The timing of our shovel-intervention seems to have been fortuitous. On April 16th I was checking the nestbox to see how much snow remained after our intervention the day before. My mid-morning most of the snow was gone and the sun wasn’t yet shining on the nestbox. So when I checked in the afternoon, I almost didn’t notice all the snow was gone when I saw Ella’s surprise in the back corner of the box!
And once the ball, or rather, egg, started rolling, the rest happened rather quickly. Egg one was joined by egg two on the 18th and egg three on the 21st.
It hadn’t snowed again but the nights were much cooler and Ella and Pip began spending time keeping their eggs from getting cool right from egg one. On the 21st however, their behaviour changed, “hard” incubation had begun. Now we will just have to wait and see if a fourth egg is forthcoming!
