This picture was inadvertently taken in a camera minus its extended memory card so it took me a few days to source the direct USB cable to download it.
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At first, there was only one small chocolatey brown egg sitting in the nest. However, when hatched, we found there were two babies! Do birds do twins?
So, as soon as the mummy bird flew away on her maternal mission, I took a quick look to cross check, just to be sure my eyes not playing tricks. Yup, there were 2 little chicks tucked up on either side of the cosy twigworks.
Since that being Day 1 of their arrival, I decided to leave it until the next morning to take a picture for the record. When morning came (Day 2), inexplicably there was just only 1 (pic above). How did the little birdie just vanish? It couldn't have flown since there was hardly a feather on its delicate embryonic skin.
As this pic was taken in a hurry, I didn't wait for one of those hungry open beak moments. I assumed there's opportunity to do a re-take the following morning (Day 3). Lo and behold! an eeriely bare nest awaited me.
We were all confounded by this avian 'Houdini' act. Did the mummy bird relocate them to another
nest, one per night, two nights in a row and how did she do it? Another thought was whether the 2nd chick being 'kidnapped' from another site if she was capable of transporting these infantile nestlings? For sure, they hadn't fallen to the ground as we would have seen and neither was there anything suspicious to indicate stealthy predators.
Thanks for the barren nest memory, guess we will never really know...
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