As I was concentrating on the lower nest, something caught my eye. There was movement in the higher nest. I quickly scanned with my lens to see a chick sticking its head up and screeching for its parent, looking up and down in search of the parent that would feed it.
As it looked up, it spotted its parent and started really screeching and another chick could then be seen.
To those of you who read yesterday's post, the parents feed the children by sticking their bills down the chicks' throats and regurgitating partially digested frogs, fish ect. You can see the chick grabbing at the parent's bill looking for food. Throughout the time I observed them, (about one and a half hours), the adults seemed more interested in grooming than feeding. I only saw one instance of the parent actually feeding the chick the entire time I was there (see image below). Now they may have fed the chicks before I arrived and then left the nest while the young rested. But as I saw and heard, the young wanted more food.
As you can see in these images, one chick was much more aggressive then the other at trying to get food. This makes me wonder about the future of the second chick. The strongest chicks will get more food and will survive, the weaker will not. If there is not enough food, the stronger chick will push the weaker out of the nest to its death. Not a lot of family values in the heron community, I guess, just survival. Although when I was a child, I was the oldest of six boys and you should have seen our dinner table. Lots of survival mode exhibited there, especially when there was one last meatball to be eaten!