Turmoil in winter eagle webcam
Text: Urmas Sellis
Images: Aivar, Urmas and Joosep
Video: fireblade1, from forum
Translation: Liis
The past week has offered the winter eagle webcam viewers plenty of experiences to remember in all sorts of weather. In snow blizzard as in sunshine, the eagles are nearly always there. Mostly of course our largest birds of prey – white-tailed eagles:
On some favourable days there could be more than 20 white-tailed eagles present, the camera view caught at most 12 different individuals. Most of them are without rings but we have also seen birds with rings from Estonia and Finland. Tiit Randla believes that at present those of the white-tailed eagles that migrate at all are moving back to their breeding areas (for instance even birds hatched in Lapland have been seen). The voluntary webcam operators have done their work so well that the codes of all ringed birds that have visited the site have been read, and we will make a summary of them all with Renno’s assistance, some time (today there were 4 ringed eagles).
In the afternoon today, February 20th, I was amazed when on opening the webcam I found a golden eagle pecking at the boar haunch! It was no stray juvenile but an adult golden eagle (probably a male):
The golden eagle is not exactly a frequent visitor in camera view, more often buzzards are seen there: