Unlike 2018, we haven't had the excitement of birds being evicted from their nest [so far] this season.
Developments in the 'maple tree' birdbox are continuing as you may expect.
But we do have the added interest of robins nesting in an old analogue camera box.
great tits
The female laid 9 eggs during April, and last Monday (29th April) they started to hatch. We now have 8 healthy looking chicks and 1 egg that didn't make the grade.
In just a few days the chicks had doubled in size, despite the female spending a lot of time just sitting on them. Initially I thought that she may be doing this because there is still one egg to hatch. But the box counter indicates that they are probably getting plenty of feeds at this stage of their development.
I don't have a lot of free time at the moment to watch the video feed, but the chicks seem to be thriving on a diet of spiders and caterpillars.
robin nest
Our resident robin pair for this season initially nested somewhere in the hedge between us and a neighbour. Just after the Easter Bank Holiday weekend they moved to a new nest (we think they may have been accidentally disturbed by our neighbours gardening efforts).
But the good thing for us is that the robins have moved into an old camera equipped nest box!
This box was only used during the 2012 season. In 2013 I added a second camera, but the robins only made an inspection of the box, and so there has been no nesting activity since. As this box pre-dates the Raspberry Pi, the 2 cameras are old 'analogue' jobbies that connect to an old portable analogue tv.
To make matters worse, the tv has a cathode ray tube (crt) so it is difficult to photograph as the resulting quality is so poor. So you will just have to take my word for it that [as of today] we now have 6 eggs.
If all goes well we should have these robins for the summer, as they normally stick with the same nest site for subsequent clutches in the same season. This must be their second clutch, so they will have at least one more, possibly two.
Our great tits are on the verge of fledging it's our first successful nest with camera for 2 years.... it was quite early so I did wonder if they will do another clutch like your Robins?
ReplyDeleteHey that's great news. How many chicks?
DeleteI'm surprised that you are not more successful, as you seem to be in an ideal wild life location and your nestboxes are well built. Great tits don't rely on those little green caterpillars, so its not like you have the wrong variety of trees or something.
I've yet to see blue/great tits go for a second clutch. I wonder if this only happens where all the chicks from the first attempt are wiped out during the first few days of leaving the nest. I couldn't find any info on the net about 2nd clutches the last time I did a search.
Our female robin surprised me by laying 7 eggs before settling down to incubate. I was only expecting 4 or 5, so 7 seems a bit over the top!
...and we've got a second great tit nest within a week or so of the previous great nest fledging (x7). 2 eggs so far.. I improved the lighting... pimoroni have a nice range of LED panels that provide much more even lighting than 5mm LEDs. No other boxes used.. I'm begining to wonder if my placement is off. They're all fairly high up, whereas the one that's occupied is lower down?
DeleteThat's great news. So GTs really do have a 2nd clutch if conditions are good!
DeleteYes, maybe your other nestboxes are too high. BTs & GTs seem to be happy if the box is between 2-3m, coal tits seem to prefer 1-2m.
We had 8 GT chicks before we flew off to The Netherlands for a few days, and when we got back we found we had lost a few. Only 3 finally fledged last Monday.
We think that 6 robin eggs hatched out of 7 last weekend. Also captured a photo of at least one robin chick (from the 1st clutch) on our trail-cam, which monitors the hog feeder and water bowl.