The Quiet before the Hatch

Ella and Pip have been incubating for about three weeks now which means we are about 10 days away from first hatches. Now this is just an estimate, some adults are very good incubators and their chicks consistently hatch out within a day or so of their estimate each year. Madame our second Radisson female and her mates T-Rex and Trey were very good at hatching out eggs at 28-30 days of incubation. Princess’ incubation times were between 32-34 day very consistently. This is only Ella’s second year with Pip so we will have to see what their timing is like. We start watching very closely about the 28 day mark but generally don’t expect to see anything until about day 32.

So while we are waiting for Days 28 through 32, we hope everyone has been enjoying this year’s FalconCam. We are hoping to improve the resolution a bit, it has something to do with analog vs digital transmission and folks with more tech background than me are looking into what might be tweaked to make the image a wee bit sharper. Fortunately, not something we need to do at the nestbox so we won’t be disturbing our little Radisson family but it also likely won’t happen right away.

Here is a short video clip of a shift change today – Ella replacing Pip on the eggs. It runs just over 2 minutes in length.