Welcome back to osprey watch part 4. We are here
at the moss nest and man these babies have grown a lot in just a week.
So you can see we still have our two young babies
but they're starting to get their adult, well it's actually their juvenile
plumage. It's growing in, they're starting to get some coloration
and earlier they were standing up and then sitting down so we'll see if we can
get some of that action today.
The babies have started to do some preening, which we saw one of the parents
do a couple weeks ago. So right now you can see the baby on the
left working at those feathers and I'm
wondering if what they're doing is getting some of the dead
debris off of the growing feather. Because as the feather grows in
that blood shaft dries up and then little bits of either blood
or the sheath start to come off. And that movement that you see the adult
doing, I believe what she's doing is
rearranging her crop. So birds of prey have this container
basically at the bottom of their throat that holds extra food so as they digest
food, more food can go into their system and
that allows them to eat more at any given point. So when she is moving
her head up and down like that kind of in a rhythmic fashion
I think that's rearranging her crop and maybe pushing some food down into her
stomach.
Alright here is the teenage nest and wow that baby is almost fully grown!
You can see how it compares the size to the adult
and also if you can notice on the back
of the baby there those feathers that have kind of a white tip
that's one way you can tell apart a juvenile osprey
from an adult osprey, so the juveniles will have kind of a white outline on
their feathers as you can see on the baby that's in the
nest and then the adults have kind of that
matte black feather.
You can see kind of right at the base of the baby that's standing
every once in a while a head will pop up so that's the other baby in the nest
here.
Here we are at the crow's nest. We can see one of the adults and just
like before I believe the babies are kind of back in the nest a little bit,
so every once in a while you can see one of the babies heads just pop up,
kind of in the middle of the nest where that stick is poking out.
Alright there we go, now we got some action
at the crow's nest! So there's one of the babies,
so again getting in those those juvenile feathers.
But out of all three of the nests I believe that these
are the youngest.
It's amazing how fast they grow within the short time of
three, three and a half weeks they've almost tripled in size from when we
first saw them.