An Earth Day Present

photo courtesy of T Maconachie

Today’s forecast of +20C weather has been a long time coming and we have been waiting for it. Or more precisely, Eye-Spy has been waiting for it (or dreading it). We knew we needed to reconnect the inside-box-cam but we needed a day when the air temperature was warm enough that when we went to do work the eggs wouldn’t suffer from being uncovered. For some reason we just can’t convince Ella or Pip to stay on their eggs while we fiddle near their nestbox. Madame and Trey used to let us, but that’s another story in a galaxy a long long time ago. Today with +20C air temperature and the sun shining, we knew that the eggs wouldn’t be harmed when we worked at the back of the nestbox to reconnect a previously-installed camera. All went very well – neither Ella nor Pip attempted to end Eye-Spy’s life, Eye-Spy was able to get his work down quickly (and successfully) and Ella settled back down on her eggs with no fuss whatsoever. Win, win, win.

Now we all have “real lives” that pay our bills etc, so while we plan and plot what we want to do, the timing for some of our tasks needs to be flexible, even more so for the the cam side of our operation. So it was a bit of a surprise to get a exceedingly one-word text message that read: “So?”. Eye-Spy is the master at brief and sometimes the inscrutable text messages, but even for him this was short. Some would say we have been working together for too long (I would ever so cheerfully disagree) and I dove to my computer to start logging onto the cams. And there it was, Ella tucked down on her eggs in glorious, crystal-clear technicolour!

photo courtesy of T Maconachie

photo courtesy of T Maconachie

The best present I could have gotten for Earth Day 2021 and one we can’t wait to share with everyone on this year’s FalconCam!