Killdeer Plover Photo's

For most of this month of June, 2013, I have been watching a nest with 4 eggs in the New Mount Calvary Cemetery on Plattsburg Avenue. The Killdeer always lays its eggs in the middle of nowhere, and in the cemetery the nest was on open ground, out in the open, with no camoflage or protection. We had a burial very close by one day and I marked out her nest with stakes so that no one would accidently walk into the nest. The mother was on the eggs throughout the month of June, in some very hard rainstorms and luckily the cemetery is composed of very sandy soil, like most of the New North End, and the nest was not flooded out or washed away.
I checked the nest on my daily bike rides through the cemetery and on June 30 I saw that everything was gone. There was not even a trace of the shells. I had no idea of what happened, but hoped that all went normal. When biking down in the back of the cemetery I was very pleasantly surprized to encounter the two parent birds and 4 beautiful babies walking around very briskly. They must have been 2 or 3 days old at the most.
Above is a parent Killdeer
Feeling threatened, the Killdeer feints a limp or broken wing to get your attention and draw you away from the babies.
See the baby Killdeer on the gravestone
And another in the grass. I wonder how long it will take them to learn how to fly?