Great Tit Chicks Still Going Well (17th-18th May)

It's been a few days since the chicks hatched in our camera nestbox on the 14th. The nest, which looked as though it had been attacked by something only contained two tiny chicks, the others which we presumed had died, or the eggs destroyed before they had hatched. The situation didn't look promising at all for the two remaining chicks, as the parents were struggling to feed the chicks hidden under the pile of messed up nesting material. The male especially, couldn't seem to feed the female, who wasn't particularly good at accepting the food which was being brought in to be passed onto the chicks. The amount of feeds from the parents was still quite high, and it seemed as though there was actually plenty of insect food to feed the chicks. 

Fast forward to now (the 18th), and amazingly, the two remaining chicks are still alive and both being fed by the parents. They are growing very slowly in size however. They are now 5 days old (including the day that they hatched), and they're still not an awful lot bigger than they were when they hatched. Maybe the attack on the nest caused the eggs to hatch slightly prematurely, and the chicks were smaller than they should have been. The video below shows a couple of feeds from the parents on the 17th. 

  

And the next video shows the situation of the nest on the 18th. As you can see, the video is in black and white, even though it was recorded in bright conditions in the late afternoon. So it seems as though the nesting material was covering the windows on either side of the nestbox again, stopping enough light getting into the box for colour images. Hopefully this won't last too long though, and things will be back to normal before too long.  



That's all for today's update. I just want to keep things ticking over here so that I don't have tons of stuff to get through. Thanks for reading and I'll probably be back with another video tomorrow, as things are at a pretty crucial stage right now.