Thursday videos

Here are the videos from Thursday.

We arrived at the Great Grey Owl nest at 20:00 and it took a while before we saw the young and they gradually became more visible, active and noisy but it wasn’t until 21:14 that dad arrived with food. This is in contrast to six days previously when we witnessed three food deliveries in under an hour from 18:58 onwards. The young are coming along well so I don’t think there is a question of lack of food but maybe different weather plays a role. Thursday was a sunny day whereas six days previously had been overcast and therefore darker earlier on (I also noted that Woodcocks were first active later much earlier last week).

The mother really does seem to be good at her job and still shelters the young between her wings and she probably has not left the nest in close to two months. When the food delivery finally came we could not see what had happened but the female was definitely not feeding the young by tearing off strips of meat so I thought that maybe she had swallowed the vole herself which then had me questioning her motherly instincts. The video however shows that one of the young (the middle one?) took the vole from her and swallowed it whole! Things have definitely moved on from six days previous when she was feeding them tiny morsals of flesh individually.

I have two videos from the nest. The first is just the food delivery sequence where I also captured the male flying in on my phone and the second and much longer video has various snippet of action from the whole period we watched them.

 

Here is footage of the hunting GG we spotted along the road. Initially perched on a wire by a house he then made an unsuccessful plunge for a rodent before moving to fence posts. You can also see how he changes his posture in response to a Hooded Crow flying over.

 

Here are a pair of Red-necked Phalaropes

And finally, Norway’s only registered singing Ortolan Bunting in 2025. The nest I found in 2023 may end up being the last breeding of this species in the country as last year just two unpaired males were recorded and I did not see anything on Thursday to suggest that this male who has now been back over 2 weeks had a mate.