16 May 23 — Lucky escape!
Dramatic scene at the hospital this morning! If you look very closely the pigeon gets away from Tom and will have learned not to play with fire hopefully!
“Eh! Wait! You were meant to beg for a bit longer!” 😉
The first chick is two weeks old! How time flies! It, and its siblings, has had a great day of sleep and food 😉 With a little bit of preening and flapping, and some shuffling around.
It was really cold overnight and in the morning so the parents brooded the chicks continuously until lunchtime. Then they left them alone a bit.

I like the alternate positions in the above shot. They do that a lot.
There were seven feeds today. There could have been eight but the chicks were still so stuffed from their previous meal that they didn’t even get up 😉 Starling and pigeon on the menu once again. Tom fed one of the Starling heads to the chicks, so at least that’s one less of them 😂
In brief, it’s all good 🙂

It took Tom a lot of dancing around before Azina accepted his food offering in the clip below.
Tom got to feed a chick under Azina once again today 😉
Shots for today:
Look at the size of crops on some of the shots!
The chick got four feeds today though the last feed was only a couple of minutes long, it was a bit close to the third and the chick was still full. Pigeon and Starling were on the menu.

Only a few minutes at a time but Tom got to spend a bit of time with the chick and the eggs. Very gentle as usual.

A second egg has been pipping all day. It started with a tiny hole and a crack and didn’t seem to develop so I was starting to wonder if it wasn’t a bit of down stuck to the egg but at 6.30 the hole was bigger and the chick visible. It still had a bit to go and may be hatching under Azina now as I am typing this.

There is a mark on a third egg that may be a pip but somehow I think it may just be a mark.
Shots for today:
Just two video clips today.
Exchange on the porch then Azina feels the need to preen a little before incubating.
A bit of time with Tom as he incubates and makes himself comfortable on the eggs.
Light entertainment with an image in image clip. A couple of pigeons spent a few minutes on the ledge in front of the nest box and I thought it would be nice to add Azina in the nest box and her reaction to it. What do you think? 😉
We have now reached the half way point 🙂
Here are a few shots from the last three days including some of the quite dramatic skies we had on Friday when it was clear and sunny over the hospital but very dark and raining just North (I even heard some thunder over Kensington at that time). And two shots of the boat races as they pass Hammersmith Bridge as viewed from the Peregrine nest ledge.
Tom has been doing shorter days of incubation, a mixture again of him not turning up and Azina refusing him. She ended up doing a shift of around 20 hours overnight as she’d started it early afternoon and Tom didn’t relieve her until almost 11 this morning.