After 38 days of brooding, the first chick of the webcam ospreys in the Biesbosch has hatched. “It probably hatched very early on Saturday morning,” says an enthusiastic forest ranger Harm Blom. “Unique images show that the chick was already busy at night to come out of the egg. In those nighttime images we saw the egg move and a crack had already formed in the shell.”
“It is a very beautiful chick,” says forester Harm Blom. “The little one has the signature stripe on the head that many young ospreys have. It looks like it came straight out of a Disney movie.” Besides the fact that it was also time for the egg to come out, there was also a change in behavior in the mother-to-be in recent days.
“You saw her looking head down at the eggs.”
“We have seen the female regularly stand in the nest in recent days, but not to turn the eggs,” says Blom. “You saw her then look crookedly down at the eggs. Also a bit ‘wonderful’. We think that is probably the first contact between the chick and mother osprey.”
“She may have noticed movement in the egg at such a moment, heard the tapping against the shell and even hearing a beeping sound is not impossible. You see this behavior more often in nesting birds, just before the moment an egg is hatched. really comes true.”
“The chick has already had the first food.”
Now that the first of the three eggs has hatched, we have to wait for the next two chicks. “We expect the next chick in two to three days and the last chick also two to three days after that,” says Blom, who also reports that father osprey has already been introduced to the youngest Biesbosch resident. “The chick has already had the first food, the first bite was fed around coffee time on Saturday morning.”
In the video clip below, the remains of the first hatched egg are neatly cleaned up.
Waiting for privacy settings…
In addition to the famous and much-visited osprey webcam nest in the Biesbosch, there are still three pairs of ospreys breeding in the nature reserve. Things don’t go so smoothly with a fourth litter.
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