Eastern Moors

Welcome to the world little ones

Some great news from curlew cam this week, we have three chicks, hatched over the last couple of days. The chicks are from the third nest found, the nest was one of two nests located last week, making 4 nests, 12 eggs and 3 chicks.

Three chicks in the nest

So nest monitoring is now in full swing, each nest camera recording unit is checked every three days, this is how long the battery power and memory on the SD cards will last.
To minimise disturbance to the nest the battery and recording device are hidden about 5 metres away from the nest, sometimes the bird will stay on the nest whilst the memory card and battery are changed, this usually takes a couple of minutes. If the bird does leave the nest during this time they return within a couple of minutes of me leaving the area, we know this as we can see from the timings on the camera footage. The birds will naturally leave the nest for up to half and hour at a time to stretch their wings, so them being off the nest for a few minutes won’t harm the eggs.

Changing the battery and memory card of the recording equipment

Adult bird sitting on nest whilst the battery is changed

The first two nests found are both due to hatch young at the end of next week. We are unsure when the forth nest is due to hatch, this is because when the nest was found it already had a full clutch of eggs so the adults may just have finished laying or they may have been incubating for a while, we will just have to wait and see!