Up-to-date nesting SEASON, 2002
Nest building
Initial egg-laying pictures
Second egg-laying pictures
Brooding pictures
Feeding while brooding
More brooding pictures
Hatching pictures
Epitaph
A truly excellent site about these birds
Visitors since 10th September 1999:
At lunchtime, just over three days from the first hatching, it rained. Our bird came in cold, bedraggled, and wet.
The nestlings are growing fast, and peep, cheep, and squeak at their mother. Her attention is attracted by a visitor to the nestbox. She looks up in alarm.
It is a magpie, come to see if there is any lunch. Of course, the magpie has no chance of getting even its head into the box, but it bangs repeatedly with its beak on the outside of the box, and our bird responds with a display of wing and tail feathers and an amazing hissing sound.
The magpie is undeterred, and keeps hammering at the box. Our bird draws herself up and lunges with very rapid wing shakes at the face of the magpie looking in at the entrance hole. This happens several times.
The humans, attracted by the commotion, open the patio doors under the nestbox to see what is up. The magpie departs rapidly and our bird adopts a defensive posture with tail feathers fanned out and the wings at the ready, which gradually relaxes over some minutes. There appears to be a set of eight tail feathers
The nestlings produce guano. Their bottoms are presented to the mother for cleaning. Sometimes the mother intervenes and up-ends the young forcibly, with the object of cleaning them. She also spends a lot of time ferreting around in the base of the nest depression for undesirable material, which she either eats, or carries out of the nest. She carries the droppings well away into the next garden, so that there is no tell-tale pile of guano under the nestbox which might attract the predators.
Here is the bird removing a particularly spectacular poo, done by a single nestling in one go. The nestlings are now able to eat a whole caterpillar each.
Here is the complete set of nine chick mouths, in the "at ease" position, awaiting the next arrival of rations.
Caterpillars are plentiful, and sometimes large, as this picture shows. It is a good thing that their beaks open as wide as they do.
The mother bird extends her wings to cover the nine growing chicks, in an attempt to keep them warm and stop them from straying. This is a collective cuddle.
Our nestlings go for nine hours overnight with no food. In the morning, our bird goes foraging and comes back with what seems to be a whole peanut. Despite repeated attempts to break this up with her beak, it remains whole. So she puts it into open-mouth after open-mouth; the nestlings chew but obviously are unable to cope. The nut completely fills their gaping mouths and will not go down the gullet. Eventually, at about attempt thirty, the nut is attrited sufficiently for one of the larger-mouthed nestlings to swallow it almost-whole. This chick then subsides in a collapsed heap and our bird sits down on the chicks.
The peanut feeders (which should not be capable of dispensing a whole peanut) are removed from the bottom of the garden, as a precaution.
On the morning of the fifth day after hatching, the chicks are noticeably larger and more agile, and cheeping with louder voices. The male bird has not been seen for two days; the female appears to be coping "manfully" with feeding the entire brood. The tenth and eleventh eggs have not been seen for three days; it is possible that they have been broken up and removed, but it is also possible that they are out of sight beneath the nestlings, or else tucked away underneath the nest materials.
On the evening of the fifth day after hatching, our bird comes in at 8.30pm as usual, but she takes at least 90 minutes to settle down on the active brood. They keep appearing from under her down; she spends much time inverted trying to extend the nest depression to make them enough room, without being able to escape from under her when she goes off to sleep. At 10pm she is hard at it still, but at 1am she is asleep as normal with her head under her back feathers.
The chicks still need her for warmth; they have a ridged spine each, with a line of proto-feathers growing along it, rather like a goat.
We have been taking pictures outside the nestbox with the colour CCD camera and a 300mm mirror lens. This has produced the following pictures which we reproduce full size. The colour camera is old, and the colours are not entirely accurate, even after processing. Her under-feathers are indeed greenish-yellow, but with a less pronounced green, but we can see her blue top cap.
And here is the image of her entering the box at high speed.
Little do we know it at this time, but this is the last time we shall see our bird fly out of her nestbox.
d.jefferies@surrey.ac.uk David Jefferies 9th May 1999
