On Wednesday, May 21, at 9:55 a.m., loud bill-clattering could be heard coming from the stork nest in Vlaha. We could observe that there were two storks in the nest, one of which was wearing a white ring. We immediately headed to the neighbouring garden, where the light conditions of the morning allowed us to take better quality photos. We observed that the nest was occupied by a stork wearing ring number 8031. Two other storks were circling around the nest. It sometimes allowed one of them to land, but chased the other away.
Meanwhile, Zoltán Szabó D., the technical director of the stork observation project of Vlaha, identified the stork with the 8031 ring. It was ringed by Tamás Papp, managing director of the Milvus Group, on June 18, 2020, in the sixth nest of Dumbrăvioara.
Rewinding the time-lapse images, it appears that the ringed stork first landed on the nest at 7:51 a.m. on Wednesday morning. It is possible that it had already spent the night in the village. At dusk, we saw a stork on the cross on the bell tower of the Roman Catholic church. Since it was only minutes before dark and storks do not like to fly in the dark, it most likely spent the night there. It is possible that this is where the "crusade" began, which led to the occupation of the nest, and during the morning it fought with the stork that had dominated the nest in the previous days and weeks. You can see more pictures of how the stork from Dumbrăvioara occupied the nest here.