With the CCTV equipment now safely stashed away for the autumn & winter it seems a good time to look back on the summer and how our filmed brood of hen harrier chicks fared.This year we made the decision to put the camera in before the eggs hatched, moving it forward in stages. In the event it was only just in place when the chicks started appearing on 5th June which just happened to be Springwatch weekend. Four of the six eggs in the nest hatched and from then on it was all go with the adult female in and out bringing in food - Orkney voles, small birds such as meadow pipits, and young rabbits.
from this ...By the end of June they were getting very active and off screen a lot of the time, exploring the area around the nest. So we moved the camera further back and, at the same time, ringed the chicks. They turned out to be a female and three males and as time went on you could see the female was noticeably larger - and pushier - than the others. Since the eggs hatched sequentially, she may also have been the first to hatch, giving her a head start. Hen harriers fledge at 37 - 42 days so you can imagine just how quickly they develop. In that time they provided us with a lot of entertainment - and not a little anxiety. Anxious times when the chicks were very small and Mum seemed to be away for too long, or when they were out exploring and off camera. At the same time you couldn't help laughing at the chick which fell in love with the camera - it was forever posing right up at the camera giving us some great film footage. Another priceless moment was watching a chick trying to feed itself. It was obviously not going to wait for Mum and started tearing bits from a rabbit. Unfortunately it hadn't worked out that the rabbit needed to be held down, and kept getting smacked over the head by dead rabbit.In the second week of July I noticed they were starting - literally - to stretch their wings and making little jumping movements. More often than not they just fell over but it was obviously not going to be long before they would be up and away. We never did find out exactly when that was as, on 13 July, they knocked over the camera. It would have been too disturbing for them if we had gone in then so we just stopped filming.
to this ...34 DVDs of footage were edited by Peter Mackay who was responsible for putting in the camera and its associated technology. The resulting DVD is currently being shown in the Kirkwall TIC and shows the highlights of the chicks growing up - well worth a watch if you are in Kirkwall.It is very reassuring to know that these four chicks all seem to have fledged safely. The Hen Harrier is such a persecuted bird elsewhere that the Orkney population of 70 - 80 breeding females is very precious. As I post this we are still pulling together the reports of how our Hen Harriers have done this summer and it looks as though it has been a not bad season although patchy. Watch this space for an update.