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Last year's birds
Fluff roosts
Fluff is usurped

A truly excellent informative site about these birds
David Jones's site with nesting Parus caeruleus, about 8 miles away

Visitors since 27th September 2000:

Fledging, 2nd June 2000.

2nd June 2000. The weather has stayed settled and fine. The last 48 hours have seen a crescendo of activity in the nest box, with both adult birds pulling out all the stops to feed the nestlings. Here is a bird on the box, at 8am, quite unperturbed by the three humans three metres away.

The nestlings look out of the nest hole, preparing to depart. At 8.18am the first bird, having poked his head out repeatedly, summoned up the courage to take the plunge and departed, flying erratically off into the hedge. He was followed at short intervals by the other three strongest birds, two females and one male we think. They flew in various directions, a couple of them round the side of the house to a staging post on the guttering. They then moved over into the extensive trees to the West. By 8.55am they had all left....

Now the story in pictures and detail. A peep out to see if the coast is clear....

The first bird fledges. The tail can just be seen disappearing through the hole.

Here is an adult bird coming out of the nest box. She has been in to feed and encourage the nestlings. The feeding did not stop until all the birds had left. Devotion to duty.

Here are three nestlings remaining inside, for a brief refuelling stop by the mother. These birds were the smallest of the brood, and on the whole they missed out on the feeding trips. It was only when the four stronger and larger siblings had left that they could get their breakfasts. Suitably replenished, the next two birds departed.

The smallest and weakest of the nestlings, who has been bottom of the heap for days and scarcely viable, is the last to leave. He needs a final feed from mum. We have scarcely seen him being fed at all during the last two weeks. He has been buried under the heap of bodies at the bottom of the nest cup...but, where do the eager and messy eaters drop their surplus food? We assume that he has been building his body size on the droppings from the rich birds' table. We certainly have seen the mum, upside down in the nest cup, coming up with salvaged caterpillars that have fallen in and recycling them in to a hungry beak.

The mother came in a couple of times with more food for him, but made no attempt to shoo him out.

He flies up to the top of the box to get an angle on the outside world...(small == intelligent).

Finally he departs. He flies away confidently and maturely compared to his siblings.

This leaves the two sterile eggs in the empty box, on the inside world,

On the outside, we see the birds leave one by one

As the first out were the heavier and stronger birds, it is interesting to see that they have some trouble flying very far. The flight of this early bird looked particularly shaky; here it is having a rest in the hedge. (On the other hand the small runt of the nest has a confident and professional first flight, over the hedge and turning west into the next-door's trees. There is an advantage in being small and lightweight for your first flight.)

Even after the last bird had fledged, the mum came back with another caterpillar, looked into the empty nestbox, took a brief circuit inside to make sure (quite sure) that everyone was out, then took her caterpillar off and was seen no longer. Neither did she return to roost in the evening; the box was a disaster area with detritus, poo, sterile eggs, fleas, and the remainining straw. It is interesting that for the last three or so days the bird has been removing nest materials during her cleaning runs.

There are some more pictures of the form *000602.jpg in the directory linked at the top of these pages.

Thus, we have produced another seven avian friends for the local ecology, with seven or eight more to come next week from nest box 2. Keep watching for developments....

4th June 2000. The nestlings in box 2 are now well advanced, cheeping merrily until we take the top off the box to capture this picture.

7th June 2000. We have left the birds undisturbed to fledge in peace. However, first the child of the house goes to have a look and reports there are only two birds left in the box. Then the lady of the house takes the digital camera and obtains the following picture of the laggards.

One of these birds takes fright and flies up into a tree, out of the top of the box. The next day (8th June 2000) the box is empty, except for a solitary unhatched egg. And some nits.

Here we show the half-inch unhatched egg. The wooden scale at the top is in centimetres, and the bottom plastic scale is in inches. We washed the egg, which was a little soiled.

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