Update 4/13: I now have a longer lens on the camera, so it gives a pretty
close view of the nest. Not much going on right now, mostly a real lot of
sitting. Once or twice a day, the birds will swap places; the male and
female share incubation duties, so they take turns at it.
The eggs supposedly hatch in 14-15 days. The first egg appeared on 4/4, so if that one makes it, it should happen on the 18th or 19th. But that egg wasn't very well attended to for the first few days, so I have my doubts. The second one appeared on 4/8, which would mean that's it'll be due around 4/22-4/23. The third egg is two days behind that one, I think. They say that the baby birds fledge in about two weeks, and then the whole family leaves the nest.
Update 4/23: Two or three times a day, the parent birds swap places. As of this morning's change, there are still three eggs visible in the nest. They seem to swap between 8 and 9 am, and between 3 and 4 pm. Probably some other times, too, but that's' all I've noticed.
Here's a picture of an afternoon shift change. Here's another picture.
Update 4/25: Still waiting for signs of hatching eggs. But nothing so far. Like clockwork, the birds changed places around 8:30 this morning. Looks like there are still three eggs.
Update 4/25 afternoon: Well, about 3:30 this afternoon, I saw the first images of a baby bird hatching. Pretty darned amazing. After hatching, they spend most of their time sitting under the parent, but there's enough movement to catch glimpses of the little fella. I was able to see the baby actually moving around at one point. I'll upload some stills a little later this evening.
Well, that didn't take long. Here is a set of pages showing the hatching of the first egg. There are five images to a page, about 50K bytes each. Apologies to the modem-impaired.
As I said before, the first egg, found on 4/4, probably won't hatch. That leaves one more, which was a day behind the other one.
Update 4/26: With somewhat less fanfare, the second egg hatched earlier this morning. Here is a picture of the parent removing the egg casing. There isn't much to see most of the time, as the babies are usually hidden beneath the parent. Within a few days, they should grow enough that they'll have to sit out in the open.
Right on time, the parents switched places this morning. They managed to switch without leaving the babies exposed.
Here is a collection of pictures from 4/26.
Update 4/27: I finally found a way to scan through all the captures quickly (there are 10,000 a day), and discovered that the parents switch places only twice a day, once around 8:30 a.m., and again around 3:30 p.m. Once the "mother" settles in for the evening, there's very little movement until daybreak.
This image turned up this morning, and it sure looks as if there are three hatchlings.
Who needs libraries when we have bookstores? I was early for a dinner, so I popped into Borders and browsed the bird books. I learned that it's the mother who cares for the babies from dusk till dawn, while the father stays out all night, comes home at 8 in the morning, sits around the nest all day, and hogs all the good camera time. The mother is the bigger of the two currently, but she was slimmer before they started the nest. There are also some differences in the patterns of dark markings on their wings, which is how I usually tell them apart.
There's always a lot of feeding after a parent returns to take over the watch. I expect that within the next few days, the babies will get a lot bigger and be visible a lot more during the day.
Today wasn't a very good day for pictures, the father was sitting so that he was between the babies and the camera. Protecting them from the paparazzi, as it were. Here's the best pic of the bunch. Since it's so big, presumably this is the baby that hatched Tuesday:
