Still Awaiting First Egg

It's almost as though the female blue tit in our camera nest box has finally realised that she's a tad early with her nest building, as she hasn't laid her first egg yet. In fact, she's still even bringing in some nesting material, albeit much less often now. There seems to be more of a thick lining to this nest than the nests of the great tits and blue tits of previous years. She's been bringing in feathers and fur to line the nest for a number of days now. 

The weather has been utterly atrocious here all day, so the light hasn't been good enough for the camera to switch from IR mode to full colour. Just going to show a still photo of our female blue tit settled down to roost for the night. Perhaps tomorrow will be the day that she begins laying her clutch of eggs. We shall see.

To make this post more worthwhile, I thought I'd add a few photos I took on Saturday morning when I walked around campus before I headed off to work. I start work at 11:00 usually, so this allows me to get an hours walk in the morning, if I can get out of the house by about 8. The closest entrance to the university campus is about 5 minutes walk away which is very convenient. Saturday morning started very brightly and got gradually worse as the day went on, so I'm glad I managed to enjoy the little bit of sunlight there was.

This great tit was seen in one of the trees overhanging the path around the lake. Believe it or not, this is the cropped version of the photo, which shows that the bird was quite far away. I do wish I had a lens with more reach sometimes...

Finally, here's a shot of an Egyptian goose swimming around the edge of the lake which I took on the way back to the house. A pair of Egyptian geese are always around on campus, although in this case I could only see one of them. Hopefully the other one turns up soon :(

Didn't see anything else particularly unusual whilst out on my walk, although it was nice to see a couple of great spotted woodpeckers, and hear a number of chiffchaffs too. Hopefully I'll get the chance to have a walk round campus when I head back to Reading again later this week. If I can drag myself out of bed a bit earlier, it might even turn into a proper full patch walk. That's a really, really big if though... 

Thanks for reading.