Lyrebird fledging
This bundle of sticks wedged into the base of a tree is the nest of a Superb Lyrebird Menura novaehollandiae. It measures about half a metre wide and tall. The adult female builds the nest, incubates the single egg and raises the chick on her own. The males only display, sing and mate with the females at their display mounds - see post of 10 August 2023 below. Sandra Lauer and I found this nest in August this year, when it was still winter in the forested hills near Canberra, Australia. The nest at the time contained an egg. The egg is incubated for about fifty days and the chick spends another five to six weeks in the nest. It snowed a number of days during the incubation and chick periods, but the nest is thickly lined with soft downy feathers plucked from the adult female's breat and belly.
I found a nest in 2023 that had been raided by a predator, probably a feral cat, but it was inconclusive - see post of 27 August 2023. So this time, I set up a camera trap to watch for any potential predator. Although the camera didn't detect a predator, and I couldn't determine what animal it might have been, the chick did fledge, which is good news.
Below are a few clips of the birds' behaviour.
This is a photograph of the chick when it was about five weeks old. It is about the size of a bantam chicken, it has lost most of its first black chick down, but it is not yet fully feathered. The rufous throat feathers are showing well though. There is no room for both the chick and the adult in the nest.
In this clip, the adult female is feeding the chick in the nest, then she jumps down. There is clearly still food in her throat pouch, so she gives the chick another feed. After that, she takes a faecal sac from the chick, runs into the forest with it and either buries it or eats it as the camera stopped recording.
Here a Grey Fantail Rhipidura albiscapa comes in close to the nest as the female feeds the chick. The contact calls between the adult and chick can be clearly heard. The adult prods the chick's rear to induce it to release a faecal sac, then she quickly swallows the whole sac before jumping don from the nest.
The chick is fed once again, but it is nearing time for it to fledge from the nest and it watches its mother as she walks off through the forest, scratching in the litter for invertebrates to eat and give to the chick. The area around the nest, for about thirty metres, was well turned over by the female from her previous weeks of foraging.
The final feed at the nest. The female begins to walk away, watched by the chick. Then, with a little hesitancy, it jumps to land right next to its mother and the two birds walk of into the forest, calling to keep in contact all the way.