See also
Proudly Presenting ... White-winged Dove Baby (July 13)
White-winged Dove Fledgling - With mom and dad, alone, and ... gone! (July 26)
July 17 - Parents on the Nest
July 22 - 9 a.m. 
July 22 - 1 p.m. The parent dove didn't show any sign of disturbance as I moved around the tree to capture of photos of the little one. 
4 comments:
Love these photos!
Have a nice Sunday!
great shots, i especially like looking up at her with her all-knowing eye staring at you.
These are such beautiful images. I love seeing that baby dove. How long before it fledges? "Our" tree swallows fledged last Thursday. We have "empty nest" syndrome!
cathy, sonia, tdharma - I love watching this little one grow, mostly through my binoculars. I wonder at how the fledgling and parent(s) can balance on the fork of that tree with such a flimsy nest, especially when the winds come up before our evening thunderstorms.
ra - This is what I found on the UMichigan Animal Diversity web site: "Females usually lay two cream to white, unmarked eggs, and incubation begins before the second egg is laid. Both parents incubate the eggs in regular shifts; males are generally on the nest from mid-morning until mid-afternoon, and females from mid-afternoon through mid-morning. Incubation lasts about 14 days, and the older chick hatches about a day earlier than its sibling. For the first four days of life, White-winged Dove parents feed their chicks “crop milk”, a protein- and fat-rich secretion of the esophageal lining that is chemically similar to mammalian milk. This diet is then supplemented with regurgitated seeds, and by the second week, the chicks’ diet is mostly composed of seeds. The chicks grow quickly and can leave the nest within 13-16 days of hatching. The male continues to feed the young near the nest until they are about four weeks old, while the female may start a new clutch as early as three days following the fledging, or loss, of the first clutch." I only saw one egg on the nest and I've only been able to identify one chick, but it's fairly difficult to see up there, so I really can't figure out sometimes who's who.
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