Last year's birds
Fluff roosts
Fluff is usurped
A truly excellent site about these birds
David
Jones's
site with nesting Parus Caeruleus, about 8 miles away
Visitors since 5th May 2000:
13th May 2000. Saturday, a misty morning and the eggs are beginning to hatch...
But first, some interesting links to pictures of yesterday's activity. Twice during the day an intruder's beak was seen at the nestbox hole, the second time tossing some straw into the hole and provoking a lightning reaction. After this the bird felt it necessary to stretch both wings to recover her equanimity.
A sneak peek into nest-box2 reveals the following spectacular view of eight eggs, each about 5 mm across and specked with red.
We also see how much tidier the nest is in this second box than in the first box with the hatching chicks. The small eggs may be seen in the middle of a symmetric and neat cup...
Meanwhile, back in nest-box1, the morning proceeded as normal, with visits by the male with food, and exit trips by the female, until 7.55am when two of the eggs hatched. The first sign of this was the female showing us a half-shell
Within a minute, the bird had eaten the shell and the remaining contents of the hatched egg, scraped out of the shell lining and collected from around the chick.
Shortly afterwards, some scrabbling in the nest produced another shell which the bird took out of the nest box.
Within ten minutes of the first egg-break, the bird departed and returned at high speed with a very large caterpillar.
It being unwise to land with force on the newly hatched chicks, our bird uses her wings as air brakes.
The young chicks are very small indeed. Here is a tiny picture taken at 8pm showing a hungry chick mouth in the middle of a melange of eggs and chick bodies. There are now four chicks and five eggs.
14th May 2000, Sunday. The antepenultimate egg hatched today at about 1pm. We now have 7 chicks and 2 unhatched eggs. The male bird has been allowed to feed the new chicks directly. To hatch out the eggs so far has taken a total time of 29 hours.
In nest box 2, the female is assiduously brooding her eggs.
Here is our box 1 family, all together at feeding time.
15th May 2000. Starting at about 5.30 am there was intensive feeding activity this morning by both birds. Here is the male, arriving at the box and looking around for his mate.
At evening time, the female returned from her last hunting trip at 20.44 BST, within 5 minutes of local sunset. She then spent 25 minutes upside down in the nest cup, swallowing a poo sack and extending the cup so that there is a little more room for the seven chicks. There are still two unhatched eggs to be seen. The chicks have nearly doubled in size since they hatched, and their mouths are more insistently prominent.
