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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.
It's been two years since we last had any activity in our camera nestbox and this year it seems we have been lucky again. Camera Nestbox Diary 2013 is go!
Last weekend whilst I was still home for my Easter break from uni, I happened to notice a Great Tit going into the nestbox with clumps of moss in its beak. This years spring has been pretty late, so seeing nest building start this late isn't a surprise at all. I had noticed Great Tits investigating the box prior to this, but this was the first time I had seen one bring in nesting material.
The issue was that the camera wasn't in the box at the time- I had taken it out months ago due to the fact it had stopped working for some unknown reason. I hadn't been able to work out whether the issue was related to the camera itself, or the cable, so I decided to just bring it all inside to avoid further damage to the camera over the winter. I decided I would try my luck and connect up the camera again to see if it would work, and somehow it did- no idea why but I wasn't complaining.
After connecting it all up, there wasn't too which activity for the rest of the weekend- I only saw the Great Tit enter the box twice more, and it was on the hole of the box a few times as well. It seemed as though the nest building process had slowed right down- although I'm aware that in many cases, nest building can include a couple of days here and there without much activity. So I wasn't too worried about the situation but I was hoping to see them a few more times over that weekend.
On the Sunday morning I went back to uni, meaning that if there was any more activity, I wouldn't be able to see it. The rest of the family had been occasionally watching the box early in the week but there was apparently limited activity. I popped home from uni this weekend as I went to the last match of the football season (I support Oldham as this is where my Dad is from), and made sure to check the nestbox camera as soon as I got home. I was surprised to find a fully completed nest. There had clearly been a fair amount of progress in the box as the week went on.
At about 19:35, after watching the camera for about half an hour, the female Great Tit appeared at the box. She spent about 3 minutes pecking at the hole of the nestbox, which I found quite interesting, as this usually happens when the birds are checking the box out for the first time. She eventually came into the box, shuffled around for a bit, re-arranging the nest, and could be heard calling a few times as well. Then I noticed something that I really wasn't expecting. As she was moving material around, she revealed an egg in the cup of the nest. It had been covered up quite nicely by the nesting material prior to this hence why it couldn't be seen. These birds do seem remarkably good at hiding their eggs in the nest.
After about 8 minutes, she finally started settling down for the night. This seemed quite early to me, as it was still easily dark at this time and lots of other birds were still active around the garden as well. The video I recorded is below. I decided to try and enhance the video in an editing program a little to make it look a little better. The colours aren't great on this camera, and the relatively low evening light didn't help either, but I was happy with what I recorded. The other issue with this camera is that its angle of view is quite narrow, meaning the nest takes up the entire screen and you can't see the walls of the box. This wasn't too bad when filming the Blue Tits nesting a couple of years ago, but the Great Tits, being larger birds take up a lot of the frame. I noticed that you can actually buy little wider angle lenses for the nest box camera, but I feel this may be a job for another year. Anyway, enough talking, here's the video I got:
So here we are, with another family to follow. Hopefully these Great Tits will have a better time of things than the Blue Tits of 2011, but we shall see. It's been interesting to note the difference in nesting times between these two families. Our Blue Tit female in 2011 finished building her nest and laid her first egg around the 20th of April. So this Great Tit female is over a week behind our previous Blue Tit family, but this was to be expected, as we've had such a late spring this year.
So, tomorrow I go back to uni which really shall be difficult to do given all that is going on here. I have a couple of plans up my sleeve to try and still get videos uploaded whilst I'm away but I'm unsure of how exactly things will work out as of yet. Whatever happens with the recording side of things, I'm excited for what lies ahead for this Great Tit family. We'll just have to see how it goes. I'm guessing a second egg will have been laid tomorrow morning, and I'll probably post again before I head back to uni. Until then, enjoy the rest of your weekend and I'll be back soon! :D
Been relatively quiet on the blog front lately, mostly due to work, but also because I've simply not had a lot to post about. So today I thought I would keep things ticking over with a little video I recorded in the garden a week or so ago of a Chaffinch feeding in the sun.
Speaking of the sun, we've been seeing MUCH more of it recently which has been a welcome change. It seems we've now got temperatures in double figures now for a while which doesn't sound great but compared with what we had in March, it's just so much better. Anyway, here's the video. This particularly chap was very happy for me to get relatively close and film him :)
Will get back to checking on other people's blogs again as soon as I can as I know there's a lot I've missed out on. I'm back to uni this Sunday as well so it should be interesting to catch up with things too. Thanks for reading and have a nice day :D
