They're BAAAACK!

[1]
 
It's spring, birds are back and nesting everywhere... including an oystercatcher pair on the roof of a building at the University of Bergen in Norway. But the big difference here is that biologists and IT folks from the university have set up an HD webcam [1] so you can watch.
 
I wrote about this webcam last year [2] for the blog, when I first discovered it. Last year the nesting pair raised one chick (named Kjeldrik, a male, by the zoologists, because it is a play on the Norwegian name for oystercatcher, Tjeld), while the second egg that the pair laid was found not to have been fertilized.
 
This year there are three eggs. It should be interesting to see how the season progresses. Last year the chick hatched on May 24, and by the end of May, the chick was lively enough that it spent most of its time out of view of the webcam. The biologists then moved the webcam so that viewers could watch nesting gulls instead. Interesting... but not nearly as cool as oystercatchers.