Start of the nesting season?

Generally its been a pretty mild start to 2011, so early nest box investigation by blue tits and great tits is something which we expected around now. We have had the odd blue tit investigating our nest boxes, however what has really caught my eye is some early nesting action going on just on the other side of our garden fence...

In the ivy which covers both sides of our garden fence, a robin pair appear to be building a nest. For the last few days we have seen nesting material in the form of leaves being brought into the ivy very frequently- at times we have seen a leaf being taken in every 10 seconds or so. A couple of years ago, a robin pair nested very close by to this nest in a small shrub and successfully managed to raise some chicks (not sure how many, I just remember the juveniles flitting around the nest shortly after fledging). I don't know if the pair I am seeing at the moment is the same pair which nested a couple of years ago, but they certainly seem as though they have had experience building nests in the past.

I do get worried when a pair of birds start building a nest so early in the nesting season- we are very likely to get some more cold weather before we can safely say that spring has begun, which could easily cause our robin chicks to starve. Hopefully it will be a while before eggs are laid and chicks hatch in the nest. Below is a video of the robin taking nesting material (mostly leaves from the ground) into the nest.

The video is about 6 minutes long, with about 15-30 seconds between each visit to the nest. I am experimenting with editing programs to get the best quality video possible. So the quality of the videos I upload may improve in the future.

The robin nest is fairly close to the blue tit nest box on our conservatory, and the two birds can be seen happily living closely together- the robin has been perfectly happy building the nest whilst the blue tit has been investigating the conservatory box. This can be seen in the video below. The video is focused on the blue tit box but you can make out the robin flying in and out of its nest in the background.

We have rearranged our nest boxes slightly since last year. This was done after the video above was recorded. The hand built nest box which was on the back of our shed was taken down because I couldn't get into the nest box to clear the nest which had been built by great tits a couple of years ago. I moved the box which was on the conservatory to behind the shed to replace the one that was taken down. I took the 25mm metal hole protector off, because I wanted the box to be more suited to great tits (as it was before). The photo below shows the nest box which used to be on the conservatory wall, now on the back of the shed:

Because there was then no nest box on the conservatory, we bought a camera-ready Handykam box (which is identical to the camera nest box we have at the end of the garden on our apple tree). So we put up the new box on the conservatory. So if your still following - we still have nest boxes in all the places which had them before, its just we have moved the boxes around a bit!

Finally, I then moved the camera that was in the nest box at the end of the garden into the new nest box on our conservatory wall. I did this for two reasons:

The first reason is quite difficult to explain, but I'll give it a go! Basically, our camera nest box cable is split into two sections - the 10 metre cable which came with the camera nest box when we got it back in 2008, and a 20 metre extension cable which I bought in order to place the camera nest box at the end of the garden last year. The 20 metre cable has recently been chewed by something (again) - probably by a squirrel, and to avoid having to fix it again, it was much easier to disconnect the extension cable, and put the camera in the box on the conservatory wall using the 10 metre cable that came with the box in the first place. Secondly, and much more simply, the birds didn't seem particularly interested in using the box at the end of the garden anyway, so it made sense to just move the camera into the new box. Complicated, eh?!

A picture of the new conservatory nest box can be seen below. The stick on the left of the box was put there by me for the blue tits to use as a perch. I deliberately made sure not to put the twig directly in front of the hole to make sure it doesn't obstruct the birds flight into the box.

So since the new box has been up on the conservatory wall, we have had blue tits fly onto the hole of the nest box but not fly in- until this morning that is! Yep, the blue tit pair which have been checking out the hole of the box for a few days now finally had the courage to go inside. Even then, the male (i'm guessing) which went in first looked a bit shy and twitchy. After a while though it settled in and stayed looking in and around the box for a good 4 minutes before the female came in, performed a "nesting shuffle" and flew off again.

The male blue tit appeared to be very interested in the frosted plastic windows on both sides of the box, as well as the camera itself which it clung to several times whilst investigating. The female didn't stay for long, but hopefully both birds will be back in the near future. A couple of minutes after recording the video, we had to go into the garden in order to put our pet rabbits into their carriers to take them to the vets to have their vaccinations done. Unfortunately, as I went outside, a blue tit flew out of the box- although I was completely unaware that it had gone back in again.

Anyway, I am sure they will be back soon. The video which I recorded can be seen below. I experimented increasing the sharpness of the video on the program I use to capture my nest box videos. Whilst the videos are higher in detail, they look slightly less natural in my opinion, so I will reduce the sharpness a little for future videos.

That's all for now, I will hopefully get round to posting more this week sometime. I have found the video of the Jay in our garden back in November which I may show in a post soon. Other than that, have a great week. :-)