Sunday, March 11, 2007, the first egg is laid.
On Monday the mother shows up periodically and pecks around the mulch and the grass near the nest, presumably eating insects. It buries the first egg a little bit in the mulch.
On Tuesday morning I took some video of the mother hunting for insects again. I was able to shoot from inside the house through a window. At times she stands over the nest, maybe to keep the rain off the eggs?
Later Tuesday, a second egg was laid.
On Wednesday, the mother/father is definitely incubating the eggs. I don't know how many eggs there are now because she's staying on them, and I'm not going to upset her to get a good look at the nest. If she leaves the nest I'll run out and get a photo.
At 10:30 Wednesday night the mother wasn't on the nest, so I ran out and got a quick photo (sorry it's overexposed - I was rushing). As you can see there are three eggs. For now this seems to contradict 3 things I've read: that there are 4 eggs in a kildeer clutch, that parents don't start incubating the eggs until the clutch is full, and that they turn the eggs so all of them have the pointed end pointing inwards.
When I got home from work Thursday night, the mother/father was still incubating the nest, as it was when I left for work this morning. I don't know if there's a fourth egg yet or not. If the kildeer leaves again tonight I'll check out the nest.
I was able to check the nest Thursday night after dark, and there are still only 3 eggs. They've been moved around a little, but they're still not pointing inwards.
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On Friday I was never able to check the nest because the mother never stopped incubating the eggs - probably because we had a big temperature drop.
Saturday morning the mom wasn't on the nest so I went out to count the eggs, but all the eggs were gone. A predator must have eaten them overnight. There weren't any traces of the eggs, and strangely the hole had been filled back in with mulch, so there was no evidence that a nest had ever been there. I'm pretty sure whatever ate the eggs didn't fill the nest back in, which leads me to believe the mother or father did. I have no idea why they would do this.
Life in the wild is tough. Few of us know what it's like to try just to survive each day. Even though the loss of animal life might make us sad, at least in this situation it wasn't pointless. The eggs weren't run over by a car or destroyed by a lawn mower. They didn't get leveled so a strip mall could be put up. They were eaten so another animal in the wild could survive another day. The kildeer are still thriving in our neighborhood. They'll still lay lots of eggs that will hatch healthy chicks. Life still goes on.
Today (3-11-2007) a kildeer (sometimes spelled killdeer) started her clutch of eggs in the mulch under a tree in our front yard. The kildeer "nest" is really just a very small cavity it digs out in mulch or gravel. I knew that kildeer usually had 4 eggs in their clutch, so when the mother didn't return the rest of the day I was worried she had abandoned the nest. Then I found this article, http://www.wnrmag.com/special/apr99kil.htm, which says "kildeer lay one egg every day or two until the clutch of four eggs is completed," and then they start incubating the nest.
A kildeer nested in this same spot a few years ago, but I think a predator got the eggs before they hatched. There are raccoons, snakes, foxes, and other animals that would probably prey on the eggs. Making it even harder for them to survive, kildeer stay in the eggs twice as long as most birds because when they hatch (after about 4 weeks), they're off and running - the parents don't feed them in the nest.
