On the female fish in the foreground we can see marks of the spawning, a furrow on the body above the anal fin

River trout; Brown trout  Jõeforell or hõrnas  Salmo trutta morpha fario

Happy beaver year, nice nightjar year, a splendid shaggy ink cap year, a joyous Wulf’s peat moss year, colourful ghost orchid year and of course a spicy eutric histosol year and … Without coordination with any organisation I would like to add – a great catfish year to you all!

The animal of the year, as all the others crowned with the same title, will be in a constant year-long limelight of words and images and surely by this we will be much wiser already at Christmas in theriology, ornithology, mycology, botany, pedology-edaphology,  or even dendrology and other areas.

Jackal; Golden jackal     Šaakal or  harilik šaakal      Canis aureus

We promised  to present the impact of the jackals in Estonia on the surrounding biodiversity.

Red deer         Punahirv        Cervus elaphus

Large red deer bulls, or stags, weigh up to a couple of hundred kilos and the body length can reach a couple of metres, shoulder height up to one and a quarter of a metre.

We have not yet seen the females on the feeding ground this season; they have no antlers and their weight reaches only a hundred kilos – so the sexual dimorphism is visually noticeable.

At the end of the year, the Ministry of the Environment announced that it would support hunting of migratory geese to prevent damage to farmers. The Estonian Ornithological Society's Bird Protection Commission continues to believe that hunting geese on their spring migration is unethical and does not solve the problem more effectively than using non-lethal deterrence methods.