Badger        Mäger        Meles meles

The offspring of the badger family this year should be about five months old. The female teaches the cubs behaviour and experiences that she herself has gathered over the years. She is busy with the cubs most often in early evening and ever more often they go on discovery trips together.

Roe deer         Metskits or kaber         Capreolus capreolus

 

The roe deer fawns were born about three months ago, so they are about the same age as  the chicks of the greater spotted eagles and the ospreys that have grown up to juveniles in our web camera view.

Old people used to say, that if the first week of August is hot, we will have a long and cold winter and the snow will stay long in the spring.

Today’s weather people have so far been a bit shocked by their own summer forecasts and don’t even dare to predict so far ahead.

It feels, as if the whole nature is padding itself with cotton wool. The woolly tips of the thistles are big and soft and the seed pods of the willow herb look like downy mountains. The ground looks like it was covered in fog, it is so dry. There has been no rain for three months is some parts of Estonia and digging down as deep as you manage, it is still as dry as ashes.

But in the nature’s enchanted garden we can still find flowering beauty.

Sitting on the balcony at my cottage, I get confused by the sounds of a bird. It whistles. And it is confusing, because there are two birds who whistle rather similar tunes.

When there is a bigger, whistling bird whose flight resembles jumping, coming from the direction of Tammesõõru, it is a Eurasian jay. But the other one, whose whistle, almost a scream, is heard from high up between the treetops and sometimes over the meadow beyond the creek, is the common buzzard.