...but unfortunately the eggs rolled out again and have been in and out of the nest since then. They are still bringing in feathers and playing at nest building, but at present only one egg is visible in the nest so we suspect the other has gone to the corner of the box again and I really don’t think it’s going to be a success this year.
We had a very brief period during the hot weather last week where up to a dozen swifts were seen to be doing flypasts but none entered the boxes and all seem to have gone away now.
Box 3 has been a total disaster. After not having seen the adults coming and going for a week or so we finally cracked and opened up the box this morning to see what was going on. You’ll remember that they were incubating 3 eggs and everything looked good until the camera packed up so we thought we’d put a working one back in there. What we found was one dead adult on the nest and nothing else. We don’t know what has happened. Maybe the other parent was taken by a predator, or maybe it simply left leaving the remaining one unable to get sufficient food, we shall never know -maybe there’s a swift version of coronavirus, who knows? So it looks like our swifts will not be rearing any young at all this year, which is a dreadful disappointment. We’ll keep the cameras up and running till the end of the season just in case.
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