In a display of death-defying bravery, the snail that climbed onto the back of Leske, who was sitting on the nest in Vlaha, at dawn on Monday 6 May. The snail crawled out from under Leske's wing at dawn and at 5.57 a.m. set off on a voyage of discovery on the feathers of the laying female. The adventure lasted a good 15 minutes. It managed to hang on even when Leske got up at 6:10 to count his chicks.
This is the moment when the shell of the fourth egg is seen to have cracked open. The chick was still in the shell but the cap-like convexity of the shell had already moved away from the larger half of the shell. This certainly explains the snail's undisturbed crawling. Leske was so preoccupied with the birth of her fourth baby that she ignored the meal marching on her back.
The snail reappears at 7:07 in the timer's pictures. This time, it pulls to the wind in the lower left corner of the nest and crawls down one of the branches on the nest's edge for an hour. There he perches until 11:30 and then disappears. It probably plunges into the deep.
The snail is a favourite food for storks. It must have been brought to the nest by one of the adult storks, but it proved too big a meal for the young. The large storks swallow the snails whole, but they cannot digest the house. They crush it together with the bones of the frogs they eat, the bones and fur of mice and the shell of the insects they eat, compress it into an oval shaped spat 5-6 cm long and spit it out.
The first two baby geese hatched in the nest on 4th of May, the Orthodox Easter Saturday, followed by others on Sunday and Monday. On Wednesday, 8th of May, the fifth chick was born. So all the eggs were hatched this year. The last time this happened was in 2018, when only four storks survived their end-of-summer migration. Previously, when we had not yet seen the nest, five goslings fledged in Vlaha in 2011 and 2015.