Hi Kathleen- I'll address you since the other posts are old. I am so very sorry that you have experienced this. Did you read what the responses were to the older post of one that lost a bluebird on the nest? I would just repeat everything that they said. If absolutely no sign of injury, I would suspect lawn pesticides, but considering what happened to the 1st person that posted & didn't see signs of injury on her bluebird, it did turn out to be house sparrows. I would highly suspect this. Do you think the female is dead too? If so, again I would be suspicious of HOSP. Answering your question, the male would not starve himself, nor is he able to brood eggs. If the female died too, the eggs wouldn't have hatched because the female is the one to incubate the eggs. She has a brooding patch on her lower abdomen that the male doesn't have. If she is alive, she may not be returning to nest because of the failed nest situation, especially if there was foul play. Make sure you know that she is not returning before removing the nest & eggs. If she is alive, she will probably try to find a new mate. Without repeating too much, make sure your birdhouse is on a pole with a baffle & put a sparrow spooker up after the 1st egg. If you know for sure that the nest has been abandoned & you don't get any activity, you may want to change the location of the box (birdhouse). If you immediately get a house sparrow setting up shop, then you'll know that was most likely the culprit. Again, if female is not returning, now would be the time to get a Van Ert trap for your house to trap the male & female HOSP. If you do, make sure you are monitoring every hour if possible so you don't trap a native bird. They can die in there if without food for too long. One of the previous posts left a website for the Van Ert trap. Again, the previous posts left great advice for your situation. This site is not as active as it used to be for bluebirders, so you may want to post to bluebirdnut.com. Lots of bluebird experts are on that site like this one used to have. That's where I go whenever I need advice. BTW, I lived in Atlanta for ten years (live in AL now). Very sorry to hear about your bluebird tragedy. Hope you'll have another pair come for a future nesting, but definitely get that sparrow spooker!

Relax she knows what she is doing. Sometimes the female will skip a day and then lay more eggs or maybe she is done. When she is done laying she will start to incubate full time which is not necessarily 24 hrs a day. They know what to do even without our help! LOL Cathy

I just did this too! They will abandon the nest if you don't take care of it, ASAP!! tonight if you can!. You need to do a nest change. There is good info on the sialis site about nest changes and how to do it. I got as much dried grass as I could and put it in an empty butter container. I tried to line it with pine needles, but I don't know where my female got hers?!! It took a few days, but then the second egg arrived along with a third! She was incubating a few days until a wren, I think, got two of them. Now they built another nest in my other box.. after all that work!! then you have to take care of the ants. They say grease the pole.. I put the liquid ant killer at the base on a plastic lid covered with a larger lid.. I hoped it would distract them from the nest, but I can't tell for sure if it worked since they moved.. but I didn't see any more ants in there. Good luck and keep us posted!

Oh- how sad. I think the current female will want to lay her own eggs since it seems the existing eggs are from the female that died (hate that). Assuming the male is/was mating with both. Make absolutely sure the new female is not incubating those eggs. I just left in the previous message ways you can tell f the eggs are currently being incubated. My assumption is that they are not. After you know for sure that she has no interest in those eggs, remove them. You can try leaving the nest to see if they'll lay eggs in that nest, but you may end up removing the nest too, so they can build their own nest. Sorry about the loss of one of your females. Bless her heart!