Mamma loafing around with the minions. (one is behind her, to the front, the other is behind and to her tail.)(edit: those are snacks,)
The babies aren’t feathery like that yet. Baby 2, aka HH6 was still an egg last I saw.
Those appear to be the snacks from earlier. Mr Owl has spent the last few weeks putting food up in nearby trees for momma, and now Momma chases him out quickly because he’s on food collecting duty even more now that the lil guys are hatching.
The babies will grow up amazingly fast though. It’s fun to watch if you haven’t seen them grow up in real time before!
I should have gone to sleep 2 hours ago, but I did a quick highlighting. Here is baby HH5, and I marked its egg tooth and its ear is very visible here too.
If you’re in desktop mode of the RaptorCAM page, the other bird nerds give good breakdowns of what all is going on. Comments and the user screen caps don’t show up on the mobile view. I can’t make out half the stuff on my own, so I’ve been relying on their sharper eyes! 😵💫
Hmm. Well they’re still there somewhere:)
I caught the rat tail that was there most the afternoon (and thought she might be snacking just before I snapped the loaf,)
No worries! I’m glad you’ve enjoyed watching her this far!
I’ve been surprised by them keeping dead things in the nest, as it seems more a vector for disease than it does nutrition.
Also that they keep food around in general! I know many songbirds store food, but that food is much less perishable than owl food is.
It’s been impressive to see the variety of things Mr Owl had brought back. Especially the snakes and that big bird there now. A very impressive hunter!
It’s still fairly cool there (40s to 50s, 60’s on saturday…) so the it’s probably not too bad.
I’m guessing normal winters (because this year’s been freakishly warm,) it’s perfectly fine to cache food like that. cuz it’s frozen.
Looks like HH6 is out by now! Someone grabbed this around 10pm
At 3am, someone else said it looked like momma was feeding both of them some snack strips.
Yay baby owls! Grow up strong!
It’s gotta be tough spending the first 24+ hours of life trying to bust out of a tiny room using just baby muscles!
I wonder how long they’re actually aware for. I assume they’ve been mostly developed for a few days by the time they’re actually hatching.
It’s probably a good thing we forget all that.
Lol, yeahhhhh, I’m good not having memories of that first journey… 🤣
