July 21: As of yesterday the Pacific-slope Flycatcher nestlings are 10 days old. Their eyes are opening and feathers are starting to show. They also appear much more restless than in previous days and I’m a little worried that one might fall out of the nest. It’s more than 6 feet down to the concrete steps so a fall would, I imagine, be fatal.

The adult birds spend most of their time foraging and only at the nest for a few seconds every few minutes. So, I thought that I’d try to get a better between-visits picture of the nestlings with my Panasonic FZ-200 camera whose 24x optical zoom lets me fill the image whereas the Logitech 920 webcam, used for my videos, has no optical zoom so cropping is the only way to “zoom in” and that results in a lower resolution image. Here is the best picture that I was able to take:

I had just focussed on the nestlings, who were alone in the nest, when the adult male flycatcher appeared in the foreground. Because of the low-light I was using a large aperture with poor depth of focus which put the adult bird slightly out of focus. It’s a nice subtle effect.

The camera picture also highlights something else not so nice. If you look closely at the vinyl siding behind the nest you can see a number of small black specks. Reviewing the webcam videos shows that these specks are actually moving around. They are concentrated around the nest suggesting that they are some form of parasite associated with nest and birds. I reviewed previous days’ videos but July 21 was the first day that the specks were visible. My suspicion is that they are bird mites which Doctor Google tells me would not be a good thing. More research needed.