Our egg-citement over four eggs for the past month has made our live stream extremely popular with visitors from Japan to Australia and Argentina tuning in to watch Dusty sit on four eggs for hours!
We added a chat to the stream and it’s been a huge success. Viewers have been posting the visit times, changeovers and most importantly, the hatching times.
Yes, we have chicks! Our pair have done it again.
The estimated hatching date was on or after 23 April, and so my rather obsessive semi-watching of the live stream began.
As a freelancer, I generally work from home and have the live stream on in the background so I can check in when I hear them calling or I just need five away from client work; watching Dusty and Freddie beats office gossip around the coffee machine any day!
The weather may have been a factor as we had to wait nearly five days for our first chick. Born on 28 April at 05:21:53, the tiny chick arrived to be promptly snuggled by Dusty. It was over three hours before we got our first proper sighting. Not to disappoint, the second chick arrived the same day at 13:27ish. Again Dusty was on it quickly so the chick didn’t get cold and we didn’t get any sightings of the two chicks until later that afternoon.
Fast forward to early May and we have two fast-growing chicks in the nest box and two failed eggs, the same tally as last year. There are many reasons why eggs don’t hatch; infertility, developed too quickly and then chilled, chilled once the other chicks hatched when feeding chicks take priority, a defective embryo, or the chick was too weak to get out of the egg. Whatever the reason, it’s nature’s course and ours is not to reason why.
Dusty or Freddie could eat these unhatched eggs, they may break and disintegrate or just be moved away. Should they still be in the nest box when the chicks are ringed, we’ll arrange to send them away to a lab that studies pesticide residues in raptors helping to contribute to conservation knowledge.
We’ll now see lots of feeding from Freddie initially and when the chicks are older and stronger, Dusty will join in too as the chicks demand more food.
I wonder what prey we will see brought to the nest in 2024. In past years we’ve seen loads of Feral Pigeons (which Ealing Hospital is grateful for as it saves them thousands of pounds on pest control), Moorhen and even a Kingfisher.
“The Falcon and the Dove sit there together, And th’ one of them doth prune the others feather.”
~ Michael Drayton, English poet 1563-1631
It’s time to celebrate two thriving chicks and watch their progress until it is time for them too to go off and wander. But before that, we’ve got “Fledgewatches” to look forward to.
Oh, by the way, Sean predicts a boy and a girl this year; what do you think?
Emma Chard-Cumming
Past EWG Secretary
