Male or female?At fledging, females should be 80% wingsize of adults, and males about 83%. On that basis,
one would assume Snow is a male. He is considerably smaller than Swift – see attached.
Snow and Swift for a size comparison
However, it is known that males mature more quickly and often leave the nest earlier than females, so am not 100 % sure. At mature nestling stage, such as this, there is something called ‘reverse dimorphism’ whereby the male can be actually larger than the female.
If there is anyone out there who would like to stick their neck out and make a pronouncement, let us know!
Cilla
Nestling preyMost of the birds brought into the nest-box are in bits – hard to identify. Beau, who is doing 90% of the hunting, obviously likes to have a quick chew before passing the prey onto Swift and/or Snow. I do have a file of a few complete corpses from this breeding season, however, and out of a total of 35, 20 are common starlings (which are pest on this campus and vineyard), three are eastern rosellas (very common here), one red-rumped parrot, one red wattlebirds, one crested pigeon, and some less specified: a few quails, parrots, other pigeons etc. I also have a file of over a 100 other prey, which need further scrutiny for identification (if possible).
What is intriguing is whether the starlings really do dominate the prey at this time of year, or whether there is a bias due to the fact that Beau does not like starlings, so doesn’t have a go at these first before offering them to the family. If pigeons are tastier, as I suspect they are, they are less
likely to arrive intact into the nest and more likely to make up some of the grey, unappetizing bundles
of fur videos of which are cluttering up my hard drive.
More on this later when I’ve had time to go through the other tapes. Here is Snow with an example
of both starling and attitude. And yes, I think he is a boy.
Snow with starling
