Comparison of our three residents November 2021

The website has been unavailable for much of this year, but here is a short update:

Three eggs were laid  on 31st August, 2nd and 5th September.   One egg hatched on 8th October.  The other two did not.  One egg did have a chick inside, as we could see movement, but it was probably not strong enough to break out.  These things happen, although very rarely, fortunately.  The other egg probably was not fertilised.   They are still in the box and I will collect them later and offer them to the Australian Museum.

So the chick that hatched is called Yurruga after a vote was held featuring 12 different names of weather phenomenon in the local Aboriginal language, Wiradjuri.  I’m still not sure, but I think it’s probably a female, as it appears on the picture above to be larger than Xavier.   She or he should fledge this weekend, I think, as most of the down has gone and the wing exercising has been more frequent.

Here is my most recent video of Yurruga at 37 days (today = 39).

The weather has been unseasonably cold and wet this year.  There have been days when there have been as few as one small prey brought in, but with just one chick, that has not been a problem and other days, the hunting has been very successful.

Diamond had an injury a few weeks, ago, probably from hunting, although we are not sure of course.

The future of this website is uncertain.  It was upgraded by the owner, Scott Banks, and was out of action, for a while.  The chat function is still not operating as far as I can tell.   I’ll keep you posted.   We may be able to design a new one and transfer some of the information across.)

The data collection phase of my current research project finished at the end of August 2021 and, aided by some of our very competent volunteers, we are getting all the data into spreadsheets ready for analysis.  There are two main components:  diet (nine years’ of data) and behaviour based on daily observations over seven years.