Robin Nest Day 22

D-Day arrived in the Robin nest today and the chicks hatched exactly according to the schedule, 13 days after the start of incubation.

The hatching started this morning, the last time I saw all six eggs present was 08:45, then at 09:19 this happened.

The first egg is hatching and the Female is removing the shell.

The parents were then quickly into the nest to start feeding.

Straight away the next chicks started to hatch.

By the afternoon 5 chicks had hatched out, still quite difficult to identify but definitely there.

Then for the rest of the afternoon both adults got busy feeding the new family.

So a successful day with 5 of the 6 eggs hatching. The sixth egg was actually laid a day after the start of the incubation and therefore it’s not surprising that it hasn’t hatched at the same time as the others. In fact I’m a little doubtful that it will hatch at all. If it does this last chick is certainly going to be the runt of the family and I imagine that survival may be tricky.

So now is the trickiest time for the Robin family. It’s going to be two weeks of intense feeding activity to get the chicks as big as possible before they fledge the nest. They’ll start to get noisy, potentially attracting dangerous predators.

But today has been a good start. The nest box condition at the end of the day (23:00) is shown below, the Female firmly on the nest.