At Rye Harbour last night we had a big thunderstorm and lots of rain… and power cuts, so that explains why our webcams went black for a while. I was concerned that the Common Tern chicks might have suffered, but they all look OK this morning. There are 3 types of food being brought in, long silver sand eels, other shorter silver fish and brown shrimps, but the sand eels are the best food for growing chicks. The older chicks are now moving around quite a bit, but they quickly recognise their parents bringing back food and beg to get noticed! Barry. Rye Harbour.
I have moved the camera from the Swallows nest that the fledgling have just left. The fledglings are returning to the barn of a night. The three of them a doing well, unfortunately they are not going into the nest. It would have been nice to have seen them, but the camera would be better used on another nest. The camera is now looking at the first nest that I tried to show, that was built onto the electrical junction box. There are five eggs in the nest. Two of them have been there for some time and I should think that they are not fertile. Three other eggs have been laid recently, but I am not over confident that they are fertile either. The adults are returning to the nest and sitting on the eggs, so there must be a chance that they will hatch. I will leave the camera in the place it is for a week, whilst the adults are returning, unless I find another nest, then I will change it over.
The Jay is a colourful Bird, we do get them on the farm on the feeders, about this time of the year for maybe a couple of months, but rarely other than that. They are from the same family as the Magpie. As the Magpie they raid other Birds nests for both the nestlings and eggs. Where the Magpie rarely feeds from the Bird feeders, the Jays always do. As colourful as they are I would prefer that they went else where.
Willow does look good on camera, but she is loosing her baby coat, and looks very moth eaten. If you saw her you would think that she had been bitten, or that she was not being looked after. When we put her into the field after being in for her feed, Bliss and Misty wait most time for her at the gate, all three walking off together, Willow not concerned that Lady is not with her. We have started to put two bowls of feed in the stable, as yesterday I noticed that Lady was pushing Willow away a little.
We are going to try to let Breeze run with the rest of the Horses tomorrow. She has been penned off on her own for nearly two weeks. We don’t like doing it to her. Being the leader of the Herd, she tries to boss Lady about. When we first let Lady and Willow in with Breeze, when they came back from the stud, we had a bit of a kicking session and it could have become dangerous for Willow. Hopefully with them all of them being in the same field together, with Breeze on her own in an electric fenced off area she will get use to them. She did last year. After a bit of galloping about they settled and there was no more problems.
After speaking to the Butterfly Farm the camera started going. They are waiting for a new Queen for the Leaf Cutter Ants, so you may only see the odd one on the rope until it arrives.