looduskalender.ee

It should be no great secret any more that we are in a serious depression wave. So much more surprising then that the commercial TV channels no longer air animal programmes like they did during the economic depression 10 years ago. But Looduskalender offers you remedies!

 

The bird eating-house season started:great tit and tree sparrow.

From November 15 the eagle winter webcamera is up again in a faraway bog in northwestern Estonia http://www.looduskalender.ee/node/1943. Coming soon are also last year’s great success PigTV and the birds’ feeding-table camera. 
Weatherman Gennadi Skromnov promises that ravens, magpies, foxes and raccoon dogs will at least be on show on Eagle TV: „But five eagles visited the site as well during the week.“ Eagle Club member Tiit Randal adds that to start with there are really only ravens and crows: „The eagles grow more confident about feeding on the ground when there is ice all around. They love to rob the ravens when they are getting away with large chunks.“ Every eagle has its own individual face, or rather tail –by the tail, and differences in the plumage, they can be differentiated. Of course many eagles also carry rings on their feet and that will be convenient for the Eagle People to zoom in on from the right-hand part of the picture, showing a perch tree. Tiit Randla tells us that eagles with 10 different rings visited the feeding place last year: from the Kola Peninsula, Lapland, Sweden and Finland. So our eagles are like ambassadors of Father Christmas himself – the eagles have very sharp eyes too – looking to see that we keep on doing good things.

 

White-tailed eagle.
 

One such ambassador of Father Christmas was hovering on its storm-torn wings outside our window last midweek. Aotäht commented that it is not really neccessary to keep watch this early. But most likely the white-tailed eagle had arrived from the sea to the lake-shore to look for prey, and the strong winds forced him up across the shore pine forest to our windows. The black-headed gulls were also still there, shrieking and looking for titbits in the shallow waterfront. But there is nothing more to be washed down from the pond to the sea, after the last big seaweed banks rolled down a month ago – the vegetation period of the lake is finished for the year. The seawater at the coast does not freeze yet, but the shore waves are full of jingling ice needles. Where the water washes over the shore the sand is soft and the surface slushy, but outside the reach of the warm seawater the sand is frozen and hard as stone. The seaweed banks, that reached half a meter in height this year, are frozen as well. On Catherine’s Day (Kadripäev) Father Winter throws a cold rock into the sea and a warm rock into the well, and then changes them around on George’s Day (Jüripäev) as old people’s sayings go.