Sea Eagle eggs have hatched

There is a webcam on a White-bellied Sea Eagle nest at the Sydney Olympic Park.  The first egg had a pip - ie a small hole in it - as from about 3pm on 13 August.  Here is a screen grab at 1723 (Australian eastern Standard Time) on that date.

The pip is getting quite large but apparently it will take the eyass (?terminology?) about 24 hours to emerge.  Isn't [Alt-Printscreen +MS Paint + Blogger] wonderful (although I did find a few issues with MS Paint as time went on - see end of post).  At about 1745 it switched to an infra-red camera.  Still good: here is the situation at 1808.

Shortly after this it was possible to see the chick's egg tooth giving the shell some serious work.  No wonder the folk in the chatlist are getting excited!

I logged back on to the site about 6:00 AM on the 14th.  Here follow a few images.

This was 7:03.  A big crack in the egg.

This next one is 8:01.

This one was taken after it was thought the chick had hatched but no-one had yet got a clear look.

Finally at about 8:57 AM a little fluffball (aka, to those on the chatline as a bobblehead) was seen.  Here it is wandering past the second, as yet inactive, egg.  There was much leaf-hatred evident in comments on the chatline at this point!

 That is the fluffball at 15:35 on 14 August!

By this point OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) was becoming a real possibility.  At 80Mb/hr I have decided that my download limit required me to show a bit of discipline so it will be pre-8am viewing only from now on!

So.  On 16 August I logged in to find S2 had hatched at13:45 on 15/8/11.  Having acquired a test version of Screenshot, as suggested by Denis' comment at 0645 I was able to capture a shot showing Mum feeding s1 with s2 just visible beside it.

Here is Dad with chicks at 0715.

..and both adults at 0720

This episode really brought home what a bunch of gooses work for Microsoft.  Paint is largely an excellent bit of software, in terms of what one can do in terms of basic image editing.  However the MSlosers have decided that:

• Everyone wants to save their pictures in the folder 'My Pictures' (so much easier for the hackers to find);
• Everyone wants to use the thumbnails view for searching (chews up resources so everyone has to buy a faster computer); and
• Everyone wants to save files in BMP format (so after saving 10 images you have to get a new hard drive 'cos the old one is full and you kill everyone's download limit).

Of course you can't set defaults to how you want them  and thus waste about an extra minute, which when dealing with a situation like this is soul-destroying.

As noted above I have downloaded a test version (ie free for 30 days) of Screenshot.  It lets you save shots as quickly as you can hit Ctrl-Alt-F12 and dumps the result on the desktop as a .JPG.  Reviewing the images - when the panic is over - is done with my old mate Irfanview (a fantastic freebie) and seems to be a great improvement on the previous operation.  I think I will be registering ($US20) my copy of Screenshot today.