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7th week - Preyed chicks

24th May 2020

This week has been very intense. Many things happened to our three nests! Let’s examine now one by one.

1. The song thrush nest

We have been monitoring day-by-day this nest since more than two weeks but on last Monday, I was very surprised to see that the nest was preyed! The nest cup was ripped off and laying on the branches below, it was broken and there were no signs of the chicks. A big predator must have taken them away! It was very disappointing. The little ones would have probably fledged in 2-3 days. In the last photo that I took, you can see one of the chicks hidden under its siblings and did not seem to move. Probably, it was sick or not anymore alive, because it did not receive enough food, or it had a disease or many other reasons. This attracted the predator. Which one? Probably a raptor, an owl or hawk, given the strength it used to rip off the nest and to break the hard cup made of mud and grass. I found just a couple of signs of the chicks on the ground: some small feathers and blood. Difficult to accept such cruelty, but we must remember that this is part of nature and that also other animal species need to survive (below a video of a day-by-day growth)

2. The mysterious nest

Last week, we discovered a nest of an unknown bird species with five beautiful healthy chicks inside. I identified the species the day after. It was of a Blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla)! This species belongs to the warblers family and has a beautiful musical song. It usually nest in shrubs, in our case the nest was built on a young pine tree at a height of 1.50 meters from the ground. The adults have a distinct plumage: the male has a back cap and the female has a reddish-brown one. I followed the nest for three days and on the fourth day the chicks were not there anymore. Also this nest was preyed! It is likely that it has been preyed by a small mammal, such as a weasel, polecat or a marten, because the nest was still intact and the tree on which it was laying was a young pine, thus its branches would have not supported a heavy animal such as a raptor. However, I would not exclude that it might have been a jay. This species sometimes eats baby birds too.

Possible predators:

3. A NEW Song thrush nest

We discovered this nest on the 10th of May with its five eggs. Three eggs hatched on the 21st, and the fourth one the day after. Since the hatching, we have monitored the chicks daily growth. One of the eggs has not hatched yet, at this point it will not anymore - sometimes eggs don’t hatch because they may not be fertilized or because the membrane sack is too tough for the chick to break through.