I was surprised to pick up an envelope at the mailbox and find a birthday card for Carson inside! When ordering her medications online, I had listed her birthday - or, in the case of birds, her "hatch day" - as January 1, 2013. Did she really hatch on that date?
Probably not. For simplicity's sake, we choose January 1st for all of the birds' hatch days since we have no way of knowing when they really hatched.
Technically we could make a better approximation based on when each species tends to hatch in the wild. The Red-tailed Hawks that have been documented for years on the Cornell University live nest cam typically hatch in late April. We could choose April 24th for her hatch date, but it's still a little simpler for us to track their ages based on the calendar year.
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