We can’t be sure, and as far as we know Mariah’s been tight-billed on the subject, but there are a few clues. Mariah has been moving around a lot in the nest. That’s often an indicator that she hears the eyas pipping its way out of the shell.

     

Then there’s this egg shell that poked out from beneath Mariah a little before 10:00 this morning. In previous pictures from today, the two hatched eyases were grouped together with two intact eggs, so the fact that this shell has appeared may mean that at least one more egg has hatched.

The final piece of evidence, at least from what we’ve seen so far, may be this picture from 9:01AM. Look carefully at the small round object next to Mariah’s left wing (on the right side of the picture). It’s a bit speculative, but that could be the newly hatched eyas, it’s feathers still wet and matted from having just emerged from the egg. She just hasn’t given us a good enough look yet to be 100% sure, but hopefully Mariah will leave the eyases uncovered long enough for us to get a head count. If we get a clear picture, we’ll be sure to post it here, so keep watching!

UPDATE: 11:45 – FIRST LOOK AT 3 EYASES!

Here’s our first look at the three eyases lined up under Mariah’s watchful eyes and protective wings. Can the fourth hatch be far behind?

-Jess

Sometime early this morning a second egg hatched! Both eyases look healthy, and they’ve already begun eating. The picture above shows Kaver feeding the eyases at about 8:30AM today.

The eyases need to grow up very quickly. By the time they’re five days old their weight will have doubled. In only six weeks they’ll leave the nest box to take their first flights. By then they’ll be fully grown! That means between now and mid-June, they need to get a lot of food. Kaver will be busy bringing food these first few days. Mariah may leave the nest for short periods of time, but she’ll stay with the new eyases for most of the day. That leaves Kaver to do the majority of the hunting. He’ll need to feed himself and all the eyases, plus Mariah, but that shouldn’t be a problem for him. Kaver is a very good hunter and he’s had no trouble feeding five eyases in previous years.

During their early growth spurt the eyases will spend most of their time doing two things– eating and sleeping. When a parent comes into the nest box, the young falcons are likely to begin begging for food. They do this by raising their heads and vocalizing with open bills, just like in the picture above. If the parent has arrived with prey, it will hold down the food with its foot, rip off small pieces and drop them into the open bills of the hungry eyases. Sometimes both parents will feed the hatchlings together. Each eyas will continue to beg until it gets full. You’ll be able to see which eyases have had enough to eat because they store the food in their crops. A crop is a special pouch in the bird’s esophogus where the food is stored for digestion at a later time. The crop will bulge when it’s full, so it’s easy to see when an eyas has been fed. When each eyas has a full crop it will often lay down for a nap. The eyases that haven’t received enough food will continue to beg, so Mariah and Kaver will keep feeding the begging eyases until they’ve all gotten a meal. Watch for the eyases to get five, six or even more meals each day!

In between feedings, the eyases don’t move around too much. Don’t be surprised or alarmed if you see them all laying down with their wings spread out and not moving for long periods of time. It’s normal for these growing falcons to sleep much of the day away!

-Jess

Everyone who guessed that Mariah’s first egg would hatch on May 7, give yourselves a nice pat on the back!

It looks like the egg hatched around 7:15 this morning. In the picture above, you can see the broken egg shell, neatly opened by the eyas as it pipped its way out of the shell.

Now’s probably a good time to talk about the new eyases. Falcon hatchlings are semi-altricial. This means that for the most part, they’re unable to fend for themselves. Hatchlings don’t have enough feathers to maintain their body temperature. This ability, called thermoregulation, is very important, becuase without it, the eyases will freeze in the cold night air, and they may overheat during the day if the temperature outside gets too hot. So Mariah and Kaver will need to keep the hatchlings covered for the first seven to ten days, to protect them from the cold and the heat. That’s the reason we haven’t gotten a good look at the new falcon chick yet.

During the first days of their lives they’ll grow a thick coat of light downy feathers. After a week or so they’ll be able to regulate their body temperature well enough that the adults will be able to leave them uncovered. For now though, the new eyases will stay covered most of the time, so you’ll have to watch carefully to catch a glimpse of them!

When you do see them, their eyes will probably be closed for the first couple of days. Unlike their parents, their bills and feet range in color from light gray to light pink. They’ll get their yellow feet from their meaty diet, but that will take several weeks. They’re not strong enough to stand on their legs yet either, so they move by crawling.

In my recent article on hatching I mentioned that all the eggs should hatch within a couple of days of each other. It’s possible more will hatch today, but they should certainly all hatch within the next day or two, so keep watching! In an upcoming article we’ll talk more about feeding and some of the other behaviors you’ll see as the eyases grow.

UPDATE! FIRST LOOK AT THE EYAS

In this picture from 10:20 this morning you can see the eyas poking out from beneath Mariah’s wing. It’s looking toward the left wall, and its closed eyes and pink bill are visible along with the fine white feathers.

-Jess

After a decade of presence on the Internet, it’s no surprise that Mariah and Kaver have attracted a lot of fans. Many of the Rochester falcons’s admirers are not only crafty, but they’re willing to share their enthusiasm with the rest of the world through their own websites. Today we thought we’d take time to recognize some of our fans’ efforts to spread the word about Mariah and Kaver.

Kodak has been Mariah and Kaver’s home as long as they’ve been in Rochester. Kodak’s blog, 1000 Words, offers daily stories and tips about using photography. This week they’re featuring a couple of articles about falcons. From Baerbel Winkler, an Information Technlogy Systems Analyst at Kodak’s facility in Stuttgart, Germany, comes this dispatch about a pair of Kestrels that have taken up residence at a nest box originally installed for Peregrines to nest in. Tom Hoehn managed the Kodak Birdcam program for a decade. His post today provides a photographic retrospective of the falcons at Kodak. Be sure to keep up with the excellent posts at http://1000words.kodak.com!

Web logs, or blogs as they’re more popularly known, are a great way to keep up with the Kodak falcons. Several local falcon watchers share their observations through personal blogs. Barbara lives in nearby Webster, New York. She writes a blog about Mariah and Kaver with lots of good information and pictures from the Rochester Falconcam, as well as her own video clips, and links to many related websites. Lord Garavin’s Bird Blog is filled with reports of the falcons’ activity outside of the nest box. Check out this recent post about Mariah and Kaver’s mating activity, and browse the blog’s archives from June and July to see past years’ fledglings in action.

The Rochester Falconcam enjoys a worldwide following. In 2001, Kodak added a discussion board to the Birdcam website, allowing those fans to interact for the first time. It wasn’t long before many of these Peregrine afficianados decided to keep in touch year-round, and the Kfalconcam group at Yahoo was born in 2002. Guests can browse the messages posted by falcon fans from around the world, and if you want to get in on the conversation, becoming a member is easy! The Cleveland Museum of Natural History has a website dedicated to their very own Peregrine pair. Their discussion board is very active, and it has a section devoted to the Rochester falcons.

Among fan websites, one distinguishes itself for its sheer ingenuity. Responding to requests from falcon fans to be able to view past pictures from the cameras monitoring Mariah and Kaver’s nest box, a long-time falcon fan with the unusual name Shaky put his technical expertise to work and produced a one-of-a-kind website. Shaky’s Falconcam Archive Viewer allows visitors to review pictures from any of the Falconcam’s cameras with a few simple mouse clicks. He’s got a humorous streak, too. Check out his Shakypix for a lighthearted look at our favorite falcons!

As you can see, our fans are a creative lot, and we hope you’ll take the time to explore their websites. Want to join the fun? If you have a website or blog featuring Mariah and Kaver let us know! We’ll add it, along with all of the websites we’ve featured here, to our Fans of the Falconcam page.

-Jess

Despite our unofficial motto at Imprints, specto subitus (expect the unexpected), it seems pretty safe to say that Mariah is done laying eggs for this year. Quite naturally we’ve received a lot of questions from our viewers asking when we can expect the eggs to hatch.

We can’t give an exact date (falcon egg hatching prediction is far from an exact science) but in general, the eggs should hatch about 33 days after incubation begins. Since Mariah laid her final egg on April 7 and began incubating a few days before that, we expect to see the eggs start to hatch around the second week of May. That means Mariah’s new family should all be out of their shells by Mothers Day.

The hatching process usually takes a couple of days, though it can go longer than three days (72 hours) in some cases. The eyas uses an egg tooth to break through the egg in a process called pipping. The hatching eyas uses its egg tooth like a chisel. First it pierces a membrane-like pouch at one end of the egg. The pouch holds air that the eyas uses to breathe while it finishes punching a hole through the shell. During pipping, the eyas turns and chisels, turns and chisels, until eventually it cuts off one end of the shell. Between bouts of pipping the eyas will rest, and it may vocalize while it’s pipping, especially if Mariah or Kaver are making their ee-chupping sounds.

The final round of pipping takes between 15 minutes and an hour. Because Mariah didn’t start incubating until the third egg had been laid, all four should hatch close together. In clutches of four, all the eggs usually hatch within two days. This is called synchronous hatching. Because of synchronous hatching all the eyases will be about the same size, and therefore about equally able to compete for Mariah and Kaver’s attention, which means they’re all likely to get fed enough to grow into healthy fledglings. We’ll talk more about the eyases’ early development in another article.

-Jess

It’s not quite a scene from the Wild West, but there was a standoff of sorts in the nest box today.

The weather’s nasty here, and Kaver’s been incubating the eggs for most of the morning and afternoon. As you can see, Mariah would like a turn.

It’s no surprise that Kaver doesn’t want to give up his comfy seat. After all, it’s cold, wet and windy outside the nest box. Facing to the south, the nest box is protected from the winds in Rochester, which usually blow out of the west. It is getting a little bit wet inside the box, but that’s nothing compared to the messy slush of heavy snow and rain that’s been falling steadily all day in Rochester.

Mariah’s not one to give up, though. For more than two hours she stood next to Kaver in the nest box, moving closer as time passed. Without doubt she’s been vocalizing, using her “wail” to try to get Kaver to move off the eggs. She even got so close it looked like she might sit right on top of him, but Kaver’s having none of it!

She usually gets her way, but not this time. In the end, Kaver stayed on the eggs, while Mariah left the nest box. Look closely at the roof in the upper left corner of the picture below and you’ll see where she went…

-Jess

It seems that the Rochester Falconcam has entered the Twilight Zone. Overnight, one of Mariah’s eggs vanished. A careful review of the images from the cameras didn’t yield any clues as to what might have happened. The only thing we know for sure is that yesterday there were five eggs, and today there are only four.

The Rochester Falconcam team used Camera 1’s ability to pan and tilt to search the catwalk area just below the nest box. We were looking for shell fragments or any other indication that the egg might have been pushed out of the nest, but despite a detailed survey we found nothing. That leaves us to speculate as to the egg’s fate.

It is possible that the egg was damaged while it was being turned by one of the falcons. You’ll recall that falcons turn the eggs during incubation to ensure even heating of the egg. Earlier this year at a Peregrine nest in Ohio, one of the eggs was broken, so it’s possible that might have happened here too. If that’s the case, the most likely explanation for its absence is that she ate the egg, or what remained of it. The egg shell is a valuable source of calcium, and Peregrines often eat the shells after their young have hatched.

Some readers have wondered if Mariah might have discarded it because she realized it wasn’t viable. That’s unlikely. Peregrines, including Mariah, have been known to incubate eggs that turned out to be nonviable, even long after the other eggs in the clutch had hatched. Also, during reintroduction efforts, Peregrines’ eggs would often be taken for artificial incubation and “dummy” eggs put in their place. In those cases the falcons continued to brood the fake eggs as if they were real.

Even though we didn’t see any evidence of an egg when searching with our camera, it is still possible that it was ejected from the nest, either accidentally or on purpose. The camera has a couple of blind spots caused by objects that block the camera’s view of the catwalk, and the egg could be hiding behind one of those. Also, the weather may have played a role. If the egg was dropped onto the catwalk, the high winds at the top of the tower may have moved it out of camera range, or even blown it off the catwalk entirely.

The only way to learn more would be to make a visit to the nest box in person, and we won’t do that. Mariah is in the middle of brooding her eggs, and we don’t want to disturb her, certainly not for the sake of satisfying our curiosity. Unless there is some great calamity, no one will venture anywhere near the nest box until the eyases are removed to be banded in early June. Meanwhile, we’ll have to settle for speculation, and hope that the remaining eggs go on to hatch successfully.

-Jess

Look carefully at the group of eggs– there are two on the right, one behind the other, for a total of five!

Mariah continues to surprise us all this year! Sometime around 4:00 PM today, she laid the fifth egg of 2007, about 67 hours after her previous one. Since she laid the first egg on March 26, they’ve come at intervals of 50, 106, 60 and 76 hours respectively– an average laying period of 73 hours, or about 20 hours more than her normal 54 hour intervals, so she has us all completely flummoxed this time around.

Here’s another shot…

Four eggs are lined up in front, with the fifth egg hidden behind the second one (counting from the left). Mariah’s breast and the eggs in front make it hard to see, but if you take a close look you can just make it out.

Mariah’s been incubating the eggs for the past five days. Usually, Peregrines begin incubating when the next to last, or penultimate egg is laid. They do this to ensure that all of the eggs will develop together, and hatch at more or less the same time. With the fifth egg being laid five days after the third, it’s likely that it will hatch after the others. That may put the last eyas at a bit of a disadvantage since its other siblings will be bigger and stronger, but there’s probably no need to worry about that. Mariah has had other “late” eggs in past years and even the smallest of her offspring usually end up being just fine. One of the major reasons for that is because Kaver has proven to be a very good provider, even for the large broods that Mariah seems to like. He’ll certainly be busy with five hungry eyases to feed (to say nothing of feeding himself and Mariah), but he’s an old hand at it, and an excellent hunter, so we’re confident that he can repeat his performance of years past.

I suppose the question of a sixth egg is appropriate. Mariah laid six last year, so it’s possible, and with her newfound unpredictability it would be foolish to think she’s done even now. We’ll see in a few days whether she’s going to surprise us again.

-Jess

It looks like Mariah was laying this egg at the same time I posted my last article! How’s that for timing?

You can click the small image at the left for another view. Careful observers of the cameras, especially Camera 2 (a night vision model), noticed that Mariah frequently changed her position within the scrape last night beginning around 8:15 PM local time. She settled down about five minutes later. That kind of restlessness is often associated with egg laying, so even though the first view of the egg wasn’t available until early this morning, we believe she actaully laid egg #4 around 8:20 PM on the 4th of April. As you can imagine, we’re all very excited here at the Rochester Falconcam!

Will there be a fifth egg? We’ll know in a few days…

In the meantime, here’s a great illustration of a brooding shift change (click the image to see the full-sized version). You can see Mariah “encouraging” Kaver to leave the eggs so that she can brood them. She does this by using a vocalization called a “wail”, which tells Kaver that she wants to take a turn on the eggs! You can read more about that in my article on incubation.

-Jess

Who can say? If Mariah were sticking to her “traditional” egg-laying schedule, we would have expected to see another one sometime in the afternoon. She is still looking fluffed up and even a little gravid, so it’s possible that she has another egg on the way. Since she’s clearly not keeping to her old pace, we’ll just have to wait and see.

I’ve consulted with some falcon experts and learned a couple of things. The first is that long egg-laying times are not quite as rare as the literature might seem to indicate. It happened at a couple of nests in Toronto, Canada, for example. In those cases, territorial disputes appear to have been the cause, but age, weather and external stresses can all cause egg laying to be delayed. The consensus seems to be that as female Peregrines get older the normal gap of 48 to 72 hours between eggs can stretch, sometimes quite a bit.

It is possible that Mariah laid an egg between the second and third ones that we see in the nest box. We don’t know of any alternate nest sites in the area though. Also, since laying the third egg (and even before) she has been exhibiting typical brooding behavior at the Kodak nest site. She’s also been here almost constantly, so if she did lay an egg elsewhere, it has almost certainly been abandoned.

In fact, Mariah and Kaver have both been spending a lot of time incubating the three eggs in the nest. The picture at the left, from earlier today, shows Kaver arriving at the nest to take over brooding from Mariah. In true falcon style though, Mariah has been doing most of the work, with Kaver taking over only for a couple of hours at a time. When he’s not taking his turn incubating the eggs, he stays near the nest. Usually he’s perched just outside the nest box.

This is a typical pose for Kaver when he’s brooding the eggs. Notice how he’s leaning a bit forward, with his tail up in the air? He sits that way so that he can get the brood patches on his breast in contact with the eggs. It’s the extra heat from the brood patches that causes the eggs to develop. If he just pressed his abdomen against the eggs he wouldn’t transfer enough heat for incubation to continue. So his posture is a clue to what’s going on in the nest.

So, keep your eyes on the Rochester Falconcam! Maybe Mariah’s on track to lay another egg, or maybe we’ll just have three this year. We’ll just have to keep watching and waiting for now.

-Jess