31 October 2022
And now . . . . ?
Yesterday evening I had to wait till it was almost totally dark before the female left the nest and I could check on the contents. I couldn’t see much, but a flash photo showed five eggs neatly clustered together.
It is now almost certainly too late for the original three eggs to still hatch (Cynthia recorded three eggs in the nest on 25 September 2022 – 36 days ago, and typically incubation lasts around 31 days). Looking more closely at the photo however, I picked up something strange – the two eggs at the back of the cluster seem to be somewhat larger than the three in front. What other surprises do the owls have in store?
By Geoff Lockwood