The clip below shows what the nest looked like on Monday morning, after she had added lots of material the evening before, as it was going dark. It is clear that she had already started adding hair and wool to the nest for lining, although this proved to be a long process!
One thing I haven't seen yet is the male coming into the box to feed the female. I have seen him around the box, and feeding at the feeders with the female, but he seems a bit reluctant to actually visit the box and feed her. Hopefully, when the female is incubating eggs, he will start to do this. The video below shows the female fluttering her wings in the nest, presumably wanting food from the male at about 10:00am.
The clip below shows what the nest looked like later in the day on Monday, at about 17:30.
Throughout the day, and on Monday night, the female seemed to be scratching herself a lot, as if mites, fleas or ticks are present on her feathers or in the box generally. I'm guessing she was already carrying them on her feathers, because the nest box hasn't actually been used before, so there was no previous nest which could be carrying parasites. So on Monday night in particular, she seemed like she was really struggling to get to sleep, waking up every 30 secs- 1 minute to scratch and preen herself. It looked uncomfortable, even from just watching it! Maybe the chicks will suffer from the parasites when they hatch :-( The video below shows her at about 11:00 (about 3-4 hours after she went into the box to roost.
She did eventually settle down, but still woke up fairly frequently in discomfort. The picture below shows her with her head tucked under her wing for the night:
Finally, the images below show the blue tit visiting this morning, and also what the pretty much completed nest looks like:
Back in late February, I posted about a pair of robins that were building a nest just on the other side of our garden fence. Strangely, despite the fact the nest was probably nearly complete, the robins disappeared, and the nest had been abandoned. We had no idea why it had been left unfinished, but our best guess is that it had been disturbed, even though we are unaware of anything which would have caused this.
So I thought they would have started to build a nest somewhere else- which they did. What I wasn't quite expecting was for them to build a nest in the robin box at the end of our garden. They managed to build an entire nest in the box without us noticing. It was only when the we actually saw the female sat on the nest incubating eggs about a week ago that we realised they were even there! It really is amazing how secretive they are. Every half an hour of so, we see her pop out of the box- probably to feed, before she sits on her eggs again. So far, things appear to be going well as far as the robins are concerned.
I thought it was a little bit late for any nesting activity in our other nest boxes this year, given that no interest has really been shown in any of them. However, whilst I was watching the robin box at the end of the garden on Sunday, I noticed a blue tit go into the camera nest box on the apple tree at the end of the garden. It went in and out several times, clearly with nesting material in its beak. The camera nest box is literally 2-3 metres away from the robin box, so I was amazed to see both of them being occupied.
However, if you read my last posting, you may remember me saying,
"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."
So the blue tits had decided to build a nest in the nest box which we had just removed the camera from. This was unbelievably frustrating, given that no interest had been shown in the nest box at the end of the garden until this point. So I wasn't sure what to do at this stage. I really wanted to introduce the camera to the box, but equally I didn't want to disturb the nest.
The first problem with moving the camera was that the 20m extension cable had to be repaired so that the camera would reach to the end of the garden. I'm very thankful that Dad was able to do this for me (for the 4th time)! I then took the connected the extension cable to the camera and got it ready to introduce to the occupied nest box. Then was the hard part; I wanted to wait for the female robin to have a break from incubating her eggs and fly out of the robin box just 3 metres or so from the blue tit box, to avoid disturbance to her nest- if that makes sense. Obviously, I also had to make sure the blue tits weren't in their nest box either before I introduced the camera. So when the time was right, I put a ladder up against the tree and put the camera in the blue tit box- which took just a couple of minutes.
Luckily, I had managed to line up the camera perfectly with the bottom of the box first time which meant I didn't need to go back and adjust the camera to disturb the birds further. I was so happy to see both the blue tits and robins return to their nests within 15 minutes of me introducing the camera. At this stage, the nest looked about 75% complete. The first video I recorded can be seen below. It was recorded at about 15:20 on Sunday:
The next clip shows her shuffling in the nest cup which appears to be in the back left corner of the box at about 19:00. She was visiting about every 10-15 minutes throughout the day, but I wanted to show the progress she had made in the 4 or 5 hours since the last video. Not a huge amount had changed in that time, but then she began to work much harder between 19:00 and 20:00, coming into the box about 15 times throughout the hour.
By 19:30, the infra-red function on the camera had kicked in, and the videos from then on were in black and white, despite the fact that the sun only set at about 20:00. The video below shows the female shuffling in the nest in black and white, with a small amount of orangey evening sunlight filtering into the small frosted resin windows on the sides of the box.
Eventually, at about 20:00, she decided to settle down for the night. This seemed to take forever though, as she shuffled around in the nest cup looking as though she was trying to get comfortable. After about 15 minutes, she relaxed a little and tucked her head underneath her wing. Even after this though, she seemed a bit restless, waking up to move some material around the nest cup or scratching herself.
That's all for now. I will post tomorrow about what progress has been made over the last couple of days in the nest box. Have a great week :D
