Cliff Swallows at NAU (part two)

[ This is the second part of my series on the Cliff Swallow colony so if you haven't read the first post yet, you can find it here.]

A little over a week after I first noticed the swallows constructing their colony nearly all the nests were completed. I'm not sure how long after the nest is finished that the female will lay her eggs but from the line of beaks poking out of the nest entrances below it's likely that by the 14th all of the nesting pairs were busy incubating eggs.

May 14th:

There were a couple of stragglers who got late starts. The biggest hurdle for the birds at this point was that the nearby water source was rapidly drying up as this picture from the 14th shows:

Fortunately, by the 18th a freakish series of late May rain storms had replenished the water so the birds could finish up:

By the 26th there were only a few birds left peaking out of the nest entrances:

I suspect that by this time the first batch of swallow chicks were hatching and both the parents were busy feeding them. According to What Bird the incubation period is 14 to 16 days, so, if you count forward from the 10th or 11th when the nests were completed then it's probably safe to say the eggs had indeed hatched. What Bird says each nesting female will lay three to six eggs so if you figure an average of four then there's potentially a couple of dozen chicks just in the picture above!

Comments

[Kathy]

OOOOh cool!! Any chick sightings yet?

[del]

No direct chick sightings yet, but if you stand quietly under the colony you can hear them chirping inside the nests.