Nest Final Touches & 2nd Egg

I woke up this morning to find that the female Great Tit in our nest box has laid the second egg. Unfortunately you'll have to take my word for it though! Great Tits seem remarkably good at hiding their eggs in the nest, and almost all day the nesting material was obstructing the view of both eggs. 

Other than this, much of the activity that's been going on has been the female making final adjustments to the nest. A few times she brought in a few extra bits of hair and wool to line the nest. It looks rather cosy in there now which is good news if last nights temperatures are repeated tonight. A couple of clips I recorded today can be seen in the video below.



Late this afternoon I headed back to uni which means I can no longer see what's going on in the box. However, I think I may have a solution sorted. I've been using a program called Dropbox for quite a while now- its a really useful bit of software that allows you to copy files into your "dropbox folder", which appears on all PCs that you have dropbox installed on. I use an old laptop at home for recording nestbox footage on, so I decided to tell my capture program to save any recorded files into my dropbox folder on this old laptop. The files, once saved in that folder are automatically uploaded to cloud storage. This takes quite a while as my home internet connection has a very slow upload speed. Once the file is uploaded, it's automatically downloaded onto any other PC's that are switched on, and connected to the internet which have dropbox installed and signed into my account. So as soon as the file is uploaded from my old home laptop, it automatically downloads onto my uni laptop. Still following? Well done if you are!

So basically I'm relying on someone at home recording a few clips on my old laptop. I did think for a while about working out a way for my capture software to automatically record short clips at set times of the day, but I don't think this is possible, and would have relied on the laptop being on all day which isn't particularly good from an environmental perspective. I think getting people to record clips should work okay though but we'll have to see, as it's not something I've done before. 

I did think about attempting to live stream the nest footage to the sidebar of my blog or something, but I don't currently have any live streaming software, and I have a feeling it would be such a pain to set up. 

Anyway, that should do it for today. Hopefully if all goes to plan I'd like to get a post up every day with the progress of the nest box. I think I'll have a little thing in the sidebar explaining the current situation, so that even if I don't have time to post, there'll be an update somewhere on the blog explaining where things are at.