First Feathers

24 Oct - First feathers appearing on Chick's wings. Though starting to feed itself, it still likes Mom to tackle the tough bits...

Meal delivery

Dad brings in the morning meal...Mum eagley ...er...eagerly pounces on it and shrouds it with her wings for a couple of minutes - making sure that is properly dead and going nowhere...

Bunny fluff

I may have a fluffy tail - but am no bunny...

Table manners

Young Chick, if you want to be a raptor you have to attack your food...like this...now you try...

Milestone

2012-10-16 Mum encourages Chick to peck at the carcass as they feed together.

2012-10-17 Milestone. Mum carries breakfast into the nest, wakes Chick, then moves out to a branch, leaving Chick to feed itself.

Breakfast

We've had wet weather for a whole week, so Chick has been bunkered down out of site. But 2 days ago the weather cleared enough for breakfast in the open. Chick is feeding well.

 

Below is a short video clip (3.7 MB)

First Sight

We're very excited! First sight of chick this morning, being fed breakfast by mother. Looks healthy. About 3 weeks old, we guess. We had a friendly visit from Shane & Mia on Saturday, doing their inspection rounds. As Shane noted, mother does not put food in chick's beak; she holds it in front of chick and chick has to pick and pull it from her. Training begins early! Here's our first pic of chick (poor quality phone-pic of camera-LCD of video-frame through telescope - but worth showing nonetheless). Expect more activity and blog updates soon!