The female Hooded Merganser that nested in a box near our home was on the water this morning with 12 new chicks. The group functions as one organism: the chicks do NOT stray from mother’s side. One chick remains in the nest box. It was struggling this morning to break out of its shell, as much as 12 hours behind its siblings. We’ll check again in the morning to see if it made it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Bird biology, Bird identification, Interesting sightings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.