On the thirteenth day after the bird started to brood, the
eggs started to hatch. Here are the first two days' samples of pictures.
Up-to-date SEASON
Nest building
Initial egg-laying pictures
Second egg-laying pictures
Brooding pictures
Feeding while brooding
More brooding pictures
Defence pictures
Epitaph
A truly excellent site about these birds
Visitors since 10th September 1999:
At 8.30 am the bird assists the first chick out of the eggshell. Our bird eats the remaining egg materials to tidy up the mess, and presumably for breakfast as well.
Not only does our bird eat the contents of the egg, apart from the new chick, but she also eats the shell, to replace the calcium she used in laying the eggs in the first place.
Here are four chicks and seven eggs. The chicks have no feathers but can crawl up over the eggs; they open their beaks wide whenever the birds enter the nest with food. The female bird is still keeping the eggs warm, so, in between feeds, she dumps her underneath unceremoniously down on the chicks and the remaining eggs. I expect the feathers tickle the chicks.
The chicks emit a very quiet peeping sound; however the adult birds make lots of loud encouraging clucking/squawking noises when they have food to give.
Here are the chicks being fed.
And here is the happy family group; eggs, chicks, male, female, and caterpillar, all together in one shot. Repeated careful observation shows that the male bird may be distinguished, sometimes, by the fact that his blue cap starts further back from his beak than is the case with the female. In fact, he has a receeding "hairline".
At 3pm, the positions of numbers of eggs and chicks have reversed. There are now 7 chicks and only 4 eggs. The first-born chicks are picking up fast for several feeds of caterpillars, and are noticeably more active and agile. It is said in the texts that initially, the chicks are very feeble and vulnerable and that the first few days are critical. We shall keep watching.
At 7.15 pm on the first day of hatching we still seem to have 7 or 8 chicks. However, the bird is coming once a minute with a caterpillar, presumably to stoke up the chicks' internal energy resources to get through the hours of darkness from 8pm to 5am. The total mass of the chicks is noticeably more than earlier in the afternoon; they are almost "growing as you watch". There is much mountaineering by our chicks, both on each other and also on the eggs, to get a good vantage point from which to present the best inviting beak and mouth-opening to the mother. The chick mouths are as big as the diameter of their heads.
Here are seven hungry chick mouths
Watching the departing tail of their mother
Who returns shortly to feed them
And is joined by the male bird
The male bird shares the caterpillar hunting with the female, but they take shifts. For half an hour or so she manages on her own, then there is a spate of arrivals by the male. The caterpillars he brings are larger than those which the female can find in her trips lasting only 3 minutes away from the nest. He transfers the food inside, or just outside, the nest box. This is a very noisy procedure. The female bird is in charge of distribution and rationing. The male bird, to start with, made no attempt at all to feed an open chick-mouth directly; he passed the caterpillar to the female, and then waited, looking on while it is fed to the chicks. Later on his confidence built up, and he started to apportion caterpillars into the open mouths, in a perfunctory and hasty manner.
The female spends less time sitting on the remaining eggs as they are being kept warm by the (40 degree C?) chicks, featherless, clambering over them. Eggcelsior. Will they hatch? There is at least one egg left unhatched 36 hours after the first egg broke. It is difficult to do a head count of the chicks.
The bird utters a squawk on arrival to wake up the more dopey of the chicks; they may be blind, but they aren't deaf, for they sit up and present "beaks at the ready" before we onlookers are aware of the imminent arrival of the mother. They probably hear her coming at a range of several metres from the box.
The weather has become windy and overcast. For the first night of this brood this is probably a good thing, as the cloud cover will prevent the air temperature from dropping as much as it has been recently.
Our bird is alert and more decisive in her movements. The comings and goings seem to be a model of efficiency and minimum effort. No energy is wasting on cooing over the chicks. The exception to this is the commotion which happens when the male arrives; it must be biologically efficient for the female to spend time and energy egging on the male.
Local sunset here was 20.28 (8.28 pm BST). Our bird kept feeding until sunset, entering the box for the last time at 20.32, just four minutes after sunset (although it is gloomy and overcast), and fluffing up her feathers and putting her head into her back, as his her wont when going to sleep, about five minutes after the last feed.
Our bird woke about 20 minutes before sunrise and ate some eggshell, as we how have 9 chicks and 2 eggs. She went out to begin feeding them 5 minutes after local sunrise, the weather still being overcast. How does she know? Ten minutes later the male arrived and began his day's feeding activities. The chicks seem to have survived the night in good shape. The female bird is concentrating on feeding the smaller chicks. Perhaps there is an advantage, presentationally speaking, in hatching early on. The bird knows how to counter political spin.
The bird seems unconcerned about sleeping on numbers of wriggling youngsters. She has a different style of brooding, in which the wings are slightly spread out, which increases her floor coverage. One wonders if the good Victorian Reverend gentleman who wrote the hymn lines
keep oh keep me, king of kings
beneath thine own almighty wings
might perhaps have been an amateur ornithologist?
Here is our bird, wings slightly extended, sheltering the hungry chicks.
And here she is tending them just before they are sat on for their second night's sleep.
Resolution of the video format is a problem for us. A chick's wide open mouth is only between 10 and 14 lines of the video raster scan. Never mind, they are growing fast and we shall get some good pictures later on.
d.jefferies@surrey.ac.uk David Jefferies 6th May 1999