At half past eleven, we saw this - another piece of egg shell. A second egg must have hatched!
This egg's shell gets eaten like the first.
Here are the two chicks. One is already begging for food, you can see its yellow edged gape, while the other is lying down, perhaps recovering from the effort of breaking out of the egg.
It is now a quarter past three and there are still only two chicks.
Greta is out of the nest - feeding I presume.
A few minutes later, while Greta is still outside, two eggs split open at the same time!
(This and the shot above were two successive captures by i-Catcher!)
A minute later, Greta arrives with some more food. Interestingly, she feeds the chicks that had hatched earlier before she attends to the chicks that are emerging from their eggs now.
She picks up a piece of egg shell ...
... and eats it as usual.
By this time she must be getting rather full of egg shell so instead of eating this rather large piece, ...
... she takes is outside and drops it away from the nest box site.
The next piece she eats as usual, ...
... and then another piece!
Things seem to have been going pretty well so far. Our only worry is that Gustaf doesn't seem to understand what he is supposed to be doing about all this.
However, there are signs that he is cottoning on - here he is passing what looks like a sensible sized morsel of food to Greta to give to the chicks.
Here he is again - perhaps we are too hard on him. It probably takes a little time for the penny to drop!
Gustaf made several journeys bringing chick sized pieces of food for the chicks before we shut down.
Here is one of the last visits of the day.