By then, two hours had passed and given the increasing agitation inside the nest, I was convinced that at least one chick would jump out or fall off in the next few hours, so, armed with patience, I stuck to my position. I realized the cavity had another opening, just above the main entry hole, when a second chick popped out its downy, yellow-grey head. The snappers weren’t much interested in each other at the moment and spent a lot of time munching on fresh underwater plants. According to Wikipedia, Black Swallowtails are generally longer-lived than other butterflies, unless subjected to bad weather or deprived of food. Please subscribe to sign in to comment. When mature, the whole abdomen is covered in  a dusty white, referred to as “prunescence.”. Open your eyes and you will quickly realize you are missing out on some serious action, right at your doorstep. And many of their young no longer hang about hopefully, but fly off to hedgerows new. I just learned from Cornell that Green Herons actually nest in a large fork in a shrub or tree with overhanging limbs to hide the nest from predators like snakes, crows or grackles. had taken up residence in natural tree cavities, a few meters apart from one another. Unlike blackbirds, blue tits nest in cavities, so it is impossible to see the nestlings without video equipment unless they are about to fly away. It comes often from readers unfamiliar with the nesting birds’ need to moult well-worn feathers once the hard work of breeding and feeding is done. There are around 65 species of thrushes, which are categorised ( Log Out /  Poison ivy isn’t poisonous for animals, though. This marks them as “leucistic”, a heritable condition. This name will appear beside any comments you post. I was, of course, many thousands from the first to marvel at a snowy blackbird, Pliny told of them shown in Rome. Read about griffon vultures, marmots, grasshoppers and spiders. A Silver-spotted Skipper (Epargyreus clarus) took a while to show me the bright white spot on the lower (ventral) side of its hind wing. He has their look and build but his feathers are still slightly fluffy snd downy. I’ve included an earlier photo of an adult  Gnatcatcher as it forages. Warm days allowed fledglings to emerge from their nests and use their tiny wings to pursue their parents into the fields and marshes, begging to be fed. The male Eastern Pondhawk dragonfly (Erythemis simplicicollis) also found the woody shards a great place to lie in wait. Hundreds of blackbirds with strange white feathers have been spotted in gardens. A little Red-winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) struggled up onto a branch near an adult who took off immediately to look for food, leaving the youngster looking just a bit insecure! Illustration: Michael Viney. Parent birds whisk back and forth, beaks lined with seed or bearing a drooping caterpillar. Their parents keep feeding and watching after them for about three weeks. So join me on a virtual circuit of Bear Creek Nature Park – from the meadows, to the pond, through the woods to the marsh and back to monitor the bird boxes. Ten days had elapsed since I had located the nests, seven since my last visit, a considerable amount of time at the scale of a chick’s life. Wildflowers, long buried under invasive shrubs that were removed last fall, are emerging from the seed bank in all their glory. Hiking up the old salt route to the Col de Fenestre (French Alps). I love the simple design of its bright white wings and subtle yellow stripe. Please check back later for updates, and make sure you spend some time outside! Both species are atricial, which means chicks are helpless following hatching and their survival inside the nest depends entirely on their parents’ intensive care. Soon enough, one chick moved closer to the entry hole; its minuscule orange beak, then forehead and finally its whole head became visible. It’s actually not that uncommon, Budget to include Covid and Brexit fund of up to €5bn, Free resource aims to help businesses tackle employee stress and wellbeing, Workplace solutions that help us work together, Business owners hopeful of new guidelines for levels of personal injury damages, Workplace solutions for enterprise organisations in a changed world. Plants like Bur-reed are one of the reasons conservationists value wetlands so highly! And my leucistic white cock blackbird, with an adequate carotene quota, had kept his yellow bill.