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The live camera project implemented by JSC “Latvia's State Forests” (LVM) for the eighth year allows anyone interested to get to know the nesting habits of birds by following the events in the lives of golden eagles, lesser-spotted eagles, buzzards, and other birds.  LVM Senior Environmental Expert, ornithologist Uģis Bergmanis tells that the female golden eagle Spilve can currently be watched on the live cameras as she is preparing her nest for the next nesting season.

“While young eagles have recently left the successful nests of golden eagles, in the meantime unoccupied nests are already being prepared for the next nesting season in the spring. Spilve, together with the young male, is improving her nest used in previous years, supplementing it with dry and green pine branches.

Golden eagles are resident birds and stay on their nesting grounds year-round. The territories are wide – the distance between the nests of one couple of golden eagles can reach up to 20 kilometres. Golden eagles, like other species of eagles, do not nest every year. “Successful nesting mainly depends on sufficient resources of food, which for golden eagles include cranes, grouse, woodpeckers, ducks and charadriiformes, as well as hares, martens, badgers, foxes and roe deer cubs,” says Uģis Bergmanis.

The last time golden eagles nested in a nest that can be observed online was in 2020. Last year, Spilve nested in another swamp, about 10 kilometres away.

Exciting observations on LVM live cameras

Unsuccessful large nests of different species of birds also seem interesting. Buzzards, hen hawks, and lesser spotted eagles use them both as places to rest and tear food, as well as to look for a nesting place for the next year. Sometimes, only a hundred metres away, both lesser spotted eagles and common buzzards or hen hawks are nesting in different nests at the same time.

At the beginning of the summer, you could observe how the nest in the Aizkuja district is visited during the day by a couple of lesser spotted eagles, which are not nesting this year, but are decorating the nest with fresh spruce branches. At dusk, the nest is visited by two tawny owl babies that have flown out of a nearby cavity.

“If there is a lack of suitable nesting cavities in the forest, tawny owls sometimes nest under the large nests in holes gnawed by wood martens. In turn, another species of owl – the specially protected Ural owl – tends to nest in the large nests. In one of the nests of the lesser spotted eagles in the Aizkuja district, an attack by a Ural owl on a couple of lesser spotted eagles was documented this summer. Apparently, Ural owls are nesting somewhere nearby. During nesting, they are extremely aggressive and tend to attack even a person if someone approaches their nesting place in a tree,” says LVM bird expert Uģis Bergmanis.

Within the framework of LVM environmental education and research project “Birds and Animals in Marsh” everyone interested has an opportunity to watch online changes in nature and follow the bird and animal activity in one of the marshes in the north-eastern region of Latvia. Since the installation of the cameras, it has been possible to confirm several assumptions about the nesting success, habits and facing of different challenges, such as searching for food and fighting with competitors of lesser spotted eagles and golden eagles. The online cameras have made it possible to look into the daily moments of birds and forest animals that have not yet been seen by the human eye.