A time for goose, thrush, finch flocks
Text: Eet ja Aarne Tuule, Tallinn Bird Club
Photo: Aarne Tuule
Translation: Liis
Geese at a field.
There is quite enough snow still in the forests of Harjumaa, but in places it is snow mixed half and half with water. Large areas are flooded. In open landscapes nesting sites are already occupied by lapwings and skylarks, but we also meet the same kinds of birds still only resting on their migration journeys, sometimes in quite large flocks.
Groups of bean geese and white-fronted geese fly around everywhere. Thousands of them gather in favourable places. Food is scarce, and so the geese search for feeding grounds, often literally fumbling in a fog.
Ducks paddle around in the pools that have formed in the fields. Everywhere hundred-bird flocks roam about on food forays: mew gulls, black-headed gulls, fieldfares, starlings, chaffinches, and, in smaller groups, many other bird species.
Tree stands are echoing from the song of chaffinches, redbreasts, wrens, song thrushes, redwings, yellowhammers, tits and others. Today, 07.04, bullfinches and goldcrests too were very much in a singing mood. Dunnocks and wheatears have arrived. This is an exciting period and surely worth while to go and see it all in fields, forests, and most of all, at the seashore.
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