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On Friday in Matsalu, near the Koonga store

 

 

With pleasant weather no one cares to migrate, particularly not when there is no shortage of food. During the Matsalu nature film festival a crane flock of a couple of hundred birds were foraging in the fields next to the petrol station but in many good crane locations only emptiness yawned.

 

The change in weather on Sunday and the strong wind that turned north-westerly brings thousands of migrating cranes from Finland, and we will see how things are with north-western Russia. Crane migration can be seen until the end of November but it depends on the weather.

 

The migrants forage in harvested fields on spilled grain as well as the mice feasting there; sometimes potato fields are also visited which of course is not to the farmer’s liking. Night lodgings may be quite far from the daytime feeding areas. They fly in „crane triangles“ with one leg often longer than the other, and the far-reaching trumpeting call in autumn nature is familiar to all.

 

The large grey-plumaged adult birds have a red patch on the crown of the head; a white stripe runs from eye to neck. The bushy feather plume at the tail consists in fact of decorative elongated wing feathers. The large flight feathers and the legs are black, the beak greenish brown. Adult cranes are over a metre in length, the wing span is two and a half metres and weight around 5-6 kilos. Young birds are still smaller than the adults, with a slightly lighter plumage and the head in brownish shades.

 

Well-known stopping places in Estonia for cranes along their autumn migration are more than thirty: around Matsalu Bay (in Põgari, Rannajõe…), western Estonia, also in Lahemaa and eastern Estonia. There  can be up to ten thousand cranes in Matsalu by evenings.

 

The migration of cranes can be followed in the e-Biodiversity pages: HERE

 

We will watch migrants in the next few days and weeks.