It appears the first barn owl egg have hatched at Eaglecrest this morning! Tess laid 7 eggs between 2/19 and 3/04. Assuming all of them hatch, we should have barn owl eggs hatching over the next 13 days. A video: http://youtu.be/n-AtdPhYRSA.
You can watch the nest at: http://www.ustream.tv/eaglecresthawks. I especially love to watch the owls at night, when the IR light does a wonderful job of illuminating the nest cavity.
We often try to determine when hatch happened. This can be difficult, since hatching is not an on/off event, but rather a process that occurs over a period of time, as this time-elapsed video of a barn owl egg hatching at Hawk Creek Wildlife Center shows: http://youtu.be/uPACjB14Nww
For more about eggs and egg hatching, read this blog post: http://raptorresource.blogspot.com/2012/03/we-are-getting-lot-of-questions-about.html
Congratulations, Tess!
