A failed kākāriki karaka nest

Sometimes things don't work out as well as we'd like. In the summer of 2022/2023 a pair of kākāriki karaka had a nest on a hillock above the aviaries. This nest was lower down than most (four metres off the ground) and we had hopes for watching hungry nestlings being fed at the nest entrance without the need for binoculars. Unfortunately the female likely had a cloacal prolapse, she disappeared one day in March 2023 and was never seen again. Over the next two weeks the male made repeated attempts to call her off her nest, it was distressing to see his distress. Eventually he gave up and re-paired.

Given this nest hole was accessible I managed to photograph (with my mobile phone on April 17th) the nest through the entrance. This photo shows at least seven unhatched eggs. They'd been scattered a bit by a kākāriki karaka unrelated to the nest, normally one would expect the eggs to be in a clutch for incubation. By this time the nest had been abandoned for several weeks.

Skip forward a season to November 2023, and other kākāriki karaka are showing signs of interest in this nest cavity. Bits of old eggshell have been discovered on the ground under the nest entrance over the last few months (scattered and broken during nest prospecting or nest preparation). Here, an intact (but old) egg has been rolled towards the nest entrance (photo from Nov 1st). Next time I went past this tree the egg was gone.