Many of the breeding pairs at WBS have come to us because of injury or confiscation, others have been captive bred themselves. When a pair successfully lays a clutch in the nest box we’ve provided, the propagation department becomes an extremely busy place to be! To give you an idea of who lays and when, here’s a short list of a typical season. Surprises can happen, but generally the birds follow a rough schedule from January to July:
January: This is when our season begins. The nests and platforms as well as our incubators are cleaned, prepared, and ready to go during the first week of January. We begin checking barn owl and eagle owl nests every Monday. When an egg is found, the date is recorded and the nest is checked on Wednesday and Friday to be better aware of the incubation dates. This process is repeated with every breeding pair throughout the season. Barn owls may begin laying in January.
February: Barn owls, Eurasian eagle owls, and augur buzzards lay.
March: Lanner falcons, tawny owls, and ferruginous hawks.
April: By April, we are in full swing! In addition to the eggs and hatchlings we already have, we begin looking for bald eagles to lay, usually around Easter.
May: May can be a busy month, with overlaps from April and June.
June: Harris hawks, abdim storks, pied crows, black vultures
July: In July, things are tapering off. We keep a close eye on our birds to protect them from excessive heat.
And as this video shows, the augur buzzards were right on schedule this year!
Stay tuned for the next installment of “Raptor Propagation” when I’ll answer the question: What exactly is an egg?
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1 comment:
I love your fantastic work for birds and mammals. Wish much more people would understand how special animals are. And how they deserve our compassion.
This says it all:
In a world older and more complete than ours
they move finished and complete,
gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained,
living by voices we shall never hear.
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