A day at a time at a nest

Some of last night and today at nest #3 of Satakunta Ospreys. Only warning for the screenshots is headless fishes again.

Supper feeding. There are quite a few shots of this, as I was really happy to see N2 doing so well and being active at begging and crawling to where the food is.

I take back saying osplets aren't very cute in the conventional sense. Look at that face!

I am also not immune to little baby birds posing in a similar way as their big parents.

Nuppu shielding N2 from rain this morning. She's doing a great job at that, and in normal summer rain that should be enough to keep her now only chick safe and warm. The storm she lost two of her chicks in seems to have included strong gusts of wind that no wings had a chance of keeping from getting under them, and there was a rapid temperature drop with a shower of hail. With the chicks being as small as they were, it's just amazing that N2 made it. Nuppu treats the little one as very precious, too.

And as very hungry. More feedings inbetween shimmying onto the chick for brooding again.

Warning for discussing the deaths of the two other chicks (and chick deaths in general) more for the rest of the post. Includes several references to cannibalism.

The nestcam's channel includes a video summary of the events, but tl;dr on what happened to the two chicks after they had died is that Nuppu carried one of the bodies out of the nest, and ate the other. There was a bit of pearl-clutching about that last bit in the livestream's chat, but I think it's a good thing that she did. The chicks were already dead so they weren't going to care, and not only is getting the bodies out of the nest quickly safer than letting them get buried, considering both hygiene concerns and the potential for them to attract other predators, it's also practical for a wild animal not to waste something it can use as food. Nuppu is going to need a lot of energy for taking care of just one chick, too.

I'm actually only surprised that she understood so quickly to treat the dead chick as food. It still took her the night and several hours of the next day, but I've seen young raptor females that have lost a chick from their first clutch ever to take days to try to wake the chick and offer it food, and I'd say that's a lot sadder to watch. There are a lot of factors at play of course, like how Nuppu still has a living chick to put her nurturing instincts into caring for, and maybe that she only had three chicks for one day, but I'm less sure about whether the latter point matters. The case I'm mostly thinking of here for comparison is a Golden Eagle female whose first and at the time only chick starved to death when her mate went missing and she couldn't hunt enough on her own to feed the already pretty big eaglet, whose passing she then took a long time to accept. In another contrast, when the SWFL Bald Eagles lost their also only eaglet last year, the female stayed the night with the eaglet, who died of blood loss from a broken pin feather not long after midnight, and by morning the female had processed the situation enough to take a few bites from the body. The female at the SWFL nest is in her twenties, with many clutches and at least two other losses of a chick experienced (as I recall, at least one of those other chicks she lost was after its death fed directly to its surviving clutchmate), and I'm sure that helped her know how to deal. Which is a long way of saying, Nuppu handled this really well for a first-time nester.

It may feel pretty gruesome to us humans, but raptors really don't have much of a problem with cannibalism, so I think of it as just one of their ways of moving on from a loss. For them, whoever you were while alive, once you're dead you're meat, and meat is food. Though for the birds there's less of an emotional element in it, for us humans who get attached to animals we watch and have so much compassion that it hurts us to see animals go through something that for them may be very serious, but not so much sad because that's not how they work, I think there's a comforting angle to this, too. If the dead chick ends up contributing in this way to its parents and surviving sibling living on, then its short life and its death was not in vain. One way or another, life continues.