Nesting activity!

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

Blue tit pair visits nestbox

-- NOTE - This post was done in April 2012, but I have posted it so that appears as having been published on 24th February -- 

The video below shows a pair of blue tits visiting our camera nestbox in late February. This video was taken when the camera was situated in the nest box on our conservatory wall. The male bird comes in first and has a very good check of the box several times, also checking he camera itself out by hanging upside down from it. The female follows him in towards the end, performing several nesting shuffles. This may be the pair that ended up using the nest box at the end of the garden that meant that I had to move the camera from the box that this video was taken in. 

Anyway the video is below. The reason why I never posted this video originally I think is because I had turned the sharpness of the video up too high when I was recording it, so the video sort of looked a bit unnatural. Looking back on it now, the video isn't quite as bad as I thought it would be.

This post is the first of my camera nest box posts that I have caught up on from last year. Keep checking back to the list of catch-up posts from last year as I'm still in the process of adding them in.

Oh dear, looking back on my posts last year, it turns out I had already posted this video! Just shows how much I had lost track of my postings last year. Anyway, I'll leave this post up for now as it gives a bit more information than the original post, which also had some other stuff on it too. 

Start of the nesting season?

Generally its been a pretty mild start to 2011, so early nest box investigation by blue tits and great tits is something which we expected around now. We have had the odd blue tit investigating our nest boxes, however what has really caught my eye is some early nesting action going on just on the other side of our garden fence...

In the ivy which covers both sides of our garden fence, a robin pair appear to be building a nest. For the last few days we have seen nesting material in the form of leaves being brought into the ivy very frequently- at times we have seen a leaf being taken in every 10 seconds or so. A couple of years ago, a robin pair nested very close by to this nest in a small shrub and successfully managed to raise some chicks (not sure how many, I just remember the juveniles flitting around the nest shortly after fledging). I don't know if the pair I am seeing at the moment is the same pair which nested a couple of years ago, but they certainly seem as though they have had experience building nests in the past.

I do get worried when a pair of birds start building a nest so early in the nesting season- we are very likely to get some more cold weather before we can safely say that spring has begun, which could easily cause our robin chicks to starve. Hopefully it will be a while before eggs are laid and chicks hatch in the nest. Below is a video of the robin taking nesting material (mostly leaves from the ground) into the nest.

The video is about 6 minutes long, with about 15-30 seconds between each visit to the nest. I am experimenting with editing programs to get the best quality video possible. So the quality of the videos I upload may improve in the future.

The robin nest is fairly close to the blue tit nest box on our conservatory, and the two birds can be seen happily living closely together- the robin has been perfectly happy building the nest whilst the blue tit has been investigating the conservatory box. This can be seen in the video below. The video is focused on the blue tit box but you can make out the robin flying in and out of its nest in the background.

We have rearranged our nest boxes slightly since last year. This was done after the video above was recorded. The hand built nest box which was on the back of our shed was taken down because I couldn't get into the nest box to clear the nest which had been built by great tits a couple of years ago. I moved the box which was on the conservatory to behind the shed to replace the one that was taken down. I took the 25mm metal hole protector off, because I wanted the box to be more suited to great tits (as it was before). The photo below shows the nest box which used to be on the conservatory wall, now on the back of the shed:

Because there was then no nest box on the conservatory, we bought a camera-ready Handykam box (which is identical to the camera nest box we have at the end of the garden on our apple tree). So we put up the new box on the conservatory. So if your still following - we still have nest boxes in all the places which had them before, its just we have moved the boxes around a bit!

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. Complicated, eh?!

A picture of the new conservatory nest box can be seen below. The stick on the left of the box was put there by me for the blue tits to use as a perch. I deliberately made sure not to put the twig directly in front of the hole to make sure it doesn't obstruct the birds flight into the box.

So since the new box has been up on the conservatory wall, we have had blue tits fly onto the hole of the nest box but not fly in- until this morning that is! Yep, the blue tit pair which have been checking out the hole of the box for a few days now finally had the courage to go inside. Even then, the male (i'm guessing) which went in first looked a bit shy and twitchy. After a while though it settled in and stayed looking in and around the box for a good 4 minutes before the female came in, performed a "nesting shuffle" and flew off again.

The male blue tit appeared to be very interested in the frosted plastic windows on both sides of the box, as well as the camera itself which it clung to several times whilst investigating. The female didn't stay for long, but hopefully both birds will be back in the near future. A couple of minutes after recording the video, we had to go into the garden in order to put our pet rabbits into their carriers to take them to the vets to have their vaccinations done. Unfortunately, as I went outside, a blue tit flew out of the box- although I was completely unaware that it had gone back in again.

Anyway, I am sure they will be back soon. The video which I recorded can be seen below. I experimented increasing the sharpness of the video on the program I use to capture my nest box videos. Whilst the videos are higher in detail, they look slightly less natural in my opinion, so I will reduce the sharpness a little for future videos.

That's all for now, I will hopefully get round to posting more this week sometime. I have found the video of the Jay in our garden back in November which I may show in a post soon. Other than that, have a great week. :-)