White-tailed Eagle, Latvia 2014

[Pb]

Please begin your 2014 posts here!

[ame]

White-tailed sea eagles in Latvia: Juras-Erglis

So far only some things are known about this WTE-camera in Latvia, but more information will be added here as we learn more the nest and its inhabitants.

Camera links:

JWplayer: http://pontu.eenet.ee/player/juras-erglis1.html

VLC player: rtsp://193.40.133.138/live/juras-erglis1

Ipad and Iphones: http://193.40.133.138/live/juras-erglis1/playlist.m3u8

Note: the addresses are case-sensitive, i.e. all letters must be small.

Pontu camera
As in earlier years with other nest cameras in connection with the live camera there is also a camera which takes still pictures of the nest once every minute for the archives. This camera is called Pontu camera. A similar camera is operational at each EENET- bird's nest camera.

The still pictures can be found in addresses which are of the following form:
- before Apr 6th 14:55 (EET)
*ttp://pontu.eenet.ee/juras-erglis1/2014-04-06/2014-04-06-14-54.jpg
http://pontu.eenet.ee/juras-erglis1/201 ... -14-54.jpg
- after Apr 6th 14:55 (EET including this) are in new addresses:
*ttp://193.40.124.24/2014-juras-erglis-ftp/2014-04-06/2014-04-06-14-55.jpg
http://193.40.124.24/2014-juras-erglis- ... -14-55.jpg
(Pontu addresses updated on Apr 11.)

Here the first letter h has been replaced with *, so that the address can be seen as whole. In the address above 'juras-erglis1' refers to the WTE nest. For other Looduskalender nests this part should be changed to for example with 'saunja' for the nest of WTES Linda ans Sulev, 'kure' for the black storks Tiina and Tiit's nest camera, or 'tooni' for the other black stork's nest which has in recent years been inhabited by lesser spotted eagles Tuuli and Remo. The date appears in the address twice (in the above example 2013-04-08 means April 8th 2013) and the time -08-36 means 36 minutes past 8 am. Editing the date and time will open the desired Pontu picture. Note that the date needs to be changed twice and there is number 1 after juras-erglis. If the picture is not found even for a seemingly valid address the time may be too early or too late: pictures are taken and stored only in the light time of the day.

One of the Looduskalender forum members, debianuser developped a tool to view pictures in a practical way. It was originally posted in the Osprey topic but the tool can be easily modified to view Pontu pictures from other cameras as well.
Here's a quote of debianuser's signature to give the link to this tool:
"Bird and other animals webcam snapshots and videos from pontu.eenet.ee with easy date selector to quickly switch between snapshots
http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3654 ... pontu.html "
Thank you debianuser!

If someone wishes to download the Pontu pictures in large quantities to one's own computer and needs help in doing that in a practical way one may ask for help from ame (or Felis Silvestris; also in LK-forum).

Both cameras, the live and the Pontu camera switch off in darkness in order to save energy. Both work, however, in very low light levels so in the last and first pictures of the day almost nothing can be seen.

[ame]

The nest is being built by a WTE couple where the male wears Lithuanian rings on his right ankle: the upper colour is blue on top of red stripe. The female has no rings.

Janis Kuze (the coordinator of White-tailed eagle monitoring in Latvia and the supervisor of the ringing of this eagle species in Latvia) gave the following information about the nest and its inhabitants on March 12th.
(In the following the most important facts have been bolded.)

This nest is known since 2010. It is located near Lake Lubans (E Latvia) and was productive for first time only last year. None of the birds was seen during the previous nest checks, therefore we found out that the male is ringed only now from camera pictures. It is of Lithuanian origin, colleagues from there informed me that bird was ringed on 04.06.2007 in surroundings of Sartai Lake, NE Lithuania, some 124 km from its recent nest.
Rings - on right leg country ring blue/red, on left leg - orange/blue V506.

First time this year the couple came to nest on 10.02, most intensively so far - on 06.03. In the recent days they are coming episodically, mostly late in the evenings (I have seen the female to lie down in the nest for first time only yesterday late in the evening). At this moment incubation should have been already going on, so it is not a good sign that nest is for most of the day empty. Still, the hope remains - in late broods eggs are layd in early April.

To save the power, system is switched off for the night and probably switched on a bit too late in the morning.

The stream quality of this camera is unfortunately quite low this year, probably due to the fact that we had to use the antenna "bridge" with crossed signals and the total distance from nest to tower is more than 20 km. It seams that it wont be improved significantly, we worked hard already and did not succeeded much.

Thank you Janis for the information!

Below is a Google-based map of the Baltic countries, showing the locations of both the birthplace of the male (red balloon pointing at Lake Sartai in Lithuania) and the location of the nest at Lake Lubans in Latvia (in red circle). In the lower right corner is the scale of the map.

[ame]

the Juras-Erglis camera started working on February 17th before it was made public on February 24th. the first week was a test period when video recording (the so-called Pontu videos) were saved irregularly. also Pontu pictures are missing from the first two days.

from the Pontu videos i have made clips of all the observed visits of Mr and Mrs Eagle at the nest and i am making daily Youtube-playlists of these clips. the playlists also include some of my own live recordings. their names begin with 'vlc record'. the names of Pontu clips begin with 'juras-erglis1'. both names have then the date and time, followed by a short description of the content of the video. - later there will be (hopefully!) eggs and chicks together with parent(s) in the nest all the time. then i shall include in the playlists only those videos which have something special and interesting events.

all the interesting Pontu pictures i have uploaded to Photobucket in daily picture albums. in these albums are also the snapshots which i have taken from either the Pontu videos or from the live camera. in these albums the pictures are in time order from morning to evening: first the Pontu pictures and then the snapshots.

i shall add the addresses of these playlists and picture albums in the end of my last post on each day. building playlists is rather slow: usually the list will not be ready before the next day. i haven't done all lists yet but some are ready. the addresses of the first test week's playlists and albums are the following:

PLAYLISTS AND PICTURE ALBUMS OF EARLIER DAYS

Feb 17th
playlist: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL ... nCe83qSPAp
picture album: no pictures

Feb 18th
playlist: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL ... lI1ePLEpZE
picture album: http://s561.photobucket.com/user/anmael ... 2014-02-18

Feb 19th
playlist: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL ... kLT0kz_daK
picture album: http://s561.photobucket.com/user/anmael ... 2014-02-19

Feb 20th
playlist: no videos
picture album: http://s561.photobucket.com/user/anmael ... 2014-02-20

Feb 21st
playlist: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL ... PH08AWYA1E
picture album: http://s561.photobucket.com/user/anmael ... 2014-02-21

Feb 22nd
playlist: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL ... UYa4wJSTiO
picture album: http://s561.photobucket.com/user/anmael ... 2014-02-22

Feb 23rd
playlist:
picture album: http://s561.photobucket.com/user/anmael ... 2014-02-23

i have also posted the above list here:
http://www.looduskalender.ee/forum/view ... 68#p298268.
in the above address is the Looduskalender topic of this nest. the pages in this topic already give a fairly thorough description of what has happened here at the Juras-Erglis nest. if someone still wishes to learn more then watching these videos and looking through the picture albums will give an opportunity to do so.

also the Latvian Dabasdati-forum has a topic on their 'domestic' nest:
http://dabasdati.lv/forums/viewtopic.ph ... 11bcb41ad1
the discussion there is mostly in Latvian, but at least some of the members write in English and probably quite many understand it.