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6/08/01:
The female is well into her incubation. She spends most of her day just sitting on her eggs. She only takes a few brief breaks each hour to go gather food for herself and to bring in fresh green leaves. Her mate also makes several trips a day to bring in green leaves. She works many of the leaves in her beak, seemingly making them more pliable, or to release more water vapor for nest chamber humidity control, or to release more hydrocyanic acid to reduce the number of nest parasites. Here she is sitting tight on her eggs. She rolls them many times an hour to increase their hatchability. |
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6/12/01:
According to the Prognosticator calculator wheel, a 6-egg clutch initiated on 5/24/01 should begin hatching on 6/13/01. However, the weather was very cold during that initial week of incubation and the female did not spend much time on the eggs. During such conditions, eggs can take 17-24 days to hatch, instead of the normal 16. We'll just have to see what happens. In this photo, you can see the hundreds of fresh green leaves the male and female martins have been bringing in daily and tucking under their eggs. |
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6/15/01:
Today, 17 days after the last egg was laid, our web cam babies began to hatch. One was already hatched when we checked in at 0659 hrs. The second egg hatched while we were watching the monitor at 0847 hrs. The third egg hatched at 1105 hrs. As of 1500 hrs. no additional hatching has occurred. In this photo, the female has picked up an eggshell hemisphere from a newly hatched egg and is eating it. The male, looking in from the entrance hole, is watching. We observed both the male and the female eat 3 such hemispheres after crushing them in their beaks a few times. The male flew off with one additional hemisphere in his beak, presumably to drop it away from the colony site. A couple of these hatch eggshells had worked their way onto the unhatched eggs, a potentially lethal condition known as "egg capping," which can prevent the capped egg from hatching. Fortunately, the caps fell off and the adults ate them. The parents began feeding the young immediately upon hatching. Both parents held the tiny prey in their beaks and chirped at the youngsters to get them to gape. The male is already feeding the HD (hatching day) youngsters full-sized damselflies. |
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6/18/01:
The six nestlings are 3 days old today. Both parents are brooding them, feeding them, and eating their fecal sacs. In this photo, an adult female blowfly is exploring the nest bowl to lay some eggs (see dark fly just left of center). In a few days, blood-feeding, parasitic maggots will hatch and begin feeding on the nestlings. Some martin nests will contain hundreds of these fly maggots, which grow to be at least 3/8 of an inch long before turning into a pupae near the time the baby martins are due to fledge. |
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6/19/01:
Today the six nestlings are 4 days old. Ambient outside temperature is 90+ degrees F. here in Edinboro, PA. These nestlings are engaging in a common behavior that they do in hot temperatures, they are spacing themselves out (instead of cuddling) in the nest bowl with their heads pointed out, their butts in. They are maximizing their spacing and minimizing their skin contact with each other to help thermoregulate (control their body temperatures). Their ASY-F mother looks on. |
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6/19/01:
This afternoon, to our surprise, the bachelor subadult male that has shown a great fascination with the contents of this gourd (he's been inside several times and has been rebuffed aggressively many many times by the adult female) entered the unprotected nest while both parents were out foraging. He proceeded to violently grab one nestling by its throat and bite it, then poke at its still-shut eyes. It moved over and poked, stabbed, and bit two other nestlings. It stayed in the nest 5-6 minutes until the adult male returned with food. Amazingly, the nestlings were unharmed and fed normally in the following hours. About 30 minutes after that first encounter, the subadult male returned, but left before resuming (?) his violence because a parent returned with food for the nestlings. We will watch closely to see if this SY-M has true infanticidal intents. In this photo, the SY-M looks up at the camera, defiantly. |
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6/21/01:
The young are 6 days old today. Here the female is brooding the young in the cool morning air. Since her 6 young have grown too large for her to now cover simultaneously, here she "mantles" them, spreading her wing open to assist in covering them. |
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6/25/01:
The six young are now 10 days old. Here the adult female feeds one of the gaping mouths. |
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6/26/01:
The 6 young are now 11 days old. Here the adult male sits in the entrance hole after just feeding his young. After every feeding, the parents dig around underneath each young, searching for fecal sacs to remove. They also pick up dropped insect prey (which run all around the nest) and feed them to their young. When the parents bring in beakfuls of small, live moths (which still beat their wings rapidly), the wing scales of these insects float all over the inside of the gourd making a "falling snowflake-like" appearance inside the cavity. Once the martin dropped a Red Admiral butterfly and it started flying all around the inside of the gourd. The bird chased it down and poked it down the throat of its young. |
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6/28/01:
Today the six young are 13 days old. Here they are shown with their heads out the entrance hole, waiting to be fed. Yesterday, when they were just 12 days old was the first we noticed them approaching the entrance hole to be fed. Also, as 12 day olds, was the first we noticed them turning around to void a fecal sac just below the entrance hole, inside the nest cavity. The parents, who sometimes now don't enter the nest to feed the young, just feed them at the entrance hole from the outside and reach in to remove these conveniently-placed fecal sacs. |
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6/28/01:
This shot, taken at 9:53 PM, after both parents have come in for the night and have gone to sleep, shows the male bird at top, sleeping in a vertical position (mostly off camera), up the side wall of the gourd. He's clinging just like a Chimney Swift. He has slept in this same side-wall, vertical-clinging position every night since the female laid her eggs. Before that, she slept in this spot and position. The female is shown just above the cuddled nestlings. She no longer is brooding them, as they are 13 days old and it is a warm night. Interestingly, they are still making their food-begging calls, loud enough for an owl to hear them. They finally quieted down about 10:00 PM. Perhaps this is why it seems Great Horned Owls often hit between 9:30 and 10:00 PM; they can hear which nests are active. Starting about this time, I notice several mosquitos enter the pitch-black nests (it's only pitch black to the birds, not the camera, which uses infrared illumination). The mosquitoes tormented the birds, biting them. Tonight, after 20+ years of martin research, I saw my first martin eat a mosquito. In the dark, the female bill-snapped at the buzzing mosquito, using sound-location only, and got the pest on the third try. |
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