I am busy counting chicks and I do think many nests have fewer chicks this year. The statistics will be interesting. Believe it or not, there are nests that laid eggs so late, they have not hatched yet. It remains to be seen if they do hatch or not. Those late chicks are at a great disadvantage when the time comes to migrate as they will not be as skilled or mature as the chicks that hatched earlier.
Monday, June 30, 2014
Finally, a new post...
Sorry I haven't posted in a while...busy time personally. I have been checking nests when possible and am discovering more nests that have failed. We are up to about twenty now, with more failures possible in that delicate time between hatching and fledging. I cannot attribute all failures to any one cause. I have observed some mystifying things...including seeing a male earlier this spring who I had not seen since 2005-2007, when he made some nest attempts that failed, and then he totally disappeared, only to resurface this spring on a nest! Now he is gone again! I have no idea where he has been or where he went, but I certainly am curious. There may be nests I do not know about. So here is my plea again to report any new nests to us! With all the failed nests, we may see some frustration nests being built at this time of year, so if you see an osprey carrying sticks, PLEASE let me know! I also have been watching a nest that had an unbanded male in the beginning of the season, and during incubation I rarely saw the male and when hatching occurred I noticed the male is banded...and he was present at this nest two years ago, but not last year! That is quite unusual. When a male does not return to a nest we tend to assume he did not survive migration. In this case, apparently there is some other explanation for his absence last year. If these birds could talk!
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The chick on the Arb nest has fallen out trying to get away from the bugs!!!
ReplyDeleteWhat happened at the arboretum nest? It is suddenly empty. The baby was not ready to fly away. Did it fall out? Can the parents go and get it and bring it back to the nest?
ReplyDeleteSadly the chick appears to have pre-fledged, or jumped too soon to escape the bugs. It was found dead below the nest shortly after it disappeared from the nest. There is nothing that could be done. Adult ospreys usually will not feed a chick on the ground and they have no way to carry a chick back to the nest without harming it. The term "raptor" means to grasp or seize, so these are birds that catch and kill their prey with the long sharp talons. This is a very sad experience for us all...but chicks die every year, we just are not aware of it if they are not on a cam. This is the flip side of the nest cams...watching them can be a wonderful experience from which we learn a lot, but we also have to learn to accept that things like this happen in nature...
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