/2012-06-20 ... -06-54.jpg

it looked like a nuthatch. i checked the video and it did come in to the live camera view, too. in fact it came to pose to the camera.
online gif animator

this is maybe not the best side of the nuthatch. it looked a bit ragged altogether...

at 7.24 a great tit visited the nest. it was missed by the Pontu camera but i happened to see it myself, live in action.

live action

macdoum wrote:ame,you now have a duty to identify the caterpillar,else we will be wondering forevermore which one it was

http://www.discoverlife.org/20/q?guide=Caterpillars

i think the butterflies there are from the Americas, aren't they?

i decided to take the simplest solution to this problem: in Finnish haapa = aspen and perhonen is butterfly. so the nest tree is an aspen and therefore the butterflies and the caterpillars there are haapaperhonen which is poplar admiral in English (Limenitis populi).
here's a picture of the caterpillar:


it's not black but in the bright spotlight of the evening sun it migth look rather dark.
the adults are almost entirely black on top and the main colour on the undersides is orange.
..
these pictures are from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poplar_Admiral

adults hatch beginning from the third week of June. caterpillars live high in big aspens and poplars and eat their leaves. i think there's enough circumstancial evidence to decide that it was a poplar admiral caterpillar.

i saw one big dark butterfly hovering on the nest on Saturday, but was unable to capture it. later on Monday evening i recorded one butterfly flying above the nest. its wings flashed yellow/orange but i'm not sure was it big enough for a poplar admiral....?


EDIT: i had another look at the P-pictures of the crawler = caterpillar. at 22.36 it had proceeded up on an evenly grey surface and was in shadow so i think here the colours are ok. it is not black but something which could be green. i've encircled it here and drawn a line which shows where it begins and end and at what height.

June 21st: Happy Summer Solstice!
this is the longest day in the year.
it seems to be a lovely day in the forest: birds singing and the sun is shining. it's perfectly calm still. usually by this time the wind has already started after night.

i'm still downloading P pictures so i don't know what the catch today will be....

the cuckoo was here early in the morning. it came at first light at 3.30 and landed outside the live camera view. in Pontu pictures it can be seen on far left first.
it began to call right away. then it changed places and finally landed on the back branch and continued calling there.
gif maker

here it is just in the middle behind the nest at 3.35.




the camera disconnected for a while but the cuckoo hadn't stopped calling. it also made other funny voices and quite a few imperfect cuckoo's where there was only the cuc but the koo remained missing.

at 3.44 the cuckoo went silent and looked around for come time... then it changed place, again to the left and unfortunately out of live cam view. in Pontu pictures it is just barely visible behind the left branch.
gif maker

at 3.54 it flew from left to right and stayed there on the right branch.
gif maker

a chaffinch came to have a look at the cuckoo. from Pontu picture at 3.56. it seems that the chaffinch has raised its head feathers and as if the cuckoo had lowered his head and for to balance that lifted his tail. both seem to be watching each other.


the chaffinch was on the right branch for few seconds visible to the live camera, too.

some portraits cut out of Pontu pictures. at 3.54:


at 4.04:


the cuckoo called no more, just made some funny voices, like clearing up his throat.


finally at 4.05 the cuckoo took off, and also the chaffinch seemed to be still there, as if making sure that the cuckoo really left.

at 7.16 a bluetit visited the nest briefly. it didn't seem to find anything.

that seems to be all from this morning.

Tits now grew the first generation of chicks and a lot of young birds fly from their nests. Will the parents lay the eggs for the second time?

June 22nd
good morning
the camera was disconnected during the night and it reconnected at 4.32. there was a fresh-sounding breeze blowing already that early. the Pontu camera had started at 4.16.

http://pontu.eenet.ee/saunja/2012-06-22 ... -04-16.jpg


i didn't spot any birds in the P pictures this morning. if the cuckoo was steady with his schedule he would have been there while the camera was still off.

Asteria: i think that all the little birds who were collecting downs and other nest materials were building their second nests. i also guess that they have already started incubating because they haven't been here anymore. and furthermore i guess that Mr and Mrs Cuckoo were looking for these nests with thier own plans...