Day 21 — A Full Brood

The hatch that began before dawn on the seventeenth finished overnight. By the morning of the eighteenth all five eggs were chicks — a full brood of five in the cup, confirmed by eye. There are no eggs left to count.

It is a quieter kind of busy now. The female spends the day down over the chicks, brooding them close for warmth the way she sat the eggs, lifting off only in short stretches. The change is the male: where his incubation-season visits were occasional courtship feeds, he now comes and goes through the day carrying food, and the captures show the two adults at the cup together far more often than on any incubation day — the start of true provisioning, both parents working the brood.

A note on the count, again: the camera watches a wide, half-occluded frame, and a bowl of small pink chicks under a brooding parent rarely shows all five at once. The automated reading of “newly hatched nestlings” was right about the event and unreliable about the number. Five is Casey’s count, made by eye at the cup — the same five eggs from the seventeenth, now hatched.

Day 21 by the numbers

• Brood: 5 chicks (full clutch hatched), confirmed by eye
• Eggs remaining: 0
• Two-adult captures: up sharply from incubation — the male provisioning
• Weather: high 21.8°C, low 13.5°C, no precipitation
• Stage: hatching → brooding

Watching for the days ahead: continuous brooding giving way to constant feeding trips, and the first eggshell fragments carried out of the cup.