all creatures great and small

One last shot.

This is the last shot I have of the baby in the nest. If you look closely you can even see it's eye is open. It is 2:51. Again had I been observing the chicks closely at the time I would have kept observing the chick to see just when it fell to the ground. But on this sunny day observing the nest through my rear screen, or viewfinder was problematic, and as in those conditions it wasn't always easy to tell the condition of the chicks. Though I still think at some point I should have been able to see that one chick was much smaller than the others, though I could never have been able to tell that it was missing an eye, until the sun moved much farther over in the sky late in the afternoon. And by then the chick would have already fallen out of the nest.

As it stands this shot clearly shows at 2:51 the chick is alive and it's one good eye is open, as it's siblings push up against their parent trying to get fed. At some point after this the chick slid completely out of the nest and fell to the ground.

After this last feeding nothing happened at the nest and I didn't record another shot of the nest until a full 2 hours later when one of the parents returned to the nest with more food. By then the one eyed chick was gone. Possibly it fell to the ground, possible it fell into the water. Either way its life was over. And I unknowingly at the time, had recorded one of it's last moments alive.

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