Black Stork Nest

A live nest cam on a black stork nest in the forests around Riga, run by the Latvian Fund for Nature. The black stork is the white stork's secretive cousin: it nests on big old trees deep in the woods rather than on chimneys, fishes forest streams, and is rare enough that Latvia counts only some 85 to 140 breeding pairs, on the national red list. The nest's exact location is kept private, as it is for most rare-species cams.

This is a patient watch. The camera went up in early 2024, and in its first two seasons a single bird visited the nest now and then without a pair ever settling, so what you see may be an empty platform of sticks, a lone stork testing it, or, if the season goes well, the whole cycle from eggs to fledglings.

Storks are here from March to late summer and in Africa the rest of the year (UTC+2, +3 in summer), so the feed is at its best from April to July; over winter the nest stands empty under snow, and the picture may pause.