May 22, 2006
Chicks #1 and #2
Nest Update: Congratulations to our new parents, and welcome to our two new chicks! With an incubation period of 40 days, the first chick was a little late in arriving, but better late than never. And at 38 days, the second chick was very punctual and right on time.
Throughout Sunday and Monday, the mother osprey looked fidgety, and was checking on the eggs a lot, so we sensed that a chick was trying to hatch both days.
Here is one of the first photos we received on Sunday that clearly showed the oldest chick. In the photo, you can see a bit of broken shell by the young osprey, and you can also see the white stripe running down its back.
And here is a photo showing both chicks right after the second was born early Monday evening. You can see the youngest lying down and the oldest sitting up.
We hope that since they were born very close together, it might reduce some of the competition between them because the oldest chick will not have a great size advantage over the youngest. But we'll have to wait and see if that's the case.
Something else to note is how the parents have been adding sticks to the perimeter of the nest box. In this photo comparison from May, you can see where they've added them. We've seen osprey parents do this in other seasons because the sticks seem to be a type of "corral" that help keep the young chicks safe when they become more mobile and start crawling near the edge. Here you can see a photo from last year that shows how these sticks can come in handy when the chicks begin exploring.
Because the action is now heating up at the Osprey Cam -- while it's slowing down on the Eagle Cam --we've adjusted the refresh periods on the cams so that the ospreys are now at a 30-second refresh and the eagles are at a 3-minute refresh. This should make it easier to observe the small chicks.
As a reminder, the reason we have to juggle the refresh times on our cams is because our satellite dish provider has placed a limit on how much image traffic we can send via our dish. While we are still very interested in our fledgling eaglets and will continue their web log and gallery for a bit longer, the eaglets will not be spending as much time in the nest now that they're flying, so we would rather have a faster refresh time at the Osprey Cam now that we have a family to watch.
Thanks to all those who have sent in photos over the last week. We'll update the Osprey Gallery on Tuesday.
Until next time,
Lisa - webmaster
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