In the previous column, we talked about birds that use large sticks to construct their nests.
As an alternative illustration of this factor, another one of these is pictured here.
Wedgetails certainly use large sticks but rather than start again, they simply add more sticks on top of those there from a previous year.
The birds in this illustration had been adding more and more sticks over a period of few years, making it much higher than the original nest would have been.
This pair had two young which had been growing for a few weeks and spent their day roaming around the nest waiting for one of the parents to return with food.
To photograph these birds, I needed to set up a hide and made several trips during the following weeks, hoping to have the parent birds return to feed the young while I was in the hide. One of the adults did fly over my head and dropped into the nest. It had caught a small animal and proceeded to tear it up. At this stage the two chicks were down in the bottom of the nest so I couldn’t see them.
On a different occasion, the second parent landed on the branch just above the other as it was feeding one of the young. Then the first adult pulled off another piece of meat and to my delight, one of the babies popped its head up out of the nest to take the food. Now I had the two adults with one of them feeding the young which was a great shot.
During the following weeks the babies grew and developed their brown plumage and I was on hand a few times when an adult came back to the nest.
Note: In Saturday, 5 August’s edition, Keith Ireland’s photgraph of a Cattle Egret was incorrectly identified as an Osprey. We apologise for the error.
