looduskalender.ee

 

We live on the ground floor of an apartment house and immediately facing our balcony is a grove with many squirrels, nightingale singing night and day and in the evening hares sitting on the lawn in front of the balcony. In other words, a brisk life goes on, you can sit the whole day on the balcony and observe their doings.

 

One morning, on going out on the balcony, I discovered that a thrush had decided to come and live on our balcony: an industrious nest building went on. I sat there for several hours and watched the doings of the thrush – going in and out, each time with a new tuft of grass in the beak. The bird didn’t pay any attention to me sitting there next to it.

 

By now the nest is finished and the bird sits incubating her eggs. Since the Eurovision song contest was going on at the same time as the bird arrived (and we liked the Estonian song very much) we called the bird Stig Rästa (thrush is "rästas" in Estonian). Later the male bird started visiting the nest too so we split the name between them. Now one is Stig and the other Rästa.