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 27th September 2000:
8th May 2000. Our bird enters the final third of her egg-sitting stint. She decides to take care of her feathers. Here she is preening her tail.
And here she is at the end of a 10 minute intensive preening session.
9th May 2000. After morning mist, there was sunshine, and then heavy rain and thunder. A lightning bolt less than 200 metres away caused the bird to sit up and take notice. Even the humans were mildly perturbed.
The male visited the female with food seven times in 6 hours from 8am. The female became increasingly restless. She itches. Terribly. She moves around repeatedly, scratching, getting up and preening, shaking her wings...here is a view under her left wing.
Clearly, ten days of egg-sitting, with little exercise, is enough to make anyone restless. If these birds live for 5 years, compared with the 70 years of human existence, then 10 days sitting is equivalent to 4 months or so of a human's life. I would not like to sit on eggs for 4 months...
10th May 2000. Today was overcast. Inspection of 10 hours of videotape showed that the male indulged in "token feeding" only. He visited the female a total of five times in 10 hours, in two widely-separated sessions, presumably just to let her know he was still around. Perhaps there is a shortage of food in the trees on a grey day. Hatching should occur within two or three days now.
Today the bird has only been away from the eggs for spells lasting at most 12 minutes. The proportion of her time off the eggs has been between 1/4 and 1/5. The development of the chicks inside the eggs must now be well advanced. One wonders if the embryonic chicks as they develop, generate enough heat from the conversion of food into flesh to assist in maintaining the temperature of the eggs. Do they require oxygen to do this?
11th May 2000. The day started with heavy rain and finished with sunshine. Video was taken from 08.30 to 14.30, during which the bird was never absent for more than 6 minutes and frequently for less. She has increased the proportion of her time spent sitting on the eggs today. She is now only absent for 3-5 minutes every half hour.
She showed some reluctance, having got up off the eggs for a stretch, to leave the nest box.
The male came in eleven times with food, during the six hours of recording.
After feeding the female, the male departed promptly. On about half of the times that he did this, the female followed him out after swallowing her caterpillar.
Later in the day, the nest-box was approached several times by an inquisitive blackbird. Eventually, this sensitised the female, who, when the blackbird flew past without alighting, adopted the defensive position for ten full minutes without moving other than blinking her eyes.
12th May 2000. Today was another overcast day, reasonably warm "shirt sleeves" weather. Our bird is changing her feeding habits. She goes out of the nest for between 1 and 3 minutes and sits on the antenna wire (horizontally stretched 18 swg) while the male comes and feeds her. Alternatively, she flies around the garden trees with him, searching for food in the tips of the twigs on the branches. Occasionally she visits the nut feeders, but only in a desultory kind of way. She is loth to spend more than very brief spells away from her eggs. They are continually turned and rattled; she pays much attention to the lining of the nest cup under the eggs. At 6am today we are 11 days from the laying of the last egg, and about 13 days from the start of serious incubation.
In the middle of today's 6 hour video recording we see a large white beak appear in the nest box hole, which provokes hissing and lunging on the part of the sitting female. This time, the defensive position is only held for a couple of minutes; perhaps the threat is not regarded as serious.
On the eve of hatching, it is perhaps worth remarking that the birds will have a long spell between local sunrise at 05.13 BST (UT +01:00) and sunset at 20.42, a span of about 15.5 hours, for feeding. Thus by a happy coincidence, the Gulf Stream keeps the climate at this northerly latitude sufficiently mild for the birds, at the same time as the daylight hours provide sufficient time for the hard slog of feeding the chicks every day. After two weeks of enforced inactivity, it must be a sudden shock to the birds to have to start working flat out.
13th May 2000. Saturday, a misty morning and the eggs are beginning to hatch...
