Monday, May 01, 2006
More Wildlife
Saturday morning. We were sitting inside the house eating breakfast and planning the day ahead, when Rita tried to attract my attention. When it became clear that she was not choking, I followed the line of her finger and caught sight of a mature roe deer buck walking through the orchard just over the pond. Roe deer are not an unusual sight in Latvia - there is a resident population of about 80,000 - but whenever we have seen them in the past, they have been running away from us. What was fascinating was watching this old man, still in his winter grey coat, move calmly and steadily around his territory, stopping now and then to browse the ground for food and to rub his antlers against a tree. We did not have the digital camera that weekend, and the film camera was hanging on a fence post outside, but I sneaked out, picked it up, changed the lens and moved into position to take a shot as he came out from behind a hazel thicket on the edge of our territory. I was too slow - he spotted me and took off. We did not expect to see him again.
Saturday afternoon. Sitting inside and eating a snack. Back he came for another check of his land. This time I did manage to get a shot, although a very bad one through the branches of some willow. We just retrieved the film from the developers and found that they developed every picture apart from that one. Looking at the index print, it does look like an out of focus shot of a willow bush, but we will ask them to print it anyway to see if our old man is visible.
As if that were not enough excitement, that evening I went outside for a cigarette just as it was getting dark. Sitting on the bench under the birch tree, I spotted movement out of the corner of my eye as an owl landed on the top of the woodshed. I thought little of it - we have been picking up large owl pellets from the woodshed for over a year, and there are thirteen varieties of owl in Latvia so I did not fancy my chances of identifying this particular one. On Friday, a man from the zoo came to school with some local animals as part of our work on Earth Day. He brought an owl, whose size and silhouette exactly matched ours - the owl shaped head accented by two lowered 'ears', and is apparently distinctive of only one variety. It turned out that our friend is an eagle owl - an endangered species in Latvia with just fifty breeding pairs. This, of course, is exciting news, but it also puts us in a quandary. The old woodshed is increasingly unsafe and we were going to demolish it early this summer. We are not sure how closely attached the owl is to the shed, although it is always plentifully scattered with pellets. Before we demolish it one of us will have to brave the risk and go in to check out the corners and sheltered spots of the shed to ensure that he or she is not nesting there.
Saturday afternoon. Sitting inside and eating a snack. Back he came for another check of his land. This time I did manage to get a shot, although a very bad one through the branches of some willow. We just retrieved the film from the developers and found that they developed every picture apart from that one. Looking at the index print, it does look like an out of focus shot of a willow bush, but we will ask them to print it anyway to see if our old man is visible.
As if that were not enough excitement, that evening I went outside for a cigarette just as it was getting dark. Sitting on the bench under the birch tree, I spotted movement out of the corner of my eye as an owl landed on the top of the woodshed. I thought little of it - we have been picking up large owl pellets from the woodshed for over a year, and there are thirteen varieties of owl in Latvia so I did not fancy my chances of identifying this particular one. On Friday, a man from the zoo came to school with some local animals as part of our work on Earth Day. He brought an owl, whose size and silhouette exactly matched ours - the owl shaped head accented by two lowered 'ears', and is apparently distinctive of only one variety. It turned out that our friend is an eagle owl - an endangered species in Latvia with just fifty breeding pairs. This, of course, is exciting news, but it also puts us in a quandary. The old woodshed is increasingly unsafe and we were going to demolish it early this summer. We are not sure how closely attached the owl is to the shed, although it is always plentifully scattered with pellets. Before we demolish it one of us will have to brave the risk and go in to check out the corners and sheltered spots of the shed to ensure that he or she is not nesting there.
