Twelfth Morning
Weather - Partly Cloudy, 73F, NW winds 12mph, humidity 74%
Sunrise - 5:50am
Another day at the office…4:00am alarm, but woke up a few minutes before it went off. I got to the nest box at 5:15 and set things up. For some reason I had a heck of a time getting my camera mounted on the tripod. I have a quick-release on it, but it just wasn't lining up. I barely had enough time before she left the box, at 5:26am. The first picture shows her leaving using the slower shutter speed (showing her blurry). The second picture is a little more accurate in showing how dark it was.
Today is our regular wood duck nest box check for our team, it starts at 10:00am. Our team has 9 boxes. It is at the end of the season and we are not expecting to have any other hens besides this one. There were a couple of boxes that had eggs during our last check, so we plan to see if they hatched and clean out the boxes and add some wood chips for birds that may use the boxes during the winter for roosting.
She returns at 6:53am.
The song sparrow evergreen got a few visitors this morning.
I wait and wait to see if the hen is going to leave the nest again, but it’s quiet. I don’t have much faith in that happening at this point, but I wait until 8:45am just the same.
At 10:00am I meet up with Jim and we check this nest first. We decide to check the eggs by candling them (look through them at a bright light), to determine if they are still good. As he opens the nest box she flushes out (don’t worry, this is typical during a nest check, the hens return to the nest, even if the eggs are touched by humans).
He found there are ten eggs in the box. Our suspicion was correct, she did lay more eggs. The bad news is that he determined six of the eggs are bad, and four are unknown. He left all the eggs in the box for her to return to. They could be bad because they are not fertile or maybe it got too hot, we just don’t know. This late in the season shows a higher possibility of this happening. We checked the rest of our nest boxes and found two more nests with bad eggs, the hens long gone.
So, what does this mean for my stakeout? We know that even if these four questionable eggs are still good that it would not be tomorrow. I get a day off. I plan to come back on Monday, the twelfth and see what happens. It is not looking good, sadly. If all the eggs are bad she will soon give up.
She left the nest box at 5:36am and returned at 6:53am.
I stayed approximately 3 1/2 hours.
