people places n things

Sadly one of the chicks didn't survive

Now by this time I'd figure the chicks were at least a month and a half old if not two. Many people were now quite familiar with me and my equipment staking out this ideal spot to capture images of the nest. Of the myriad of questions I'd get throughout the day the one asked me most often was how many chicks were there this year. I would tell them four, which several of the bird watchers amount them confirmed. But today even as I spent over 7 hours photographing the nest I could only spot three, (when I went through each shot frame by frame , many weeks later I could indeed see four chicks early in the day but only three by day s end).


I told everybody it was possible the 4th chick remained hidden in the back of the neat out of view, or even possibly left the nest. Though that seemed unlikely as, big as they had become, it was highly unlikely any of them had the wing strength to fly away yet.

It wasn't for another two weeks that I discovered what happened to the 4th chick. This particular gallery besides being a home to photographs that don't fit the categories of any of my other three main ones (nature, scenic or candids) also serves the purpose of being a preview gallery for the other three. As if I get home early enough from a days shoot to browse through my shots, I will often edit 2 or 3 of the days better shots and post them in this gallery as this gallery is connected to a world wide group of photographers who daily post their best shots of the day.

As this is a hobby it often takes weeks for me to get the time to sit down and then systematically go through all the shots from a days shoot. So when I started going through the shots from the 20th I came back to this gallery to see which ones I had already done and put in this gallery, so not to duplicate them in my nature one. That's when as I looked at this shot I noticed the 4th chick.

Look at the edge of the nest all the way on the left, directly above the main branch that supports the nest, and you can definitely see a clump of feathers. That clump of feathers is the 4th chick, and at some point in another hour or so the 4th chick will no longer be there. And the next time I came back a week or so later, as I said before there was only 3 chicks. What it died from I can only guess, but logic tells me that since it was a lot smaller than it's siblings it probably starved to death, not able to compete with its bigger stronger siblings for food. But up to that point all 4 chicks looked healthy fed, and about the same size, so I don't think it was a case of the parents giving up and not feeding a sickly chick, at least not at first .

But as I didn't come here regularly enough to say for sure, I may not ever know what happened, but if the parents were able to raise three of the four babies to young adults to go out own their own, then the still had a very good mating season.

springStaten IslandClove LakesGreat blue heronbirdsnatureheronsNYC