Well it’s a good news /bad news kind of day. First the bad news…..overnight two of the arboretum cam nest eggs ended up out of the nest cup. I don’t know how the first one got out there….but it looked cracked to me and may have been unfertilized. Later in the day it got stepped on and cracked further into small pieces ( seen above the female in the first photo). The second egg ended up in the lower left corner very suddenly and I watched the video over and over to figure it out….i think when the male came with a fish, and the female got up to get it, the egg may have been stuck to her belly feathers…and then it dropped off where she was standing with the fish. It remains there. The nest cup looks wet and muddy, so that may explain why it stuck to her. It’s sad, but we hope the remaining egg will be ok. So the first photo is of the Arb cam nest. Other photos from another nest.
The good news….our two first nests have begun hatching! I was at one nest this morning while it was still foggy and drizzling….and only 43 degrees. The male was sticking very close by….and he would only leave to get more nest material. Sadly some of it was landscape fabric. I wish people would be more careful with what they leave laying on the ground. When the female got up to look beneath, the male stood next to her and stared into the nest cup. Sweet. Then when she settled back into incubation / brooding, he snuggled down right next to her! He was not sitting on eggs, but he was giving her moral support! This is our oldest banded male now….20 years old! Ya gotta love this guys attentiveness, and care. The photos are horrible but maybe you can make out two heads in one image and then another one where they are both staring down into the nest.
Then I went on to another nest where the adults were pretty darn interested in what was happening in the nest cup! I did not see a feeding yet….but I know these touching signs that something special is happening!
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