The warm
days have allowed June to spend more time outside the nest box, and even do a
bit of nighttime hunting. This is possible because the older owlets no
longer need constant brooding and even Seymour can tolerate her absence
for a couple of hours. All of the owlets should graduate from brooding
within a week. Meanwhile, June continues a very complex food allocation process
that includes periodic pauses (such as shown here) to study the situation and
decide who deserves to be fed next. Her system appears to be working as Seymour
(on the left) looks healthy, while Emily on the right and Rufus (not
shown) are growing rapidly. Seymour, however, will remain "at
risk" for the next week due to his small size.
This picture shows June returning from what I thought was a
hunting trip until I noticed that she held nothing in her beak. She
is looking at Ward who had waited patiently in a nearby tree with a
mouse. She quickly flew over to retrieve it and returned to enter the
nest. Ward came back twenty minutes later with a very large mouse, but
remains shy about daytime nest visits and called for June to retrieve it
from the nearby perch where he had waited for her earlier. In both cases,
she took a very indirect route from the nest box to his perch. While she
is looking directly at him in this picture, she turned to her left and
circled around behind the nest box.