Sunday, July 11, 2010

I'm Hungry

I found this Barn Swallow's nest while I was riding my bicycle back from Beppu Eki after I got my new hair cut a few days ago. I was a bit surprised to see that the chicks were still relatively young comparing to other nests around the area, where most of them have already left the nests. Most of the chicks in this nest still have some downy feathers on the head and some parts of the body, and were still not ready to leave the nest. All five of them looked very healthy and were very much eager to get food from their parents. The parents came back every 3-4 minutes with some food to feed their chicks, and everytime the parent birds came flying close to the nest, the chicks raised their heads up high and made a very noisy begging call. I guess it would take about 1 week for these young chicks to be ready to leave their nest. Most of them were already exercising their wings, showing that they're quite anticipated to fly!

PS. More surprisingly, I saw another nest with an adult incubating the eggs! I'm pretty sure it's the same parent bird I've photographed in this post, since the nest was newly built on the exact opposite AIC sign. So I think this will be the second brood of this couple! We just can't underestimate the desire of these birds to breed.

8 comments:

Ari said...

Great shots of the Swallow, the one with the chicks' mouth wide open looked so funny !

Phil Slade said...

Great shots Ayuwat. Here our Swallows may have 3 broods if all goes well. Congratulations on the hair cut!

Ayuwat Jearwattanakanok said...

Thanks a lot Ari and Phil!
Wow 3 broods! That's pretty impressive. For tropical forest birds in Thailand, the nesting failure rate is more than 50%!

Chris said...

Excellent capture of the Swallow, congrats.... I love the first one a lot but they are all superb!

Stuart Price said...

Nice set, a very public place near us where Swallows usually nest has had the nests moved, presumably on grounds of cleanliness.............a shame.

Ryou said...

Great series of shots on the nesting Swallows! I noticed in a few places before that if the same pair of Swallows uses the same nest site, they build up on the old nest over and over again such that the nest becomes a tall tower-like structure!

Ayuwat Jearwattanakanok said...

Thanks a lot everyone!
Stu> That's a really sad story to hear. These swallows of the south are so lucky....
Ryou> Wow I've never seen that before. The couple I found built another nest near the old one....maybe the old nest was already too dirty.

Madibirder said...

Hi Ayuwat,
Wonderful series. The parents must have been working hard to satisfy the hungry chicks.
regards
madibirder