Ospreys and Eagles in Finland ~ 2009 & 2010

[Olga]

The female was on the nest at about 21:00. But the male was there too for long times, sitting tight on the cavity of nest bottom, and peking the head down to the cavity.
21:01

21:02


Peeking to the bottom cavity again
21:13


21:12 the female was eating on the edge of the nest - I'm not sure who was sitting alone on the nest before this situation.. Now there is sitting the male anyway. He sat there all the time when the female ate alone and all in peace.



I saw the female eating for about 22 minutes. Her ring shined in the evening sun. Here male is looking to the bottom of the nest.



My last shot for today, at 21:34. After that the male was sitting there alone as long I wathced the cam.. Well I' m not 100% sure it was the male who stayed there



My pics from Osprays in Seili ( some few pictures are google hits of Ospray eggs and a newborn) today in Photobucet (the pics are not in the very best order..
http://s281.photobucket.com/albums/kk22 ... =slideshow

[ame]

i don't think it is possible to see the eggs in the nest, because the hole is so deep. the hole must be very deep, because the birds go in the hole by their shoulders, almost half the way of their backs when the peek down there. and when they sit in the hole they also sit so deep that their backs are only about an inch over the rims of the hole... and if the eggs also have that camouflage colouring as your pictures show.... all this taken into account i think it is a 'mission impossible' to see the eggs in that nest...

BUT i'm almost certain that there is at least one egg in the nest and that they are incubating, not just warming the nest.

[ame]

in the newspaper 'Helsingin Sanomat' there was an article on May 1st (yesterday) about the suppositios about ospreys 'mating-for-life' and 'fidelity-to-one-spouse' being uncovered to be a false belief.

A Finnish ornithologist Matts Finnlund has examined an extensive amount of web cam picture material from both the Hailuoto and the Nauvo nests from previous years. he has discovered that the male, arriving to the nest first and thus conquering the territory, mated with one female after another as they arrived at the nest. he thinks that the females left the nest when the male stopped bringing food to them and had thereafter been replaced by another female arriving later. he thinks that another possibility is that a later arriving female had expelled the earlier female.

above i tried to give a short resume of the article's content, which i think was very interesting. i would assume that the male tries to conquer a territory and a nest which is as appealing as possible (meaning as favourable for breeding as possible). the females arrive later and fly around checking the available selection of territories and males and evaluate their abilities of feeding (they go 'nest shopping' and check which male has 'the biggest pay check'). during this checking period the birds mate, too. maybe if the eggs don't start to develop the female moves on... (in the olden days in the countryside in Finland a young human couple spent nights together with their their families consent till the girl got pregnant, even though it was 'a sin' in the eyes of the church. only after the pregnancy was noted, the couple was married, because a marriage without offspring was useless.)
it is possible that the females have a fights over the best bachelors (competition about the most able males in the darwinian sense). on the other hand, the males may choose among the females, too. a male may not feed a female if he 'thinks' she is not attractive enough. the female 'understands' the hint and leaves to look for a more favourable male.

as more information is obtained it seems that the monogamy of birds is only human wishful thinking...
maybe BSs behave in a manner somewhat similar to the ospreys? who knows... maybe all the ladystorks found mates more south this spring and that's why Padis is alone now. (i think we all agree that Padis and his nest are handsome enough even for a more demanding taste... ) these web cams really give valuable information about the behaviour of wild birds, impossible to obtain in any other way!

[ame]

i have uploaded my pictures taken on Thursday Apr 30th in the P-bucket now and they are in proper time order, too. you can have a look at them in the address below:

http://s561.photobucket.com/albums/ss54 ... o30042009/

(the picture s37 is missing because there was no such picture at all. i lost count there )

i haven't taken any pictures now because there isn't actually much new to see. most of the time there is only one bird sitting in the nest, most likely incubating, and the weather is gorgeous: almost no wind at all and the sun is shining bright, ( the weather's 'like a bride' as Finns say )

besides: Renandeli has covered yesterday! (see the mail above)

[ame]

i happened to capture this picture by accident when i came in. does anyone have an idea of what is happening here?



and the next picture is looks like there was nothing special going on at all.

[ame]

hi Millan (, and others, too )
i have a few more pictures to demonstrate how small the nest in Nauvo is. have a look at this:





i was simply chocked to see these WTEs here for the first time , because they were so huge. i think they should really think seriously one more time before they try to take this nest as their home. it's not big enough for those gigantic birds.

and here's two more pictures showing that the ospreys aren't really so big after all even though they have a wing spread of almost 2 meters:





the crows aren't much smaller than the ospreys and they are not afraid to visit the nest even though the owner is at home! the ospreys can't leave the nest unguarded for 2 minutes if they want to have their eggs and chicks safe!

[Olga]

Ame, I think that the female was flying there around the nest for some minutes before she landed on the nest. I don't know exactly when she landed on the nest, but the male was standing there ready to leave at once when possible.

I happen to have only the picture of the male standing alone on the nest at 16:34. ( the next of my picture serie is taken at 15:56, the female standing to the right)



at 16:38 Ame saw the 'strange' view of the flying Ospray over the nest (look ame's post abowe)

So, at 16:56:51 is my first picture of the female on the nest - the male was now sitting but very soon he stood up.





The female is now alone on the nest.







At 16:58:23 the female looks tightly towards the cavity (and the 'secrets' there Then she bends her head down towarsd the cavity





at 16:59:43 - Oh, I love it, to sit here and rest..


at 18:43


PS Ame, nothing special happened! You was right.

I'm laughing to my explanation for 'nothing happened' with 9 pictures..

[ame]

i don't know, Renandeli, i am still puzzled with the picture i got... . it seems to me as if there are two birds fighting in flight, with their feet connected in the air... and the damsell in the tower watching the knigths fighting.. i don't know. and after that shot everything was 'normal'.

[Olga]

ame

: i happened to capture this picture by accident when i came in. does anyone have an idea of what is happening here?

Oh, now that I look more carefully I see thatthere must be two osprays in the air on your picture! There are seen more wings than of only one ospray!

There has been some visitor on that very moment, it lasted maybe one second, less than ten.. Great capture anyway.

But after that I saw always the same ospray, female, on the nest, after the male had left. I was away out in the garden between 19:30-21:00, I opened the PC at 21:30.

I made two small slideshows of the osprays' life on the nest today

1) Incubating in the afternoon from 15:08 - to 16:59

http://s281.photobucket.com/albums/kk22 ... =slideshow


2) The sleepy female on the nest from 17.11 - 19:34

http://s281.photobucket.com/albums/kk22 ... =slideshow

[Millan]

Hi,

Ther are now 2 eggs in Seili, I give hier address to find one photo of that! Signatur Control has given that in Seili-size in Finland.

http://www.aijaa.com/v.php?i=4127476.jpg

[Olga]

Hi,

Ther are now 2 eggs in Seili, I give hier address to find one photo of that! Signatur Control has given that in Seili-size in Finland.

http://www.aijaa.com/v.php?i=4127476.jpg

Hurray!! I said I saw them, not the two eggs at same time, but one by one - maybe they were 'fresh' at those moments and then they have rolled in hide into the cavity! But both osprays have been turning them, supposedly, and watching them for so may times heads in the cavity .. Great! Extremly interesting news, thanks Millan!

edit : I can't help borrowing the picture here from aijaa.com.

[Olga]

Late evening in Seili, at 21.30



Night, at 22:36

[ame]

hi there! i think you are right, there are eggs in those pictures!! not only one but two!

i think i can see eggs in some of my pictures, too! it's a shame we don't had video picture from the nest. it's easier to see what's there in a moving picture, when you change pictures rapidly. then you can see the differencies between pictures. here's an example from yesterday evening (about 17.54-) when the birds were changing shifts:



there in the middle i think there are two shiny eggs. (but i think they must be rather white, not brownish like in you pictures Renandeli? ) i guess they have move some big branches from the front side of the nest. it doesn't look as deep as it did before.
you can see the eggs better if you go P-bucket and take a look at the slide-show of yesterdays pictures:
http://s561.photobucket.com/albums/ss54 ... =slideshow

and when there are eggs there are egg hunters, too:



this one just flew by.

[Olga]

In Wikipedia in Finnish it is said that the colour of the Osprey egg is kanelin ruskea, cinnamon brown. I can only guess how wide is the colour scale and why are the colours so different

An abandoned Ospray egg in Finland, light brown spots.



dark brown spots, some of them almost blackish



dark and light greyish spots, an almost white looking egg

[ame]

there seems to be a lot of variation in the colour of the eggs, but they all seem to be rather light anyways. they all seem to have a camouflage pattern, so that viewed from the air above they are not seen as quite obvious targets when mummy is not sitting on them.
in the picture i posted above the light from the sun comes from the side towards the camera and from a rather low angle (it was nearly 6 pm). therefore the light is reflected from the eggs towards the camera, and they then glow and shine and look rather white even if they are coloroured.

[Olga]

For some minutes ago I saw the egg, the whole egg, in Marjaniemi ospray nest. It was full of cinnamon brown spots on almost white bottom, very beautiful.

Like in this picture, in the middle of the second row - Marjaniemi egg's spots are lesser, but the egg is full of them) or like in the lowermost row, right.
BTW I have seen Marjaniemi screenshots in several web pages - not V.Pulkkinen's pages. I had taken one but my paint has disappeared from my PC. I can't

[ame]

wau, the birds in Hailuoto have been quick then!
was it only one egg there?? i haven't been able to follow that camera, too... i just have had maybe one look at there per day and seen the bird sitting there, looking as if it were incubating.

[ame]

BTW I have seen Marjaniemi screenshots in several web pages - not V.Pulkkinen's pages.

i suppose they are everywhere... i think even you have some of those pictures still left in your P-bucket
i think they should add a logo in their camera picture saying 'NO COPYING!' :protest: .. or something more obvious... people just don't know.

[ame]

i'm going through my old pictures to see whether eggs could be seen in them. i think this is one of the earliest 'maybes':



it' taken on Apr 30th at 11.10.51. the male is on the right looking down between his legs. right there under his beak there is a white roundish spot that could be an egg. The female standing on the left may have a half-eaten fish in her left paw. it is difficult to say anything certain, because the sun has been shining so bright that the picture is almost over-exposed. a cloudy weather (like today) would be more favourable for taking good pictures.

[ame]

hihii! i saw the egg in Hailuoto, too!! everything seems to be going fine on this front.